Recent Account Bannes for HackingFollow

Honestly, I doubt it. Barring building a test environment with the zone loaded and reset to the same conditions during the time in question and comparing data, there's really about no way to correlate the actual bits in the data block to actions in the game. It's dynamic. That means it's reacting to the state of the server at any given time. Tracing that is virtually impossible (which is why I keep saying that they're almost certainly not actually looking to see if you're ghosting, but are flagging off something much easier to pick up).


Most likely, they just made a human judgment call. They looked at your level. They looked at the zones you were in. They looked at the time frame. The concluded that if you were ghosting, you somehow managed to not kill any mobs at a rate higher then one would expect given the situation, and you didn't get any more gear then one would expect. So they gave you the benefit of the doubt.


I'd be willing to bet that beyond counting packets with specific headers, and checking loot and kill logs, they don't have any other tools available to examine this. That's not necessarily bad (since, as I said, it would be incredibly hard to do anything more then that). The scary bit is that they appear to be completely reliant on the record of packet headers and unwilling to correlate that with the other data they do have. If you get data indicating ghosting, but then look at the kill and loot logs and don't see anything unusual, your first instinct should *not* be to assume the person was ghosting and ban their account. Your first instinct should be that whatever trigger you're using to detect ghosting isn't working properly and investigate that.


I've written process parsers and loggers. Trust me. Anyone who says that they can't get a false entry either isn't bothering to check for false entries, or is lying to you.






Dunno. Could try posting this to either the tech support, offline SOE discussion, or one of the dev boards on Sony's site

An ACCURATE description of these hacks:

Ghost Killing:
Most people confuse this with Nodelay/Monkbug. More on those later, this is what ghost killing acctually is:
'Ghosting' is a MacroQuest program that sends very very fast warp commands (I don't know how this is done, but it's with packets). You will warp very fast between the mob and your original position, on your screen it will look like you're just attacking the air, but if someone else looks at you you will be flickering... as though warping very fast. You can still get hit doing this.

TL;DR: Ghosting is warping to a mob and your original position very fast.

No Delay:
Broken since Jan '08, permenantly. SoE did something right :). This was commonly used be SHADOWKNIGHTS mostly, because when you're doing attacks with literally no delay, believe me, you get a metric ton of ripostes. Shadowknight gets AAs and spells, and epic clicks which let them heal themselves for 100% damage hit. It was literally possible to clear out a whole raid instance in minuets, and you could avoid mechanics such as hp locking on Hanvar because the script couldn't take your DPS. Used in conjuction with Ghost Kill.

TL;DR: Broken, turned delay off on attacks, simple.

'Monk'bug:
This is still in effect, and acctually works on any class with intimidation. What it does is take advantage of the potential attack you gain from intimidation. This works best with monks as they have the highest amount of attacks from intimidation. Basically it's like nodelay, except that the delay is only turned off for intimidation. You can still kill things pretty fast, but it's no longer possible to solo Solteris etc alone. You'll have to box clerics et cetera.

ZoneWarp:
This is just a glorified version of regular ol' warp (I'm sure that dosen't need a description). What it does is NOT take you instantly to any zone, but warps you to the zonelines of the zones you want to go to.

For example, if I want to go to Katta Castrum from Toxxulia Forest, this is what would happen:

/zone katta
You'll be warped to the zoneline of the Barren Coast.
Immediatly after you zone in, you'll be warped to the zoneline of The Buried Sea.
Immediatly after you zone in, you'll be warped to the zoneline of Katta Castrum.

It's so fast after you zone in, you don't get to see the screen load, it stays at the loading screen.

TL;DR: Warps you to zone in co-ordinates. You still have to travel to every zone on the way to your destination.

How Hackers Get To Stay In Instances!
This isn't really very well known. A compile of MQ with Ghostkill/Monbug will probably have this as well:
ZoneLock: Allows the hacker to stay locked in a zone even if the instance is dead.
InstanceKill: Drops everyone from an instance, and effectively destroys it, it dosen't appear on your expedition or task list, and unless you're zonelocked, you'll get booted.

About knowing when a mob spawns etc, that's a SEQ feature. MQ features a map, but it sucks and is built onto the ingame map. It dosen't show spawn timers, but you can type /target mobname and target a mob anywhere in the zone. ShowEQ can't show you loot tables, but it can show you potential loot.

To be fair, did Sony not give back your account to you?

Yes Dekusutaa, in all fairness they did give the account back. However with that they threatened that if i were caught cheating again they would close the account forever...and since I don't why I'm showing up as cheating I just assume not play.
I figure if I get the hankering to play again in the future, at least I'll have an account to do it from.

Polley

Soe has done nothing to actually check the loggs or anything on my accounts as far as I can see they keep going back to the original gm who wrote back on my petition on 30 April that I was hacking on 19 April. They still give no particulars and speak in generalities. I will continue to try but they seem to be fervent that I cheated even though they are completely wrong. They never even actually gave me a written reason why they banned my warriors account. I seriously doubt I will ever support any sony product ever again as this has left me with a very bitter taste.

Regards
Rmahnee

Maybe not a false positive but an anomaly of some type wouldn't be unheard of.

I think it's a matter of SOE being way over zealous and nailing anything that looks out of the ordinary. Wouldn't be the first time SOE has gone overboard.

Well Roslek, Your correct, It's hard not to be skeptical about people posting on forums. People can make any claim they want, and there is only so much one can do to validate it. Any of us could argue that we did absolutely nothing wrong, but I'm willing to bet you, and most people, would never believe us.

I don't think that Sony is mucking about banning accounts for no reason, and I don't think anybody made that accusation. At this point the problem lies within the fact that Sony made an error but is unwilling to acknowledge it. They are very adamant that they are right, and we are guilty. All we want is for them to look long and hard at the situation, admit they screwed up, and make an attempt to rectify it and fix the problem.

Polley Pauhana


Edited for grammer

Edited, May 19th 2008 9:45am by PolleyPauhana

My suggestion is this.

If you're in a group, and it seems like someone is using a hack or some other violation of the ToS, leave the group and /report the player.

I was in a group recently where a guy was bragging about how much real world money he was making selling platinum. I (as well as a couple guildies in the group) left immediately, and /reported him. We all got responses of thanks from a GM, and I can only assume that we're not on any watch list or tagged for anything.

You seem to be WAY OFF THE SUBJECT.... We the grp gained nothing , a cloak that went to an alt whooppeee , we spent close to 6 hrs in the zone we were trying to find out about getting the tier 3 spells from finishing quests in the guardian, And Gloruk was closest to having it done We were helping guildies and trying to become more familiar with what was needed to get tier 3 spells SO GET OFF THIS IDEA THAT I GAINED ANYTHING... all I have gained is a boatload of frustration going to links that until recently I could not even get into. I don't run third party cheat software I ran wineq and magelo so please tell me if that is cheat software if it is then I will be the first to say my mistake but to my knowledge it is legal to run magelo update and wineq and I'm not even sure if I was running wineq. When we decided to do the guardian, I had loaded a slower so that we could get started, and the slower was camped in the zone after I dropped the grp and the task in order to get another player who plays his shammy much better than I play mine as a third box. So get off the idea that we gained anything, I / we gained nothing except alot of frustration over something I still don't understand.

Rmahnee

edited for grammar

Edited, May 23rd 2008 7:29pm by rmahnee

Congratz on getting back in. And let us know if the warrior does also.

Edited, May 27th 2008 11:24am by kasandra

Way to go Rmahnee! I'm glad you got the accounts back! It sounds like Sony might be realizing that mistakes are made and they are correcting them. I hope that they can use what they learned from us, and others I'm sure, to fine tune their detection methods.

Welcome back!

Polley Pauhana

Oh Siddious, this is Tinkishere. I am so sorry to hear this hon. I've played with you a lot and I know you are not a hacker babe. I really hope this all gets worked out for you.

nm, the one I was replying to fell below the line already.

Edited, Jun 12th 2008 9:57am by Whitman