Post
by Bilge » Thu Jul 17, 2003 4:11 am
Sorry for the long post, I am not posting much, but I am reading a lot.
Let me introduce myself : I have been using MQ for a long time, I have a good experience of it, I have my own MQ mod, and I wrote my own utilities based on it .
Well, if I may give my opinion about sony/verant awarness of who is using MQ, I allways had the feeling that GM's knew exactly what I was doing.
You know this feeling, just like when you're gently overtaking a policemen's car that is driving at the speed limit on the road...
Of course they know that you're past the speed limit, since you are overtaking them, and THEY are at the limit.. They close their eyes, pretending they don't see you, because you're doing it 'gently' and you don't abuse or act like an ass.
I think that GM are just like policemen : They don't want to put everybody in prison, because :
1) They need to have information about hacking possibilities.
2) They need to know how far people usually act with hacking tools.
3) They need to know what people want to have in EQ (maybe EQ2)
4) You represent money for them. This is a problem of balance : Put everyone in prison and who will pay for the prisonners' dinner ?
Look : most of the first trivial hacks have been implemented in EQ :
- EQ in a window (was considered cheating, because you could run second party programs, or analyse your logs while playing EQ..)
- Maps, with your position on it and a nice compass ! (long time ago, you had to use the 'sense heading' + locs and have printed maps on your desk or so)
- Much more information about skills (precise numbers instead of 'average', 'good', 'master'...), about experience (the blue bar...) HP, mana... (and with the new UI skins...) spells (description), equipment...
- For trackers, you can track better now
- They give much more precise information about the zones, new stuff they patch in the eqnews.txt....
etc... etc...
All these things have been an attempt to make EQ hacking 'useless',
or lets say that they were able to enhance EQ in the 'most wanted' way.
And without EQW, ShowEQ, Macroquest... Verant would probably have oriented the enhancement of EQ differently.
So, even if they know about you, as long as you don't piss them off, they will leave you alone.
Well, anyway, as long as you are not annoying other EQ users, as long as you're not modifying the way EQ works, and as long as you stay in the shadow, they will close their eyes I think. Why would they ban you if you act like this ? You're paying your account.
You'll be banned if someone whitnesses you acting weird and tells a GM. Because if they don't, the whitness would repeat that he saw a guy acting strange and GM close his eyes. Everquest's Forum would explode...
Well, you can think differently, that they don't know about us, or that they don't know who is using MQ, but I think they do, and I think they don't mind as long as you use it very discretely, and as long as you don't create a mess with it.
2 or 3 times, a GM walked near me, while I was using /who npc, and /face... I've been playing EQ for very long, if I didn't have MQ, I wouldn't play EQ anymore. If they ban me, it's ok.
And I really have the feeling that since they saw that I wasn't stealing anything from other people, or macroing for profit, they didn't mind.
EQ is an old game now, they know that most of people using MQ are just using it to keep having fun with EQ.
Anyway, just my 2 coppers.
