So how many people cheat in EQ???Follow

Nah, never cheated to the best of my knowledge and my guild certainly doesn't use any cheats. Hell, we have a hard enough time figuring out the regular old normal way of doing things???

You should be able to get into a Grummus raid at 55 Bub.

Final Door, one of the top guilds on Stromm just last week killed Ayonae Ro, completing PoR content. This victory screenie shows a place I'd like to see.

Seems like you'd be lessening any feeling of acomplishment that you may get from this game by cheating, but some of the outside programs provide only, what could be described as, minor convienences. /shrug.


...

Hey there bub!

Well, I'm a bit too behind the curve to use add-ons for EQ. The closest thing I've ever done is to set up a game controller to auto-fire a macro to forage, but even then I was doing TS stuff and just kept forgetting to hit the dumb button!

I think it's in the nature of most gamers who try and reach the end-game to try and find exploits. Even the corporations cater to this by placing 'secret' stuff into them, and then the mad race is on to find them. Eventually these hacks and cheats find their way onto posts, and the cycle continues.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is unacceptable. Heck I loved goofing around in games like that, but for an online game I can see where it might be more problematic to deal with. I'm sure SOE knows all about the exploits, but by cracking down hard on the high end gamers, they would loose a whole lot of revenue. And anyone who thinks that end-gamers aren't the highest priority to SOE is just fooling themselves. IMHO, cheating will go on as long as it doesn't bother the majority of the players, and the cash keeps flowing to Sony.

I once told a wood elf that she was the only one for me but then, after too many Halas Heaters, I wound up in bed with a lvl 2 gnome girl in the tutorial.

Aside form that, I've never cheated. As much from a complete lack of enthusiasm regarding learning how to do it as anything else. If there was a big red CHEAT button on my keyboard, I might be tempted but researching, downloading and running other programs is more work than my lazy *** can take.

I think there are a few kinds of cheating.

One, which is totally against the EULA, uses third party hack software or other methods to circumvent the game designers...er..designs. Never done this.

Two, in-game 'exploits' for lack of a better term. These things appear from time to time (ok let's be honest, way too often) and the designers scurry to fix them. If I found one, I would /bug it and not do it again (*cough*).

Some of the exploits are more egregious than others and are usually dealt with heavy-handedly by the GMs if you cross a line. This is inconsistent though, as sometimes nothing happens.

Then there is the subtle stuff, like if you find a weird pathing of NPCs that allows you to succeed where ordinarily you should fail.

I am probably guilty of number 3, but not to any great extent. Once or twice .

i wouldnt class that as cheating, its a error in the code in which SONY wrote and you didnt do it on purpose nor did you know it would happen (or did you lol)

The main and most common cheat is buying/selling accounts items or plat

Edited, Dec 20th 2006 11:26am by wuvarien

That would be the only temptation for me. I will likely never see the Elemental Plans or Plane of Time, and I really wish there was a way that I could. Even a program where I could just "float" around and not kill anything would be awesome. One of the reasons the druid is still my main is because it is so easy to go out and explore the world.

Any other kind of cheat, I am just not interested in. I play because of the time spent with my family, friends, & guild. Cheating takes away from the sense of accomplishment that I feel when I complete a particularly tough quest or raid or boss mob.

Yeah I found a link to EQZoneViewer.com but it no longer seems to reside there!

After further searching I found a guild site that appears to still have it -
Second Age. Check the top 5 downloads on this site. Cancel that...referred to EQZoneViewer

Edited, Dec 20th 2006 2:50pm by Namblak

Hmmmm Wonder if anyone has a copy or knows where to find it now!

Edited, Dec 20th 2006 2:51pm by Namblak

I think were at point now were its starting to bother people. SoE has been lax on issue recently for reasons you describe of not wanting to loose revenue and also not wanting to spend money in tracking cheaters down. But were very close now to a tipping point where cheating becomes so common that noncheaters feel they are being forced into choices of cheating as well or leaveing game.


Edited, Dec 20th 2006 6:49pm by SiddarA

I can guarantee that every highend guild has at least 2-3 people using macroquest. Most of the stuff isn't a big deal. I know a lot of highend enchanters (or DID, when enchanters actually still played eq) who use it for targetting, just because EQ's targetting system is so crappy.

I just find it really really funny when people show off obviously MQed screenies.

some guilds are more open about it than others. a certain highend luclin guild, when they first got in to tacvi, would warp around picking up remains from areas they hadn't gotten to, and respawning the instance just to get more. they were so blasé about it that their authentic magelos had probably half a dozen tomes within a week of getting in to tacvi. (normallly, you can't complete a tome without at LEAST killing xxeric and one other mob - and if you only have two mobs down, it will take at least like six weeks a tome)


hillariously, xenaida made the check on /open to make sure target was a chest clientside.


if you want, I can host a copy of it for distribution since it looks like the original site went byebye. plenty of bandwidth to do so. okay, I leach off a friend's bandwidth, but she has plenty <3

Edited, Dec 20th 2006 11:32pm by Groogle

Hi everyone! I want to share a bitter-sweet story, and it's lengthy, so read at your own interest.

For reasons for which I am scared, I am making this a fantasy story!

Billy and Kiddo were friends growing up. One day, Billy's dad showed him how to play EvereQuest! Billy enjoyed it so much, he quickly hooked Kiddo into Norrath with a flourish of graphics and excitement.

Sadly, one day Kiddo discovered that Billy was using MacroQuest (MQ2) to do the following;

- Add forage ability to any character
- Show moving icons on the in-game map for every creature in the zone, including the creatures level / con color.
- View the loot table of a creature
- Cycle a program to move his character to the node of a roaming mob, including features to auto attack, use predetermined skills, and have his cleric box cast (recast on fizzle) Complete Heals as needed. The pair would then return to a safe spot (auto-pathing) to sit and med once they reached a certain point of fatigue.

Kiddo was upset with Billy, but it was just a game. So Kiddo moved to another server. Billy promptly reached level 70, joined a raid guild, and tired EQ in short order. To justify playing he sold items and accounts online, and sold plat to IGE (at roughly 20% of the resale price).

After some time, Kiddo decided to research MQ2. Kiddo found a script that if used, could increase all player's current mana by 200pts in an AoE. He also discovered that people would make Bot accounts to use this mana buff on a disposable account (in case it got banned) and worst that happened to their accounts whom reaped the benefit was a roll back.

Kiddo quit EQ.

Now for the happy part; Kiddo moved on to EQ2 to game with some other RL buddies, Bobby and Sally. When Billy found out, he too joined EQ2, but to his dismay, MQ2 only worked for scripting and not as good for his usual tricks! Billy was upset but determined. Later, after his account was banned for hacking, Billy stopped talking to Kiddo and suffered a bad injury at his RL job.

Kiddo now plays WoW, because Bobby and Sally quit EQ2. Kiddo has seen many scripted players in WoW (as many as in EQ2!) but no actual hacks.

EverQuest is a beautiful game, Antique in some respects.. But GREAT! Fact is, it is also super challenging! I understand why people like Billy would want to use cheats, or why Kiddo got mad. Me? It is in all seriousness one of my Life Ambitions to own 7 computers on 2 DSL networks to run my own 6 box group with an active trade mule (or two?) on 8 accounts! THAT is how much I love EverQuest. Newer is not better, and no amount of hacks will push me away from enjoying the game. Some people might call me a cheater for 6 boxing though.. What do you think?

Yes sire, it has been years since I viewed that in use. I believe it was a potential loot table, not an actual of what the creature would drop. Just what it could drop, world random items excluded. I don't even remember if it was MacroQuest being used, but I know *cough* Billy had something to view a pop-up loot list of items for the creature, which he accessed / prompted? by clicking on the active map icons of the mobs. It could have just been a database linked to his UI for all I know.

As for the mana hack, I never saw it in action. I just saw a page of text programming and a description of said programs' purpose / use on the MQ2 site back in '05. I am not a programmer and can't say if it works or not, but the thread on that site had several bemused posts about how they were getting over on "the System" by using Bots to run the program while their 72 man raid all got repeated free + mana, and only got caught rarely so long as they avoided new content. That is what made it believable to me, but I am a gullible so take that into account too! Lol!

I don't pretend to know how all those things work, most of what I've seen has just been copy / pasted from short-lived obscure forums and the like /shrug.

For us Newbies... Would anyone please explain the actual process of Warping, ghosting, etc...

I have a general irea of what warping accomplishes... But what is "ghosting?"

I have seen more then 1 guild almost completly vanish when EQ loads up one of their new hack finder programs in a patch.