EQ Producer, Craig Knapp speaks out about Hacks and Exploits : EverQuest 2 General Discussions

Hacks and Exploits

As any developer will tell you, we get into this industry because we enjoy games and we enjoy making them. That is why I dislike even having to mention hacks and exploits, but it is a reality that needs to be addressed.

As many of you know, we've spent a significant amount of time on our reporting systems to detect various hacks and exploits. The end result will provide a really positive impact. For example, without the reporting tools, we took action on over 1,000 accounts during the month of October. Although that number may seem high, the numbers generated by our reporting tools are considerably higher. These tools are currently limited to generating reports, but we are rapidly approaching a time where these will be used in a more robust manner. I won't go into detail, but I'd like to encourage anyone playing outside the natural boundaries of EverQuest to get back in those boundaries. Whatever advancement these exploits provide to individuals is not worth the damage that it does to the EverQuest community. Consider this fair warning.

So what is the likelyhood that they can detect some of the various scripts that xunleashed runs?

There are a few bots that will be extreamly hard to detect because of how advanced they are but bots that allow crafting are going to be sitting ducks IMO. I could go into detail about how I believe they could find certain bots easy but since this (I Think) is a open forum I won't.

Loraik

From the sound of his comments, if I had to guess, I'd say they're building tools to watch for certain patterns. The two patterns I can think of would be
1: changes in coin that fall outside normal patterns. This wouldn't have to be a hardset number- think of how the credit card companies do it now: they can detect when an accounts spending suddenly deviates from its 'normal' usage with suprising accuracy (indicating it was stolen). Now apply the same to EQ2.
2: timing. Any time you get messages from a client at intervals too regular to be done by a human, theres a good chance its not a human, but a bot.

Since I have never played EQ and only EQ2 I must ask yet again for yet another thread why this is even in the EQ2 forum?

I'd say they'd apply the same filters to EQ2 as i think the two engines are fairly similar to each other in terms of server side software.

Do you honestly think so though? From what I was told by a dev over on VN they have very little in common code wise.

Well i think so, though i can't know for sure can i. But i've done a bit of packet sniffing in both games before and their not very dis-similar.

I wouldn't doubt the dev lied as they have done in the past. I hate SoE anyways so I don't doubt anything that they do or say that is wrong.

This is total BS. I can spot the botter's easily in EQ2. In fact SoE could do it themselves they don't need any fancy tools -- it's built into the game. I have going back to do some quest in T5 zones, and I'm constantly running into my server's botters -- ones doing plat farming. I have noticed though that the plat farmers don't do anything in DoF. In fact it seems primarily harvesters that will be easily noticed. But even then SoE doesn't give two farts...EQ2 is underpopulated that it probably helps bring in new people.