Is it MacroQuest's fault?

[leifert]

After seeing numerous offhand refernces to this "MacroQuest" thing, I went and looked it up, and realized that it was (duh) the program I'd been hearing about that allowed people to make tons of plat from automated tradeskill combines.

It also appears that SoE removed a lot, if not all, of the profitable combines in the same patch (10/31?) that broke SEQ.

Since the tradeskill exploitation actually warranted an in-game warning message, is it possible that the whole MacroQuest thing just pissed them off enough that they decided to take a more hard-line stand against ALL 3rd-party programs, including SEQ?

[S_B_R]

Anything is possible...

[crazdefool]

Not likely seeing that macroquest still works..

[Exo]

rest assured this is the results of an attack aimed at ShowEQ. It was not simply a change, it was an attack. It was aimed at cheating in general it was aimed directly at ShowEQ.

[Catt]

I would agree that it was aimed at us.

MQ doesn't care about encryption, it runs on the EQ machine, using memory directly.

The only reason I can see for them to change encryption is us, or others very close to what we are doing.

[Ryntar]

I would think that since the form of the "attack" was compressing the data packets and considering that bandwidth costs are the most expensive ongoing costs of operation (even above staff), it would seem that the "attack" would likely be more of an attempt to lower bandwidth costs than soley as a ShowEQ nerf.

Compressing data before sending it over the net is one of those fundimental ("always do this") rules and it surprised me EQ has taken this long to implement it. Of course it took them 2 years to implement server side battle-spam filters, so it may be more of a reflection on their programming talent.

[high_jeeves]

I seriously doubt that this had anything to do with bandwidth costs. They compressed exactly 1 new packet, which happened to be the one that the encryption weakness was in (over the 4 or so that are already compressed), and it is a fairly small, and not particularly frequent packet.

--Jeeves