Is SEQ a big deal to Sony now?

[Kimbler]

This has been alluded to for some time but I was wonder what you folks think.

With EQ incorporating mapping and most folks/guilds have a high level tracker available to spot spawns SEQ no longer gives the huge advantage it use to give.....no question it greatly enhances gameplay (to the point my play time fluctuates when all forms [Maggotboy sniffer, Cave's MySEQ, orginal SEQ] are working or not).

It that a fair assessment?

If SEQ in any form no longer gives the great advantage do you think it is really a big deal to Sony?

I personaly don't think it is as big deal for EQ but I do think they will stay vigulate to prepair for the day EQ2 comes out and the situation gets reset to like it was when SEQ orginally came out. They will try to keep it broken all the time.

Was wondering what others think.

[iluvseq]

Even the highest level tracker cannot see spawns throughout an entire zone from the zone in.

I know programs like SEQ are of great benefit to many guilds who use them to determine if potential raid targets are available.

Showing "invisible man" mobs is also very helpful, as many of them are triggers or timers for events. For example, if "an unearthly wail" is up in Umbral Planes, it means Doomshade is triggerable.

No reason to sit around for 3 hours and watch to see if the Dark Masters start chanting.

No in-game map or Ranger can tell you that.

So I would say SEQ and programs like it definately give a large advantage to those who use them.

I know that guilds who use them frequently are able to monopolize spawns over guilds who don't. It also enables guilds to quickly take out multiple targets in several zones, as you don't have to waste time fighting in close enough to attempt to track your target. A single porting class can pop around to various zone entrances and check 4 or 5 potential raid targets in 5 minutes. This is impossible for a guild who doesn't use SEQ or a program like it.

[Dedpoet]

Sort of off topic, but I get a kick out of how all the big guild's web pages often accuse other big guilds of using Seq and they all deny that they use it themselves. Yet, I see lots of posts on these boards about the elemental planes. :-)

[who_me_use_seq]

I find it very difficult to believe that any raiding guild does not have a group of SEQ or MySEQ users. There may very well be a large contingent of the guild who do not know about the "special tracking" group, but they are almost certainly there.

At least on my server the spawns are too highly contested to sacrifice any advantage that one might be able to get. And yes, it is a bit of an advantage for a wizard to be able to pop into a half dozen zones while you are divvying up the loot from the last kill and tell you for dead certain what mobs are up.

[BinaryConfusion]

we are there .. 99% of the guild doesn't know more than that SEQ exsists let alone that a few of us use it. I don't know of any large guild on my server that doesn't at least have one SEQ user.

[Chuin]

As a Monk, my uses for SEQ are not for tracking rare spawns. I use SEQ for pulling places like ToV.

[AnotherCoreDump]

Let me tell you as officer of one of the major guilds of our server, we do not use SEQ for finding raid targets, monitoring spawns and things like that. Thats what Druids/Rangers and Rogues (with this AA ability) are good for.
I (as non-tracker, non-puller) only use it to speed up corpse recovery (find peoples corpse in walls and stuff) and generally to find lost persons in dungeons .. and for navigation (before the map feature was implemented).
Thats why I wait for seq's return and do not use any other feature.
But I DO know that we're an exception, at last on our server.

[Kimbler]

I see then it still has its uses that would keep Sony trying to break it. I was hoping they would back off if we were not using it to any great advantage.

Thanks for the replies.

[Midnight]

The vast majority of the higher end guilds have atleast one person in their guild using a form of SEQ. Hands down no doubt about it. Of course there ARE guilds whos hands are clean, but it's a low percentage.

[Nstalkerga]

I know that on our server ... whether its known to the "guild" or not there are at least 1-2 people in each the the top 5 guilds.
I think im the only active one in ours atm ... with 2 other suspects

Theres people who run it ... and just never say anything.

In fact, i run it ... but honestly it more for my use and not for the guild, however its been known to save us time when a wizzy checks it out with the eye while rogues scout other areas.

/grin

[image]

If they didn't care then the encryption/compression flags, encryption itself wouldn't be changed.

[Amadeus]

Personally, I think the only thing that freaks out SOE is the offset hackers. There are folks out there right now that can alter their memory and have unlimited Enduring Breath, non KOS to all mobs, fly around ..you name it. THAT freaks out SOE.

The changes in encryption was probably a feeble attempt to thwart SEQ and similar programs as a move towards seeing if they could actually close the door before EQ2 came out. However, the compression things and struct changes ...in my opinion .... are caused by new features being added all the time and bugs that they are fixing and refixing trying to fix bugs caused by the buggy new features they are adding all the time. ...it's very circular.

I say that last bit because I work on MQ structs regularly and although they've scrambled around a lot in the last few months, each time something new was added in it and things just seemed to move accordingly (though it may appear from the outside as though they were scrambled). Honestly, I think the struct changes are more SOE adding/changing things to either fix a particular bug or trying things and then removing them..etc.... moreso than anything else.

[image]

I didn't say anything about structures or opcodes. Encryption/compression flags are required for ShowEQ to know what it needs to decrypt and decompress, and then you have to have a decrypt function to decrypt the encrypted packets. These are getting constantly changed.

A note, the compression/encryption flags are a recent addition, like two months ago, originally they only compressed certain packets and encrypted others, now they do it to the majority of the packets.

[fester]

There has only ever been 3 encryption method:

32 bit SOE
64 bit SOE
XOR Packet Chained

The compression has been the same since the beginning.

Image, it sounds to be that you believe that the change of encryption is somehow an indicator that they changed it to prevent seq.

I can tell you that if they believe that, then they are simpletons. I do not believe they are that dim witted. The XOR encryption was extremely easy to find, debug and reverse. I found the subroutine inside eqgame.exe that performed the encryption within 24 hours of when it was introduced. I know of at least two other people I spoke with on irc about the encryption that knew about it; we knew where the initial value was located; we all knew it XOR'd a 32 bit chunk at the 4th byte, 9th byte, and (packet size/3)'th byte. There is absolutely no way they thought this was going to be difficult to introduce. I mean come on. Think about it. It used XOR. There were only 4 (as I recall) XOR's in eqgame.exe that referenced a 32 bit memory address (a requirement to "bullet hole" the 3 require positions.) Any junior programmer would know that locating the code to perform the "encryption" would be trivial.

The real reason I believe they changed the encryption is XOR is a hardware operation and 64 bit encryption is several hundred times more complex. It would be impractical to use a better encryption and the XOR plus flags (comp, combined, implicit, crypto) would provide close to the level of security they had with the 64 bit encryption with far less CPU used.

[image]

I think the idea is to temporarily disable something they do not want working so that content isn't exploited...

[fester]

I believe the changes come from wanting to lower bandwidth used or to free resource so that they can improve the graphics.

I don't think they really think about "breaking" it. It is my belief if they did, we would have a much more difficult time decoding the changes.

[image]

I said temporarily fester.

[fester]

I am not exactly arguing, I just don't believe they would even "think" about doing it for a permanent OR temporary reason.

[datadog]

/agree fester

Most of the changes that break SEQ are related to changes in character structures and optimizing the data stream.

[eq_freak]

Sadly, SEQ or MySeq is basically a requirement for playing the high-end game atm, unless you like wasting your time on bugged spawns.

Example:

PoEarth.

The rings there are 3 day respawn, at least that was the case when they were briefly respawning correctly a week or so 1 month back.

Since then a patch broke them again, and they now do NOT respawn. The ONLY way to check if they are active is by using ShowEQ to look for a few select invis mobs. Otherwise you and your guild have to waste 1 1/2 hour just to spawn a lvl 50 placeholder..