SOE is listening to us!Follow

The other day I was online and I did a /w all guild and there was this person on the list that I've never seen before. I sent a tell to the guild leader and asked him if he knew who this person was. He didn't. He then told me that he had no option to remove this person from the guild. So we sent tells but there was no response. We then looked a few other guilds on the server and this person was a few of their guilds too! I talked to my friend in another guild about it and he had just noticed it too. The spy was in our guilds for about an hour and then left. We came up with 2 reasons for his/her presence. Either 1) SOE is listening in on the guilds that have higher level players because of the whole macro thing that has been going on or 2) Giving SOE the benefit of the doubt, they are listening in for information on higher level content that is being discovered and trying to find out what the bugs are.

It's not widely known but if they chose to, in EQ1, SoE could read every single word in the game. Yes, even tells. I could imagine a bunch of SoE folks gathered around a monitor laughing their heads off at some dopey guys cybering each other, thinking they were private.

So I'm guessing they can certainly do the same in EQ2 if they want to. They don't need to actually put a toon into a guild to eavesdrop.

Happened in EQ1 a couple of times in my guild. A guy showed up in guild manager that we didn't know. Everyone in guild was someone we knew, it was a small family guild.

So I sent a tell to the guy after he wouldn't respond in guild chat. Turned out he had no clue what I was talking about. He wasn't in the guild, he was just showing up in the tool as being in the guild.

In other words, a glitch.

I didn't know what to believe, but it happened again a few months later, and eventually SOE even released info that there was in fact a glitch like this.

SOE doesn't need to put themselves in game to listen in, every tell you send, every word you type, is going through their servers.

The fact that the toon doesn't even show up on your server list might simply imply that the game screwed up and showed a player from another server, maybe that server's zone and your server's zone were actually on the same physical server or something, who knows? I don't know enough about their server structure to even begin to speculate.