Recent Account Bannes for HackingFollow

I would have to add that some exploiters dont get banned because what they are doing is not ban-able even though others may feel it is exploiting. Sometimes its just positioning and pathing that ppl use to their advantage. That stuff often gets 'fixed' if you mention it.

I was the one that posted here about Muckdiver not entering melee and he is now changed to do a lot of melee.

Not sure if that 1.5 epic step done at the POK book outside of Akanon has been fixed. Ppl usually just take the book to pok to avoid the DT and then zone back to enter the fight some more.

When pulling some mobs some times I take them through bad pathing so that it delays their arrival at the group until the grp is rdy to handle it. That way I dont need to fade and retag. The mob just runs off in a bad direction and I shift around so that it wont warp.

So banable offenses like 'hiding in the geometry' are kind of nebulous to me. I dont even know exactly what that is. I know of no spot where I can just stand still and kill a mob where it cant hurt me.

Now, if I were a ranger, just about every zone has spots for them to stand and shoot down a mob and it wont attack them. Thats just the ranger bow aggro distance calculation. I dont consider that exploiting, just a ranger trick to soloing for some mighty slow exp.

Edited, Apr 10th 2008 3:01pm by kirbyramz

Well here's an update on what is going on.
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Response (Lead GM Encegawi) 04/10/2008 01:57 PM
I've had my senior GM take the time to give me a very detailed report on the actions you were accused of. He agrees that the level of cheating was not severe, and a suspension and rollback would have been sufficient. The check was run for the last 45 days, and these are the dates where your character was cheating without a doubt:

2-26
2-28 Hacked 55 discipline Quest
2-29
3-1
3-2
3-3
3-4
3-6
3-15
3-16
3-17 Hacked entire Lguk zone attempting to pop fabled's

Items looted while hacking:

2-28 Takish Ruins - About a thousand lines of confirmed "hacking" client.
Lifestone of Spring
Indium Ore
Lifestone of Summer
Lifestone of Winter
Lifestone of Autumn

3-17 Lower Guk - About 18,121 lines of confirmed "hacking" client
Short Sword of the Ykesha
An Executioners Axe
Skull-shaped Barbute
Executioners Hood

So with this evidence suspending and rolling your character back is only a warning to you not to cheat any further. Your involvement in cheating was much more than just being a part of a group, you were actively hacking the client software. Over the last month and a half you cheated and gained in one way or another. The rollback probably didn't remove every item you had gained from this, but the only option from there is to wipe the character entirely. As you can see the suspension and rollback is the absolute limit I am willing to go to resolve this issue. I cannot reimburse any items lost from the rollback regardless of how they were obtained. Refrain from using third party software, and nothing will ever be removed from your account. I hope you can understand my point, but if there were any other questions or comments you want to make please let me know.

~ Lead GM Encegawi

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Response (Lead GM Encegawi) 04/10/2008 03:38 PM
I've spoken to my manager again about this case and he's decided to allow you the LoN item cards back to your character. I will go ahead and reset the claim on the items, but I will need you to give me an accurate list of the items that were removed so I can match that up with our server logs. Please also note that this is a one-time only exception. Should you be caught cheating again, the account will immediately and permanently be banned.

~ Lead GM Enceagawi
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Customer (Polley) 04/10/2008 05:03 PM
I have talked with many people about this via an Allakhazam's forum. We all agree that Sony's Effort to ban Cheaters and exploiters is commendable. I thank you for taking the time to really take a good look at this.

I also want to thank you for showing me the logs that you have concerning hacking the client. Each and Every one of the zones, items, disciplines and mobs killed that you have are correct. However the thing is that I do not hack, nor have I Ever. Please don't get me wrong, I consider the matter resolved, but now the question comes "Why am I showing up as hacking"

Ill give you an account of these items as best I can.

2-26
2-28 Hacked 55 discipline Quest
2-29
3-1
3-2
3-3
3-4
3-6
3-15
3-16
3-17 Hacked entire Lguk zone attempting to pop fabled's

Items looted while hacking:

2-28 Takish Ruins - About a thousand lines of confirmed "hacking" client.
Lifestone of Spring
Indium Ore
Lifestone of Summer
Lifestone of Winter
Lifestone of Autumn

3-17 Lower Guk - About 18,121 lines of confirmed "hacking" client
Short Sword of the Ykesha
An Executioners Axe
Skull-shaped Barbute
Executioners Hood




As for the 17th of march in the lower Guk zone. I went their with a guild mate names XXXXX, a 55 warrior to get her some fabled drops. I stayed mostly to the undead side killing PH's and mobs along the way.
We cleared the PH for frenzied ghoul, moved to the ghoul lord PH and as i was checking spawns we picked up a Dark Elf Cleric who was also wanting the frenzied. I know that XXXXX does not hack! As for the cleric, when I came upon him he was afk in front of the Frenzied spawn he told us when he came back that he had been there for awhile. We didn't manage to get any fabled mobs to pop that day.

As for 2/28 in Takish Hiz.
I zoned in alone and killed the four roaming mobs which drop the four lifestones. I was the only one in the zone until the last one i killed, which i believe was summer but i cant recall exactly. At that point a bard and what i believe to be her druid and shaman came over and were waiting while i killed it. The bards songs did land on me while they were near. After that I turned the drops in, got my discipline and left.

Is it possible that I was grouped with a cleric that was hacking and was casted on by a bard that was hacking? I know how this must sound, considering that you have confirmed evidence of me hacking, I must sound like a bold face liar.

Im afraid to even play the game now because I don't know what is causing this to happen, if i zone somewhere and start killing theres a chance that this might happen again... and the last thing that I want is to get my account permanently banned.

Im sort of out of options and thoughts. I really need your help to figure this out...I have changed my password on the account, and checked the files on my computer for any botting software, spy ware or viruses and there are none that I found. Is there any specific name that i should search for that you know of?!

PLEASE, help me! Ill take any advice or thoughts that you may have! Something is very wrong here.

Polley
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So Sony has rectified the situation. I still need to get them the list of Items I'm missing, but what concerns me more is that they have thousands of lines of code that show me as hacking.

I'm hoping they will have some help for me! I'm not going to play the game until we figure it out, the account is not banned anymore but they assure me that if they see me cheating that they will ban me permanently. So im thinking its best to just stay away.

I have checked my computer for bot programs, spy ware, Trojans and viruses, and have checked for other programs relating to EQ in anyway. Besides Magelo I have not founf any.

Ive asked Sony for help figuring this out, does anyone here have any suggestions?! Is there some way that there is a program running on my computer that I don't know about?

I feel really stupid now, I fought this and now they have shown me evidence that Im cheating...and I have no way to disprove it.

Any suggestions? ill take anything at this point!


Polley

To be honest my ******** meter went off when groogle posted. Not about groogle but about what he said. I cannot imagine sending any emails this nice to sony if my account had been "incorrectly tagged" a hacker. Maybe you are just a better person then me I know one person who never gets pissed. To be frank his lack pisses me off but =P. But after about reply 4 from them of me trying to be nice and them giving me the same old answer I would have hit the roof.

If your story is true then sorry maybe you are one of the 1 in a 1000 saint types who no matter how agreived can act like Ghandi. Personally I doubt it.

What is the old saying...you get more flies with honey etc...

This whole situation worries me. If Polley's story is 100% accurate, I could, without knowing, be running some background software that could be considered a hack. I wouldn't want SOE to ban my account after all of the hard work I put into my characters.

BTW, this was hypothetical and not extreme paranoia.

Interesting to say the least,

and flat out frightening.

What is "Ghosting"? How would I know if my computers have a third party hacking program running?

Is this another GOOD reason to not group?

I have AVG, Spybot, Anti-Spy, AD-Ware and Black Ice firewall on all of my machines, although I have not experienced any problems with them, game related or not, I am concerned, am I protected?

For the past several months I have experienced some weird warping thing, where I seem to jump back to a place I was minutes before (I keep the connection bar up now constantly and oddly it never seems to jolt down when this happens).

I also have been experiencing a weird problem when my Cleric rezz's, she more often than not now goes LD with in seconds after the person being rezz'd clicks on the "yes".

This problem occurs when I am grouped and ungrouped and happens more often in the Guild Lobby, but has occurred out in the zones as well. Honestly, I've got a better chance of not going LD when I'm not in GL doing rezz's which is why she no longer accepts donations, rezz's are free and something of a lottery for me.

I do however: receive at least 3 or more "plat/PL" spams per hour when I am logged in, even when annon, or sitting silently in the Baz.

God I miss the days of Duke Nukem'

Well SoE makes me feel bad when they pull out the Holier than Thow card after all the stuff they do wrong. Like advertise for EQPLAYERS when they know it has been busted since July of 2007 and they continue to offer money back to folks who subscribe for advanced features.

I don't like folks who hack, but I don't like SoE to cheat either. I think if SoE wants to clean up Everquest, they should start with themselves and then proceed.

There are a lot of detailed descriptions of Ghosting. I will give a very short simple one here. keep in mind that now Sony can track this and will kill you if you do this.

1. enter a zone with a boss mob
2. move to a spot far away from the boss mob
3. turn on ghost 3rd party software to start your ghost and no-delay wpns.
4. run your ghost, (kind of like the 'eye' ppl use to scout), over to the boss
5. kill the boss with your ghost since he cant be hit and does 32000 dps instead of 500-1000 like normal. Kill all adds and all mobs that could hurt your normal toon.
6. turn off your ghost and run your normal toon over to the boss and loot whatever he dropped
7. (get a msg from a GM that your account is being terminated)

What is happening is you are forcing your toon to shadowstep from your current location back to the starting location 10 times a second. This way a mob can never hit you because you always shadow step faster than he can catch you, but you can swing and hit them because you are in two places at once almost. Nodelay puts your wpns at 40/0 instead of 40/30 or whatever. You actually hit as fast as you would double attack or triple attack but continuously.

I have no idea if this may or may not have applied to you, butlast night something strange happened to me.

I was on my warhorse from the expansion gift, you know the one that is as slow as run0 i think, anyway, i alt tabbed out and back and noticed that we were heading to get a new task. I promptly caught up with a pally on her unicorn and passed her. I clicked off of the horse and i moved even faster.

Additionally, on my screen it looked like everything was moving faster, but the mobs would lag, and pop back a distance and come runing again.

Now, the interesting thing, is that the Paladin saw me pass her. so i was really moving this fast in the game, and when i stopped, i turned so fast i spun completely around,

So, what i am getting to, is did your movement seem any faster than normal? could this be what they saw and thought it was you hacking?

In any case, i /bugged it incase someone saw and thought i was cheating. Rebooting seemed to fix it.

Interesting point Kasandra,

But no, during the time they have me as hacking I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary.

I did notice however that when they originally banned the account they said they had evidence of me hacking in "Dreadlands, Bastion of Thunder, Muramite Proving Grounds and Crushbone" but when i asked for more info about it they gave me logs from two weeks earlier in Takish Hiz and Lower Guk.

Kirbyramz gave a description of how ghosting is done. I can only assume that the ghost killing programs take advantage of flaws in game stability that already exist. So I suppose it it possible that when someone has a bad connection, or is losing packets from the server, that it could look like some sort of warping effect. Id guess thats what happened to you Kasandra. Sony does not want to discuss the matter anymore so we'll never know if that is the case.

Polley

Well at least It's easy to tell the difference between the two. And as for Kasandra well if your running an AMD DC, looks like that might be your answer.


Polley

AMD Dual core processors, hmmmm, that would be me, know if a workaround?

muck around with processor affinity and it should help.

Try disabling SpeedStep in the BIOS. The Dual-Core Optimizer helped, but EQ still acted really weird.