MacroQuest64

It seems that anyone using Macroquest is getting Booted to Desktop right when they start the macros.

People would petiton it .. and a Sever wide message stated ..


If your getting booted to Desktop .May want to check for 3rd party programs running in the backgroup .. maybe something with Marco in it. Since it will not work with EQ anymore.


Just giving yall a heads up

Same has happend to me aswell on the regular server.. But after the kick to desktop I just login again and the macros work.. Strange..

Yea, but from the wording of the announcement, it seemed to me that they are actively going out of their way to make sure MacroQuest will NOT work any more.

Should make for an interesting patch day =)

(The announcement wasn't quite what rogue posted above, I'll check my log and post the exact quote tonight. It was actually pretty funny)

From another forum:

A very interesting message on Test last night

A dev broadcast last eve that you are if you are constantly going LD and you use a certain macro program that it does not work very well with EQ anymore. He added a little :) after the message.

At least they aren't checking who goes LD all the time and flagging them for further inspection since that is a good indication on who is using MacroQuest...... Or are they?... To be determined I guess.

I have doubts that anything can be coded that is unhackable. I wouldn't worry too much about it until a MQ dev says something that constitutes worry.

Sure nothing is un-hackable, but if Sony is actively trying to thwart MacroQuest, they could certainly slow things down quite a bit.

umm, I'll bet you anything they are checking the process list for the name Macroquest.exe hehe.

Or something stupid like that.

Thats what seems to be indicated by the serverwide message. I doubt they would or could really make a check for the MQ hooks. Dunno how exe's work as much but in ELF the way you redirect a function is change the first few lines to jump to another piece of code, and this is done at runtime. The only way they could prevent against this is to do a checksum of every function before it is called, and doing that in a game means it lags like a bitch and everybody stops playing and etc.

I haven't tested this yet, but if you renamed the mq exe to something like "xmms.exe" then it would probably still work.

Just a theory

--darkfang

They were talking about hack utilities, not macroquest. on 2/06 verant activated some anti-hack code that checks for offset changes every few minutes. So, for the most part it's now impossible to run hacks using the old software (or even new software for that matter). They are checking specific offsets though and apparently NOT checking the offsets used by MQ. So if you use MQ you should still work fine. If you used any other offset changers (such as ghu) then you now get booted to desktop every 3 minutes whenever you activate specific cheats. It's believed that they intentionally are not checking the offsets MQ uses since they have no real problem with MQ in and of itself. It's the cheat hacks that they have a problem with.

A word of caution though, it appears they can change the offsets that get checked relatively easily. So if some functions within MQ start getting checked it would cause MQ to crash the client as a whole. If MQ becomes annoying to them expect that to happen. The best answer is to not use MQ or hacks at all, but barring that I'd suggest just not using it for exploiting the game. A macro that sits in town all night hitting sense heading to raise your skill would most likely not be cared about at all. Any macro that makes plats or exp without you touching the keyboard....that won't go over well.

Well, the GM/Dev message last night specifically mentioned "...something with "macro" in the name"

It's nice to see that the test server is being used to test new content for bugs /roll eyes

What a worthless piece of furniture the test server is... I feel sorry for anyone using the console version of EQ on the PS2 where patches aren't possible....

Well from the forever-hacking boards its evident that they are integrity checking some areas of memory specifically for offset tampering. So they probably just expanded that to also cover MQ.

If I had to venture a guess I bet they are checking wether the command table functions and WriteChat functions have been detour'ed.

Here's the actual quote from last night:

[Tue Feb 11 18:58:39 2003] Galleknight BROADCASTS, 'If you're repeatedly going LD, you might want to check to see if you're not "accidentally" running any kind of program that interferes with EQ, especially those that might have the word "Macro" somewhere in their name. It doesn't exactly work real well with EQ anymore. Thanks. :)'

Amadeus wrote:It's nice to see that the test server is being used to test new content for bugs /roll eyes

What a worthless piece of furniture the test server is... I feel sorry for anyone using the console version of EQ on the PS2 where patches aren't possible....

Ummm...that's not ALL they are doing on test =)

There is the LoY beta going on right now, after all...

And I'll repeat what Amadeus said...

It's nice to see that the test server is being used to test new content for bugs /roll eyes

How many bugs could they have fixed with the man-hours it took to cook up this little Macro/offset protection?

CodeNewbie