Patch on Thursday May 21st

[mudtoe]

Anyone care to bet whether or not the Thursday patch will break SEQ again? My vote is "YES". Being the paranoid type, I think they have several changes all lined up and pre-tested whose sole purpose is to break SEQ after it's fixed. Seems very coincidental that the last couple times SEQ has been fixed, a patch has been scheduled for just a few days later.

[fester]

The last patch did not break showeq. I have never witnessed any change that in retrospect, was not for the good of the game.

So my vote would be No. If it is broken, it will likely be a change that is easy to fix.

[Jel321]

Heh, wanna know if its broke? Just take 20 seconds and logon on Test. :)


I just patched up ShowEQ last night and didnt get a chance to login or I would tell you. Ill know tonight.

[cheese_poker]

Correct me if I am wrong, but as of the last patch, the CVS version that fixed SEQ had not been released. Maybe patches here and there that got it working, but not the whole tamale.

Either way, I'd bet Sony has some scheme to watch these boards and change things to break SEQ every time its released.

Sad really. I enjoy seeing my skittles working, but am completely helpless to fix anything once its broken. It really makes the EQ experience more enjoyable.

My hats off to the developers that persist.

[fester]

The last patch happened with ShowEQ working with patches. The CVS version did not work when the patch landed. But the cvs version is always lagging days behind (if it did not, you would have daily cvs patches too.)

I guess my root point is that I see the changes they make and I don't get any sort of sense they are "to break" showeq. I don't even get the feeling they are good fixes to EQ that just happen to also break showeq.

I guess stamping out the conspiracy theories is like stamping out UFO rumors. It will never happen.

[bubbahlicious]

Originally posted by fester
The last patch did not break showeq. I have never witnessed any change that in retrospect, was not for the good of the game.


I'm eager to hear your argument that the data stream compression change at the time of the PoP release was for the good of the game, and not to break showeq.

For reference, I cite Fee:
http://seq.sourceforge.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2916

When iterating over the pros and cons of the network changes, Fee had this to say:

"Stream encryption (for lack of a better term): Some people have questioned whether or not any of the recent changes were aimed at showeq. The answer is definitively yes! Without discussing the details of the mechanism in detail, I can say that this must have been designed to thwart pre-school children from parsing the packets, because thats the only audience I can think of that wouldn't "get it". So the result here is ALOT of extra processing on the packets before the client can use the data. This of course results in CPU overhead. "

You're probably right in this case, of course, Fester. The vast majority of changes introduced by Verant/Sony have been for the good of the game. But they have introduced changes in the past which were aimed soley at screwing ShowEQ. To rule out the possibility of that kind of change ever again seems short-sighted to me.

[fester]

Well Bubbahlicious,

That change is the only one I thought about mentioning when I wrote that message. The reason I decided it may not have been directly aimed was that the new XOR blocking encryption is less trouble than the original 32 bit SOE encryption.

My position on this one change could be considered weak. But it is based on the assumption that reverting to a weaker model is counter to a desire to keep ShowEQ broken.

[guice]

SOE has changed it to Server Maintenance (it did use to say Patch).

So, you can relax a bit. To make any changed in the packet stream, to the best of my knowledge, would also require a change in the EQClient.exe as well. That would constitue a patch.

[mudtoe]

I just tried it, and it looks like SEQ is still working. Guess I was wrong. However, one good thing about being a cynic is that if I'm suprised, it's only pleasantly :)