The Dark Side of Brell: Another Nostalgia Thread

[Ickhor]

Disclaimer: I played from release until LDoN, originally on Xegony, and made my first brell char a few months after Kunark came out. So, I can't comment on anything after LDoN. I won't incriminate anyone other than myself and people who are already known hackers anyway.

So with all the Nostalgia threads popping up lately, and with a lot of us old guys not caring if we get banned anymore, I thought it would be fun to get the juices flowing on the kind of stuff that really shaped the server.

I don't claim to be some sort of master EQ hacker, and I'm sure that my stories are lame compared to what some of you have done/heard.

I'd be really interested in learning for sure the matchups between the obvious-hacker-mules and their mains. I'm sure that Ganadan was Shavena, and I can make a pretty good guess that Eleet Haxorz was Thalun.

Duping was rampant in EQ early on (everyone remembers the 24 million PP Thalun screenshot with kunark gear and the old UI, right?), around mid-kunark it seemed to die down into nothing, at least for the average player, when it was actually happening off and on until at least LDoN. The thing is, Verant (and later SOE) never could really implement a system that found duped items, so they had to resolve bugs which caused duplication conditions to occur, which is inherently flawed because it assumes that to have no duping, no bugs that allow duping can be active. With a constantly changing codebase...this is impossible. Duping existed at least as late as the bazaar was working, because there were a lot of bazaar-specific duping bugs.

What really changed as the game matured was not an end to duping, it was just how verbose it was. In the early days, you would see people selling the same exact shit on ebay every week. Ultra-rare stuff too. That all changed some time before velious.

The key to duping was that it had to be completely silent. With Verant's strategy to combat duping being to fix bugs, you had to make sure that you didn't let anyone, even your trusted hax0r friends, know about your bug. It's not that they would necessarily tell, it's that they might use the bug in a way that makes it obvious to the prying eyes of Verant, which would end up getting them watched by invisible GMs/log monitored, etc.

One time Tranqullish (earlier GM) or someone approached us at one of the Best of the Best GM events about us having duped items, offering us a prisioners dilemma that if we fessed up and told about our bugs, we would only get suspended. Of course this was complete bullshit to get the information out of us, and when we didn't admit to anything they just left. And yeah, we were full of duped items.

PP duping was the most lucrative because PP transactions aren't logged at all. A lot of them were easy too. For a few weeks in Luclin, all you had to do was sell something to a vendor while walking backwards. If you pressed sell right when the vendor window was about to close, you would get the money and keep the item too. We had this down to a science with stacks of blue diamonds.



Packet sniffing (ShowEQ etc) was by far the most popular form of hacking early on, and remained popular with high-end guilds at least until I quit, probably to this day. Every high end guild had at least a handful of people to run ShowEQ to check for raid spawns.

How this basically works is, in an optimisation to make EQ more realtime, the server sends you information about the whole zone ahead of time. The EQ client on your computer just doesn't tell it to you. Say for example you zone into lguk. As soon as you zone in the server tells you things like, the undead lord is up, and he is holding a sword with model #A5 (I made that number up). If you read this data off the network wire then you know that you can go get a Short Sword of Ykesha right now.

The thing about packet sniffing is there is no way that anyone could tell that you were doing it, unless you gave yourself away. A certain member of LoH used tell the ensh/loh channel "I smell that X is up and is going to drop Y." Of course everyone knew what was going on.

Every (high end, large) guild took advantage of ShowEQ for raiding and raid planning.



Then there was exploiting features in the game that weren't really bugs, but caused you to leverage a huge advantage if you knew about them and kept them secret. My champion exploit and the accomplishment I am most proud of in EQ is when I made a level 1 mage one day, and then raided Rallos Zek with Enshadowed at level 63 with her that night. I only knew of one other person across all servers who knew about that bug, and it stayed live until it was accidently fixed, SOE had no idea.

Somewhere around velious a new NPC troll appeared in grobb hidden in a wall that would not respond to hails or anything. But, if you gave him a milk, he would give you experience. It was just like the old DF belt/Bone chip quests. But those stop giving experience at some point, and this quest never did. Milk was sold in grobb. Buying all the milk and giving it to the NPC was tedious as hell, and wasn't rewarding time-wise after level 15 or so. But a little bit of programming to autobuy and turn in the milk made it really fucking fast. Yeah my mage still had her newbie robe and dagger and no spells/skills at all at level 65. The skills were incredibly easy to raise though (macro). This bug was kept quiet and lasted until Grobb was redone into the froglok city in LoY.



Memory hacking bugs were what got most cheaters banned. Specifically hacking their runspeed, and hacking the refresh time to near-zero on abilities like flying-kick/mend. But you could use commands like /zone with no reprecussions (assuming you didn't like, /zone into veeshan's peak from gfaydark or something. A /zone that you couldn't pull off just by walking was a read flag. It was fine to /zone from gfaydark to butcherblock then to timdeep and then firionia vie to dreadlands, then /zone to burned woods, then /zone to skyfire, then /zone to veeshan though.) forever. Things like turning off [ANONYMOUS] had no way of being tracked, and everyone did them. Likewise with map overlays before SOE gave it to you anyway.


Let's get it out of our systems. I don't really consider this cheating, because EQ isn't a competitive game. If people have an attitude that they have to be the best of their class / best guild / most PP on the server, and get pissed off, it's because they have ego issues and isn't my problem.

[Ickhor]

Oh, and one more thing.... Fun Fact:


Hypothetically, it may be possible that someone at some time made somewhere around $25000 in a one-month long duping binge on ebay. I will leave the details of this audacious claim as an exercise to the community.

[Bahd Zoolander]

I've got a level 29 beastlord that never killed a mob in her life. Another NPC in Grobb would take alligator meat and give exp. They sell alligator meat in Thurgadin.

That bug only lasted about a week after I found it, but I got bored with it after a few hours.

I have some insight into a running MMO now. Some of the dupe bugs are just crazy. I have no idea how people discover the complicated sequence of events that some of these bugs take. It's funny, but sometimes the really simple bugs that have been there for years are never found when the crazy complicated ones are.

[Kulaf]

Never sploited or used any macro or game enhancer or packet sniffer or anything else, and to my direct knowledge no one I interacted with to any extent did either.

If folks in Watchers were using ShowEQ.....I was never in the loop.

[Ickhor]

It's funny, but sometimes the really simple bugs that have been there for years are never found when the crazy complicated ones are.

Truth.

If folks in Watchers were using ShowEQ.....I was never in the loop.

They did, at least early on. I didn't really know any ShowEQers in Watchers in the later era, but I'm sure they had at least one person, they had to.

It usually isn't very obvious. The only way you get banned from ShowEQ is by admitting that you use it, and SOE reads guildchat. So people would have "tracked something on their alt" or "timed a spawn" or claim that they are using some ridiculous chain /assist targeting technique or something.

[Kulaf]

Well I was in Watchers from the time we were killing Trak in Kunark until we were beating Uqua. I can honestly say that I never saw anything that would indicate to me that anyone was using it. It was absolutly never discussed on our message boards in any of the forums where we discussed strats.

I was fairly hardassed about exploits.....as most anyone in Watchers could probably testify......so it is possible I was just intentionally left out of any discussions involving it.

[Ickhor]

What I'm saying is that, even if Watchers didn't use ShowEQ openly as a guild, there were still people that used ShowEQ to the guild's advantage...

Like, in Enshadowed, there wasn't any guildwide collaboration in it, no one mentioned it on the message boards either, but the people who used ShowEQ just talked amongst themselves, and pointed everyone else in the right direction without making it overt.

[Klast Brell]

I can see that the use of Show EQ would make being faced with a rotation / sign up etc really frustrating.
You peak in to zone X and the uber toy is up. But lamer guild Y has the slot reserved.
I'm not saying that's the only reason for people bitching about the old formalised system. I'm just saying it may have been one of the reasons.

[Trollbait]

I didn't really know any ShowEQers in Watchers in the later era, but I'm sure they had at least one person, they had to.

/raise

[Ddrak]

ShowEQ? I thought that died when MacroQuest came out.

I know a whole bunch of people from every high end guild on Brell at least that actively used one or the other. It's pretty obvious when you know what to look for (timing the PoEarth named was a classic giveaway). Still, I'm not naming names and I actively discouraged people talking about it or using to for any gratuitous advantage in Watchers when I was there.

Dd

[Arathena]

I can see that the use of Show EQ would make being faced with a rotation / sign up etc really frustrating.
You peak in to zone X and the uber toy is up. But lamer guild Y has the slot reserved.
I'm not saying that's the only reason for people bitching about the old formalised system. I'm just saying it may have been one of the reasons.

I know that when Dhark threw down the gauntlet and called for the vote on the rotations, Poison Arrow, as a whole, didn't really give a shit about the loot on Trakanon. What we cared about was this: To get the ~40 Trakanon teeth we needed to get into VP and start raiding there, we were looking at three years to farm it with the rotation in place. That rotation was working real good for us little guys.

The Ubers never really got screwed by the rotations. Who gave a shit if VS was gonna drop a necro stick, you've already got three in the bank from when it was just SR & LOH flopping the spawn back and forth. It was the rest that took it in the ass when there were 40 guilds on the rotation, 20 of which were capable of killing him on his own, and 20 more that formed 4 alliances that also took 20 spots on the basis of having different names to sign up under.

Fucking Earth rings pissed me off, though. What they were thinking making the only way to find out if you're gonna waste three hours of your night for nothing to cheat, I'll never understand.

[Garrdor]

I tradescammed with alts on my spare account ever since pre-kunark. Some cool bugs. About 90% of the plat didn't go to my character though. Me and a friend both bought top of the line machines with the proceeds. I scammed since almost a year after launch all the way to before Luclin.

I've even scammed some people from these boards.

Wow, I feel like spilling the beans. Where can I start?

Lets just say back in the day on my monk, I also Ninja'd off of a famous red dragon.

[Arkaron]

Every (high end, large) guild took advantage of ShowEQ for raiding and raid planning.

I'd tend to agree, and would venture to say that it still happens, though with instancing this is likely on an individual basis and not a guildwide tool.

There is an Army of the Dead exploit where if you time it correctly you can keep waking corpses right after one another, and wake them, and wake them, and wake them, and wake them, and wake them...

I have not done this myself, but I've caught it on my Druid's track bar more than a few times in WoS.

[Xican]

I only cheated to level and even then it was never anything too bad. Usually just line of sight exploits.

Oh, I also cheated to get Crystal Chitin gear.

I knew the several ways to get plat, but they were all too tedious. By the time I learned how to cheat in EQ, I was already too apathetic about the game to bother.

I think my 'claim to fame' was having Oribi help me cheat on multiple occassions when I had that roll-back bug. Chitlin also helped, but I don't think I ever told him. All I know is, thanks to Oribi's timely rollbacks, Chitlin holding some stuff for me and some convenient circumstances I duplicated my inventory about 6 times, before I got bored with the process.

One of these days I'm going to confess and appologize to both Oribi and Chitlin.

[Arkaron]

I only cheated to level and even then it was never anything too bad. Usually just line of sight exploits.

I dunno if I'd even consider something like LoS an exploit, to me it's like the shitty pathing in MPG.

I bet if you told them you would all have a good laugh, hehe.

[Klast Brell]

I used some early map overly program for about a month till EQ put it's own map in.
I used a macro program to auto forage on a druid I played for a while.

That's the extent of my cheating and haxoring.

[Tholiak Eladamri]

If PP Transactions isnt tracked like you say, how come they knew what character my PP went to when a friend logged on my character and stole my PP just to be an ass?

[Flunkie]

I used ShowEQ from about the Velious era, pretty much everyone I knew used it which is how I found it in the first place. The one interesting thing I found was the invisible nameless NPC in the middle of the ocean where Lodizal spawns. Thought it might be a timer place-holder or something. I tried to kill it, you can target it, but it heals incredibly fast. You wuld need a group of nukers to do it, but I'm pretty sure it can be done. I don't know if it might spawn Lodizal or reset the timer, but it would be interesting to find out.

I think the worst problem EQ has now is that you can fully automate a group using macro programs. I know of someone that gained on the order of 300 AAs in a few months doing this. And that was 24/7 AFK. If he can do it, the Chinese sweat shops can do it big time and I venture to say that duping is not really all that necessary anymore.

[Ickhor]

If PP Transactions isnt tracked like you say, how come they knew what character my PP went to when a friend logged on my character and stole my PP just to be an ass?

Is your friend an NPC vendor? This is a completely different type of transaction.

[Akhbarali]

I had the ability to cast instant click root (ie ZERO cast time, could be cast while running) in essentially unlimited qty's on my magician since before the Cazic Thule revamp that added that stupid earing (which they nerfed, and it had a long cast time anyway). I never considered it an exploit but did not share the information with anyone for years because SOE was very clear that mages should not get root under any circumstances. If it became widespread they would have figured it out and nerfed the ability (it was eventually severely restricted but not intentionally). It allowed me to do some wicked soloing, better than most classes (even necros!) indoors. It made me laugh at all the gimps on Mage Tower/Compendium whining about root when the ability was right under the noses since the day the game released. For the record, SOE was right, root was overpowering for Mages.

Other than that, I knew of a couple "safe spots" where you could kill things but not be touched by them (Crystal Caverns being the most notable). I never used them and was tempted to report people that I saw exploiting the spots. The idea of cheating at video games always struck me as something for the 18 and under crowd. /shrug I did take advantage of the ridiculous exp at the Orc Camp by the bridge in Eastern Wastes but never considered that an exploit.

I don't think anyone in VC ever used Show EQ but we were hardly an obsessive raiding guild. A couple guys in my first guild (Wolves of Freeport) used ShowEQ to travel around and target named in various dungeons but it never seemed worth the trouble to me.

I do not know anyone that duped and would have definitely reported them if I had known. I figured they were either selfish, immature pricks or for profit scammers that ruined the game economy for everyone else that played.

Akhbar