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Games Entertainment

EverQuest/Sony Fights Code Wars With Latest Expansion 420

Perlmonkey has written a summary on the latest Everquest Expansion, and Sony's efforts to thwart those who might wish to to tap into the packets and do things that maybe aren't exactly fair to other players. Or they just want a map that should have been in the first place. In anycase, hit the link below to read his piece on the subject.

The most recent expansion for EverQuest (Planes of Power) adds a lot of problem-solving quests to the game, so Sony beefed up the (long-since broken) encryption that they used for the client protocol. The expansion has been a major hit, pleasing some of the most critical voices in the EverQuest world, but one week later, the anonymous development team of ShowEQ had broken the new encryption. Read on for details of the ongoing battle over keeping secrets in plain sight.

First, the skinny on the latest EverQuest expansion, Planes of Power (PoP). Because this is an expansion chock-full of content for only the highest level characters in the game, Sony added some features that everyone would want (and thus, pay for): the ability to progress to level 65 (60 was the cap before); a new zone called the Plane of Knowledge which allows characters to moved freely to all of the old game areas and a feature that allows large groups to coordinate more easily. That's the carrot for the lower-end users, but really this is the first expansion to lock out even moderately experienced players in favor of large, strong in-game guilds.

Even so, the response has been almost all positive. Some players complain about the last-minute changes (especially the changes that made monks and druids less powerful in the high-end game), but those who are taking advantage of the new game areas are happy with the reduced time required for encounters and the fact that the game rewards strategy more than ever.

Planning, attention to detail and a fanatical focus on getting past every challenge that Sony presents are important in-game, but Sony is less than pleased by programmers who are just as happy to approach those challenges from outside of the game. Using Linux and Qt, ShowEQ is a packet sniffer that watches the EverQuest client protocol and displays a map of everything that the Windows client is privy to, but may not disclose to the player. Years ago, the ShowEQ developers discovered a weakness in the encryption that the client uses, and they have been able to reliably interpret the data ever since.

With the PoP release, Sony improved the encryption so that it used a larger key which was more securely chosen. At first, the talk on the ShowEQ IRC forum was gloomy and the normally secretive developers cloistered themselves off from the the group, returning only rarely to proclaim the difficulty of breaking this new scheme. The protocol is not unlike that used by ssh or SSL. A public key is sent from Sony to the client, and the client uses that key to encrypt a random session key and send it to Sony. Theoretically, this approach is open to only a limited number of attacks, all of which run the risk of being detected by the client.

A former ShowEQ developer who was hired by Sony was reported to have said it's over, "you'll never break this"... One week later, the new version of ShowEQ was available via CVS and was working again. The new keys were vulnerable, it seems, to an even simpler form of analysis and the result was simply that ShowEQ worked significantly faster. In many ways, this seemed to simply be a "bonus quest" that Sony threw into the PoP expansion, and it had been beaten.

On Thursday, October 31 ShowEQ broke once again. The protocol now compresses key data to prevent the analysis that was limiting the keyspace that has to be searched. As of this writing, ShowEQ no longer works passively, but this escalation is not over. The latest version allows a user to input the key directly, and developers are hard at work, trying to find further weaknesses in the key generation and/or exchange. The developers are even starting to question the long-held, unwritten truce that they maintained with Sony. The idea was that if Sony did not make decryption require a Windows-side component, there would never be a Windows version, limiting the use of ShowEQ to those capable of getting ShowEQ working under Linux. Now, the party line is, "there is absolutely, positively no reason not to have a WinSEQ."

The technical details are interesting, but the social and legal details may take center-stage for a while. The seq team is trying to figure out what they could put on the client-side without being detected and that brings into question the legality of Sony scanning running processes and reporting back. There's also the matter of Sony's rather astoundingly harsh EULA that tries to preclude activities like this in every way that it can (though the legality of click-through EULAs is still a hot topic).

One problem with this escalation is that, like another product (TiVo, which is partially backed by Sony) the very people subverting the product and making it more than the creator wants it to be are the best customers. In terms of EverQuest, they are often the ones maintaining several accounts and/or spending extra money for the "Legends" service. How does a company contend with a market where your best customers are also your most resourceful? With the TiVo, there was an uneasy understanding between the company and its modders. Sony has broken that balance with EverQuest.

Now that Sony has crossed this Rubicon, it is quite likely that ShowEQ will be ported to Windows and hundreds if not thousands of new users will be introduced to it. Was that Sony's goal? Certainly Prof. Felton showed us that such a battle is ultimately futile. Why does Sony want to fight it again on yet another front (remember that they are an RIAA member)? Is there any financial justification, here? Does mapping software really threaten the game more than the many in-game exploits that the high-end encounters suffer from?

PoP is a finely crafted fantasy gaming experience, but Sony has once again chosen to spend extra time and money hurting themselves and their market. Perhaps their competition will not make the same mistakes.

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EverQuest/Sony Fights Code Wars With Latest Expansion

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  • I guess (Score:2, Insightful)

    the saying It's just a game isn't valid anymore, I wonder what would happen if Sony just shut off Everquest, the hardcore players would once again have to have a life.
    • Nope, they'd go BNETD [bnetd.org] style. Never underestimate the power of a junkie who needs a fix.
    • Re:I guess (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Dillon2112 ( 197474 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @12:32PM (#4787998) Homepage
      Or, more to the point, the thing *Sony* fears is a weapon to be held against them. If you suddenly have every EQ idiot using SEQ on their 'doze box, and they ban them (as Sony said they would) then they lose money. Or, they have people cheating rampantly. Either way, Sony loses. Bad move for them, I say. Leave well enough alone.
      Nice quote. I would guess that you're a Rush fan, but then I noticed your name. OK, so I *know* you're a Rush fan. =)
    • One problem I have with almost all of the massively multiplayer games out there is that there is defintely a point at which no new players can reasonably expect to join the game, because the long time players have gotten so many advantages over the newbies that the newbies can never expect to make up the difference. Everquest's "solution" to this problem is the concept of death. If you are killed, you get thrown to be back of the bus with the newbies. Since nobody is immune, eventionally even the top players will die eventually so Joe Newbie should eventually have a chance to earn their way to the top. But these kinds of "cheats", discovering that a misstep will lead to an encounter with a likely-to-be-fatal situation, lessens this possiblity and can make players practically immortal. This is damaging to the game, in that it leads to a situation where a newbie who starts today can never pass the leaders of today since those leaders will keep earning their way upward. EverQuest is practically closed to new admissions, and that's gotta be scary from the business office's view.
      • Uh, (Score:2, Informative)

        by Skreech ( 131543 )
        You don't start over when you die in EQ. The best scenario is you have a cleric raise you and you get 96% of your lost experience back, and you're out maybe 5 minutes. The worst is that you could lose your corpse and everything you owned was on it, but even an admin will help you out if you're honestly trying to get your stuff back and truely can not.

        But start over? Not at all. You're still the same level unless you were unfortunate to lose enough experience to go back a level, but you wouldn't expect to go from level 60 to level 1.
    • Re:I guess (Score:5, Funny)

      by Nkwe ( 604125 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @03:06PM (#4788715)
      I wonder what would happen if Sony just shut off Everquest, the hardcore players would once again have to have a life.
      Probably the same thing that would happen if the someone just shut off slashdot.
  • Ha ha ha. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Perianwyr Stormcrow ( 157913 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @12:15PM (#4787904) Homepage
    Raph Koster's rule of "the client is in the hands of the enemy" seems to have been forgotten by EQ's developers- if ShowEQ is such a problem, it's time, perhaps, that they stopped telling the client all these nasty things they didn't want it to know. I mean, I first remember ShowEQ coming 'round *3 years ago*. Why they haven't simply made the client ignorant of things it shouldn't know in all this time is beyond me.
    • Re:Ha ha ha. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Dillon2112 ( 197474 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @12:35PM (#4788011) Homepage
      The client has to know certain things to run. To alter what it knows would to make a thin client game even thinner, and would alter the balance of the client/server load. If the servers are picking up slack for the clients (or the sole purpose of players not sniffing that info), then the servers have to be redesigned and beefed up. Not likely, I say.
      • Every MMORPG I have played has started out not nearly as thin as it had to be, and nearly all have had to undergo significant redevelopment to rectify this matter.

        EQ can be forgiven for not knowing this at its start (it was one of the earliest MMORPGs) but it's had a long time to learn from its own experiences and those of its competitors.

        Assuming that everything known by the client will be known and exploited by the players using it would seem to be the safest rule.
        • Not Quite True (Score:5, Interesting)

          by The Raven ( 30575 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @02:46PM (#4788597) Homepage
          There are many things that the client MUST know, for performance and usability reasons.

          Every request the client makes for information means another round trip access to the server. Another complex decision by the server whether the client should be allowed that information. When you have 100K users online, making requests like that dozens of times a second, it can get JUST A TINY BIT LAGGY.

          To alleviate these issues, the server sends some information to every client. The game map. The nearby creatures that the client may need to render at any moment. The current statistics of all the players equipment. All this information the client NEEDS to know.

          Here is an example of one thing people often think the client does NOT need to know... creatures that are behind a hill, or not in the players cone of view. However, what if the player whips around to look behind them? How disorienting and unplayable would it be if every time you turned it took half a second before you saw ANYTHING other than terrain? As for obstructed creatures, would you want to go around a corner in a dungeon and not see anything for half a second until the server caught up? Not to mention the exhaustively difficult math required to accurately determine whether you have line of sight to something or not.

          Thin clients DON'T WORK. At least, not in MMORPG's. Works for MUDs though. If you don't mind, I'll be going back to my DikuMUD now. :-)
          • Re:Not Quite True (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Znork ( 31774 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @06:20PM (#4789704)
            The game map is not sent. The game map is the zone files which are already local to the client (and which can be looked over using several means). The nearby creatures _and_ every other creature in the zone were sent last time I checked. To filter out which mobs position info to send to the client does not require communications with the client. It's trivial to fix that.

            Creatures behind a hill or not in the players cone of view? Umm... maybe press the camera button to switch views could help you? This is already visible in the game.

            LOS code is already in the game. As in 'you cannot see your target' - darn.

            If a mob is around the corner you start sending info on that mob to the client when it gets into such a range that it is concievable that the player will see it in a second or five. Not as soon as they zone into the same area.

            Thin clients ARE THE ONLY THING THAT WORKS or YOU WILL HAVE CHEATERS. Period. The client tells the player anything you send it. Period. The client tells your server any bullshit the player wants it to. Period.

            The client is the enemys foothold in your fortress, not your foothold in the enemys fortress.

            A moderately competent programming team and a reasonably smart architecture designer can code around the disadvantages of thin clients with things like path prediction and server-side components of player response time. But nobody, can _ever_ stop the players from reading anything you send them or sending you whatever they want.
      • Re:Ha ha ha. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Saxerman ( 253676 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @02:07PM (#4788463) Homepage
        the servers have to be redesigned and beefed up. Not likely, I say.

        For games that have already been around for awhile, you're right that they're not going to be making large changes to the server and client to hide those things they shouldn't have been sending to the client anyways.

        I have great hope that the next generation of Massively Multi-player games will incorporate the idea of 'the client can not be trusted' into the game design early on. I agree that it requires a lot more work server side to process things it would be much easier to have the client work on. But the only real way to prevent people from accessing things you don't want them to see, is to NOT SEND IT.

        I also think games like Everquest should keep the server closed, but open the client so third party groups can create them and add features. There only real way to allow this is to only send information to the client that you want them to have.

        • Re:Ha ha ha. (Score:3, Insightful)

          After a certain point, this isn't feasible. Right now, all that SEQ can do is show you the locations of monsters that are out of your line of sight.

          Calculating whether or not a monster is in your line of sight requires a bunch of logic. You need to know about the terrain, obstacles, locations. And the calculations are different for every person, etc. Iduno. Seems prohibitive to me.
          • Re:Ha ha ha. (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Saxerman ( 253676 )
            After a certain point, this isn't feasible.

            After a certain point, Moore's Law makes this feasible. Right now, you're right. 3D line of sight for every player on large servers requires some seriously big iron. The question is, should we stay in an encryption arms race against the hackers to try and make it too tedious to decrypt, or spend the extra money on severs that can handle the increased load.

            This is going to be one of those business decisions which will have long term impact over the life of a business. It is my hope that as computers grow more powerful and available bandwidth increases that we will have increased choices in available clients for future multi-player games. If they choose to fight the hackers, it means they're going to try and maintain control of the client, which means we're going to be stuck with the one they provide. (Which doesn't have to be bad, but I still like having options.)

    • Re:Ha ha ha. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01, 2002 @01:08PM (#4788185)
      (Anon because I use SEQ)

      SOE (or Verant previously) *has* removed lots of data from the client-side. For example, a long time ago, the client used to be aware of every "mob's" (monster's) loot. Today, the loot table for a monster is not transferred to the client until the monster has been killed and somebody is trying to loot it. So, before, you used to be able to pick-and-choose which monsters to kill to get maximal loot, but today, you cannot do this.

      Various other bits of data have been moved to the server-side (IMO, due to the much faster CPU's they have today vs. 3+ years ago) such as spawn points, times, etc.

      These days, SEQ is primarily a mapping (GPS) system. It allows you to see where you are in a particular zone and if you are willing to run the client key-sniffer, you can also see where the monsters are in the zone (and their names). This allows you to navigate a zone without getting gang-banged by (possibly unfairly) high-level monsters and to also locate certain "named" monsters.

      It should be noted that SEQ ***does NOT*** modify the game data in any way. It only allows the user to view the datastream.

      • by Perianwyr Stormcrow ( 157913 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @01:57PM (#4788415) Homepage
        Years ago, Ultima Online had a pretty egregious cheating application called UOExtreme. It let you do all kinds of special stuff- run faster than normal, see hidden people, get an automatic readout of damage you did to players, and have general interface improvements that allowed you to play the game more efficiently.

        Well, people got banned for UOE use for quite a while, but the thing that killed it was that the UO dev team simply emasculated it and made it no more than a device for the delivery of trojans.

        How did they do this? Clever engineering and greater awareness of the needs of their playerbase.

        Fastwalk was fixed by making walk packets require a response from the server before moving the player.

        See hidden was fixed by just not telling non-GM clients where hidden players were, and disallowing attacks and other operations on hidden characters. Invisibility was handled in a pretty slipshod way beforehand- the server just told the client, "hey don't show this guy."

        The automatic damage readout was just integrated into the client, with the addition of Starcraft-style health bars showing the damage level of your current target.

        The interface improvement issue was solved by the legalization of a similar program called UOAssist. Many operations in UO rely on an extremely clumsy interface requiring many mouse clicks and movements for actions that should be far simpler. UOAssist changes this, offering somewhat of an "expert interface" for the game. UOAssist's author sends all program changes to UO's developers to be examined before release.

        Come to think of it, you probably know all this stuff already...
      • Re:Ha ha ha. (Score:5, Informative)

        by cwebster ( 100824 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @08:01PM (#4790180)
        (not anon, and i am a seq dev)

        >SOE (or Verant previously) *has* removed lots of data from the client-side. For example, a long time ago, the client used to be aware of every "mob's" (monster's) loot.

        ShowEQ has never been able to tell you a monsters loot. Ever.

        You could deduce what they might drop from things hey have on them (the old favorite was telling which wisps had lightstones, not because we could tell thier loot, but because you could tell what level of light they gave off).

        ShowEQ has never known loot.
    • It's even worse. They worked so hard at the encryption and the net result is that the client will now be ported to windows so that EVERYONE can run it. Their encryption doesn't stop anyone of course, since as soon as the key is generated it can be read from memory :)
    • security vs. cost (Score:3, Insightful)

      by autopr0n ( 534291 )
      CPU time costs money, the more CPU time they burn on the server, the more money it costs them in terms of CPU time.

      OTOH, client machines have tons of CPU cycles that they aren't using or don't really need. The more you can offload to them the better.

      Cheaters can ruin a game for a lot of people, and people upset at cheaters leave and cost sony money.

      So it becomes an optimization problem, (in the statistical sense, not the computational one).

      Do enough to prevent cheating so that you wont lose more customers' income then the cost of the server load that's caused by your anti-cheating software.

      Throwing monkey wrenches into the cheater-coder's work is a very cheap way to prevent cheating that changes the equations around.
    • by Rogerborg ( 306625 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @05:18PM (#4789363) Homepage

      Netrek [netrek.org] figured this out about fifteen years ago. The source is open, so it was assumed from day 1 that clients couldn't be trusted. Attempts at client authentication were added later, but those were add ons (and could be and were subverted), they weren't the prime means of preventing cheating.

      The strength of the Netrek model is that the game was designed from its infancy to send exactly and only the information that each client needs to display what it's supposed to be displaying. For example, cloaked units are supposed to be shown as unidentified contacts and on the galactic window only, with erratic position and irregular updates. One of the first things a hacked client developer will do is to display them on the tactical window as well, and there's nothing that the design can do to stop that. Also, it's not perfect; an ID is sent for the cloaked units, so the client can show what they really are. However, the server does only send irregular updates, and it flat out lies about the position, heading and speed of the unit, so the client can only show so much.

      One of the most controversial design decisions involved torpedo weapons. The servers sends "start" and "end" packets, but instead of sending speed and heading and letting the client handle movement of the weapon, it sends regular "position" updates, with a jitter built in. This increases the bandwidth requirement significantly, but it means that the client doesn't know the exact speed and heading of the weapon, so can't make an easy calculation about how to dodge it.

      The Netrek model is replete with decisions like this. There are a few snafus (like the cloaked ship ID), but in general there is very little that a client can display that it's not supposed to. And believe me, I tried.

      The reason for this tight design is simple if you think about it. Netrek, like XPilot and Xfire, was originally an X-display game. The server handled both mechanics and display. When Netrek moved to a TCP(later UDP)/IP based model, that model was preserved and the server took on a lot of responsibility for culling information that each client shouldn't know.

      It never fails to amaze me that commercial games developers never seem to learn the lessons that open source projects can teach them. I know (from bitter experience) that there's a huge rush to get results on screen, but hey, guys, do it right, don't do it twice.

  • by Hubert Q. Gruntley ( 310405 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @12:18PM (#4787923)
    This article paints the ShowEQ developers with a rather sympathetic brush. If these were aimbot developers for q3 or ut or cs, wouldn't we totally revile them? What is the difference?

    Maybe there should be two sets of servers, one for all the ppl who want to play fair and play against ppl who are playing fair; and one for cheaters, and those who want to reverse engineer the protocol, etc.
    • by UberOogie ( 464002 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @12:29PM (#4787975)
      Exactly.

      I have never understood online gamers whining about their right to cheat. This article is talking about this as though it is some brave stand against a corporation doing something bad. This is about people cheating at a game. It ruins it for everyone playing fair. I fail to see why this should be applauded or supported, and I'm fairly shocked Michael wasn't the one posting this story.

      Sadly, this is why consoles are going to take over for a while: The majority of players are simply sick with the cheaters. It was amazing to watch people immediately start to whine when MS disabled modded X-Boxes from Live. Sure you can say there were "legitimate" reasons to mod the boxes, but come on.

      Of course, this only lasts until some "worthy" individual hooks up a box between the cable and the X-Box to start parsing out material.

      • This article is talking about this as though it is some brave stand against a corporation doing something bad.
        This is about people cheating at a game.
        To me, this issue is about a brave stand... not against a particular corporation or act, but a general class of fallacy. To me, the right to cheat exists (although it is socially despicable to do so outside of single player games, unless every player agrees beforehand to cheat) and opposition to this right generally takes the same form as the opposition of my right to media shift (ie rip CDs to portable MP3 player).

        I, personally, do not care much about the forum in which I speak: issues generally resolve to only a few different categories, and I treat all items in a category the same. A social problem cannot be eradicated with technological measures. Personally, I feel it my "duty" to reiterate this point as often, and as loudly, as possible -- mostly due to a copious lack of counter examples. This issue seems to be better than CD ripping for making my point, though: the fact that I oppose cheating (vehemently!) and yet seem to support the cheaters strengthens my point. (My solution, if you care, is to play only with friends -- even on consoles.)

        • by UberOogie ( 464002 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @01:39PM (#4788337)
          To me, the right to cheat exists (although it is socially despicable to do so outside of single player games, unless every player agrees beforehand to cheat) and opposition to this right generally takes the same form as the opposition of my right to media shift (ie rip CDs to portable MP3 player).

          Yes, the right to cheat exists. Yes, the right to make and run programs that lets you cheat at games exists. All Sony is doing is preventing people who are running known cheating tools from playing on their world servers. They are not disabling the software. They are not modifying your computer in any way.

          Your mp3 analogy is thought-provoking, but I think not valid. They are not taking the same forms. No one at Sony is legally going after users using the cheat tools. No cops are breaking down doors. No nastygrams are being sent to schools where the cheat tools are being run. The users right to make and use cheat tools are not being infringed. What Sony is doing is preventing people using cheating tools from playing on their servers. Seems well within their rights to me.

          Your solution of playing only with friends makes sense in other online games, but not MMP games. You can't just play with your friends because there are only official servers to play on. But as a moral question, is it really okay for a minority of cheating players to ruin the entire online play experience for everyone else who doesn't want to cheat, and paid exactly the same amoun t of money for the game? That doesn't seem to add up to me.

      • I have never understood online gamers whining about their right to cheat.

        People are not claiming the right to cheat: I have never heard anybody complain that online chess servers don't allow them to log in and remove the other guys queen while he is taking a bathroom break. Nor have I ever heard anybody claiming that this is their right.

        This is not about a right to cheat, it is about the right to hack and modify your own computer and any software that runs on it. And that is a right that people do have - no matter how sinister or anti-social their motivations for doing so.

        Let us hope that gamers that want to use platforms that control them rather than lie within their control do move to consoles and proprietary gaming services - better that then have the computers of those of us who use them for real things invaded your hideous user hostile technology (ie, palladium).
        • People are not claiming the right to cheat: I have never heard anybody complain that online chess servers don't allow them to log in and remove the other guys queen while he is taking a bathroom break.
          I hate playing chess over Yahoo or any other public server! Why? It restricts me to the classical rules of chess when I want to play cooler games like Knightmare Chess [sjgames.com] or perhaps just other, tamer, variants [chessvariants.com] on chess! Most of these rules require "cheating" as you so sladerously phrased it! Until this severe lack of client functionality has been remedied, I refuse to play online chess!

          (<sarcasm> tags omitted as I'm not really sure I'm 100% joking....)

        • And they aren't taking away the right to hack your own computer, they are just taking away your right to play EQ if you choose to do so. EQ, btw, isn't a constitutional right.
        • by Hrothgar The Great ( 36761 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @05:51PM (#4789564) Journal
          So what? Sony, so far hasn't gone after people for hacking or modifying software. They've simply made your mods not function correctly.

          Let me ask you this: Do you believe that you have the right to make any modifications you want to software you own, but that Sony does NOT have the right to make modifications to software THEY own? Are you advocating rights for everyone, or only for you?
      • I don't think the whole affair is about "the right to cheat". To me it is about poorly implemented anti-cheating measures. It's simply impossible to create a waterproof client.

        Process table scanning? I can rename the cheating program, change its size, whatever. Memory scanning? A bit tougher to beat - but I can run the client under VMWare, Bochs or any other virtualization software, this way it only sees what's inside the virtual box. Another option is using a mutation engine (virus writers use them to fool virus scanners). Besides, the client can only scan for known popular cheating software, not for any custom code. Code obfuscation? I don't know of any successful attempt at deterring hackers by obfuscating code.

        To put it short (for the 1000-th time in this thread) - if you don't want the user to know it, don't send it to the client. So my sympathetic view of the cheaters comes not from my sympathetic view of cheating, but from my attitude towards client-side security.
      • ...Phantasy Star Online for Dreamcast was all hacked up within months of release. I think hacking will probably put a serious dent in the number of people that play MMORPGS...and Sony knows it, hence their efforts to stop it. It's really sad that some miscreants get power trips off cheating in online games. It pretty much limits players to playing with people they know, which greatly limits the pool of available people to play with, thus stealing from us the internets greatest promise...a vast number of people from all over the world to interact with.
    • by moonbender ( 547943 ) <moonbender AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday December 01, 2002 @12:33PM (#4788004)
      The difference is that Q3, UT and CS are (team-based) deathmatch, or PvP (ie player versus player) games. EverQuest, on the other hand, is mostly a PvM, ie co-operative player versus monster, game.
      That's not to say there isn't any player competition - obviously there's a whole lot of it, both directly in the form of duels and PvP servers and more importantly indirectly in the form of who's got the better char or which guild is more uber than another.

      If another player cheats in EQ, he gets a better battle axe than you faster, if an enemy cheats in CS, you're in a world of pain.
    • Have you *ever* played EQ? Do you even know what you're talking about?
      SEQ was used primarily in the beginning to aid people in finding out how your odds of hitting changed with certain gear, and how much mana you had (something EQ never told you). It quantified all kinds of things that players really needed to know, but were never published anywhere with the game or from any official source.
      Ever.
      SEQ allowed players to critically evaluate how the game was calculating things, and you know what? That started huge dicussions on Verant's OFFICAL message boards between Verant and customers on what changes the customers wanted. There are mana calculators everywhere online, but they were all developed from info gathered from SEQ. Players use them all time.
      The most recent changes to meditation, spell behavior, and damage checks were all a result of the community gathering info using SEQ and bringing the data to Verant and saying "This isn't right!". And Verant listened and changed it.
      Cheating?? I think not. It was the community stepping in and filling a gap for the better of the players and the developers.
      None of this can be said of Aimbots, or wallhacks in Q3, UT, or CS.
      • by Buzz_Litebeer ( 539463 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @12:57PM (#4788130) Journal
        One of the weird things is, maybe they didnt "want" you to know how much damage things did, and not from a balance standpoint either. I have created modifications for the game medal of honor, allied assault spearhead. and I do not want people to know all the exact values i have set for my weapons. to those who are curious and know what they are doing it is a relatively simple matter, but i feel it takes away some of my intent for everyone to know that the smg does 45 damage or such. imbalance is not a practically "bad" thing, even in a mmorpg. No you wouldnt know your singing steel boots or whatever didnt work well until you wore them for a long time, and realized that they arent purhaps as strong as your lambent whatevers. But that would be part of the interesting part of it. When you get into finding out direct stats you get to having players that are, sadly, like me. who will statisically approach the game, and quite possibly ruining the intent of the creators of the game and how the game is played. I am not decrying the fact that many things have been fixed because of SEQ, not at all, I am just saying that if it had not been around the game would be entirely different, the only way you would know things is from relative tested heresay. which might even be more interesting.
        • Min/maxers are some of the most serious players of any game. The fact of the matter is that we all engage in min/maxer style behavior when we play, regardless of style, because we want to succeed in the game to be able to enjoy it.

          Accomodating min/maxers makes them into your unofficial debugging force, as well- if a game's based on numbers, you ought to be able to see the numbers. Other people want to see them, even if you don't- and trying to legislate your form of "immersion" on players is pretty silly. We all find our own level.

          Remember, also, it's your friendly neighborhood explorer that teaches you all those nifty tricks that you use every day :)
        • In general keeping game mechanics from the players is a bad idea. There is a certain set of people with undying curiosity who will go after and find your secret. In a population as large as the one which plays EQ, its in evitable. The problem then becomes that these people, some of whom inevitably use that knowledge, have a marked advantage when playing the game. This is exactly the same problem that happens in the pen&paper world. If you have one GM and a group of players, then as long as the GM can keep his mouth shut he may be ok on game mechanics he makes up. But I have yet to meet a gamer who hasn't read the "GM's only" section of a book, or didn't wonder in his off hours what the hell was up with the last game, or whats going to happen in the future in the game, or how the game world must work. The only way around this is to keep everything focused on the story. Otherwise games like this tend to boil down to who can do the most damage to whom, and in that case every player wants the biggest statisitcal advantage he can get. Game designers should take a page from the crypto world. I should be able to know all the game mechanics, yet still find the game engaging.
      • So you're saying that the program isn't widely used for cheating and is not designed to be uniquely helpful in doing so?

      • Sadly lame folks who feel they have to cheat to be able to compete with others are everywhere. It would be one of the most attractive features of a MMORPG to know that there were no effective cheats and that when I got beaten in the game it was because the other guy was better than me, not because he was able to load up a frickin cheat program.

        While it might be nice to know all the stats on items, it is not a sufficient justification for using cheat software. Ever. If the playerbase feels the game should provide more information, then you lambast the developers with requests to add it as a feature, but you don't use and encourage the development of cheat software to further that goal. You might have honorable intentions but the 10,000 folks coming after you and using the same software are simply too lame to win a game on their own, and are there for the unfair advantage it offers.

        Not so relevant in EQ per se,where players are not in direct combat (unless on the Zeks I know), but very relevant to Dark Age of Camelot [darkageofcamelot.com] (and also see Camelot Herald [camelotherald.com] for Statistics on the scoring and state of the game etc )- the game I play a lot at the moment - where players are regularly in direct conflict with each other. Programs such as Odin's Eye have threatened that game heavily.


        Phrogman
    • ShowEQ is not cheating.

      Sony thinks of it as cheating because they think of EverQuest as a game. However, there are thousands of people who play EverQuest to whom it is not a game, but a social venue. Now, EQ breaks the local laws of that venue, but to call it cheating is like calling MP3-swapping cheating.

      Now on to the impact. There are several kinds of ShowEQ users. One is the "I just want a damn map" sort. For them, even post-new-encryption, ShowEQ works just as well as it always has. If Sony would add a map to the game, most of them would probably stop using ShowEQ. But the last thing Sony wants is after-market tools for EQ (they've banned people for using MP3 players that cat attach to DirectX for the controls).

      There are also the people who use ShowEQ as an edge. IMHO, when the people who play that game spend cumulative weeks of their lives playing, I don't see running a program that tells you where the nearest creature of your level is as a terribly bad thing. The fact that it's available to all and not horded by a select few is a bonus, since most information in the game *is* horded.

      Then there are the people who use ShowEQ for things like guild raids and the like. These people are just a different kind of mage, IMHO. You have your warriors, your damage-mages, your healers and the clairsentient who can tell when your target has spawned. Some people get very upset about this latter class of player because they give an engtire guild an edge. Me, I'm neutral. I'd be upset if that guild pushed it too far, but honestly when Sony comes out with an entire expansion and 90% of it is beyond the capabilities of 99% of the player-base I have to ask who THEY are trying to convince that the game is good enough as delivered....
  • Well written! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Buran ( 150348 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @12:21PM (#4787936)
    A very well written and informative article. I'm intrigued by the story of ShowEQ -- and the fact that Sony seems to want to protect their system by deciding what users can and can't run on their computers. It reminds me of the video player that uninstalled Ad-aware automatically, claiming that running it wasn't allowed under its license. I don't believe that such things are really legal -- are they not an invasion of privacy and an illegal search? (Alas, the Constitution's protections against this in the US are only applicable to the government itself, but such practices, I feel, are going too far) Sooner or later, I think, Sony will be dragged into court over this and sued. What if, for example, they use their little spy applet to suck data off someone's computer that gives them an advantage (a competitor's computer that had confidential information, for example?).

    I am, though, a little surprised to see that the ShowEQ people haven't been sued under the DMCA. And I'm glad they haven't, because what they are doing is reverse engineering and they are not actually hacking into the client or the server, so it is legal. They are not trying to pirate the game. They are merely trying to see what exactly their computer is saying to the server and what it is receiving from it. A perfectly fair thing to do, I think, because it IS their own property and the owner of it has the right to know what exactly is happening, so they can choose whether or not to run a given application instead of having to trust the programmers. Checks and balances.

    Note: I don't play Everquest. I call it EverCrack, actually. I don't play games that I have to pay a monthly fee for. I prefer to play single-player games, or sometimes multiplayer, offnetwork, with people I already know.
    • Re:Well written! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bryanp ( 160522 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @12:32PM (#4788002)
      I'm intrigued by the story of ShowEQ -- and the fact that Sony seems to want to protect their system by deciding what users can and can't run on their computers.

      Uh, no. What Sony is saying is that they don't want users cheating in their online game and therefore having an unfair advantage over the rest of the people who don't cheat.

      What's the big deal here people? If you wish to use someone's service you have to abide by their rules. If you don't like it you can leave, you can try to convince them to change their system, or you can cheat. If you get caught cheating, don't be surprised if you get slapped around.

      • I can understand the position of wanting to lock out cheaters, and of course measures are going to be needed to prevent that from happening. However, there are, to me at least, ways to do it that I don't think are acceptable. Sniffing around on the user's system is an invasion of privacy. It may supposedly help accomplish that goal, but it, in my eyes, goes too far. What I run on my computer while using your application is none of your business, no matter why I'm running it. If you think I'm cheating, then find another way to figure that out. (Heck, applications that don't need the Internet at all that try to phone home anyway are going too far in my eyes.)
    • Re:Well written! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by UberOogie ( 464002 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @12:37PM (#4788029)
      A perfectly fair thing to do, I think, because it IS their own property and the owner of it has the right to know what exactly is happening, so they can choose whether or not to run a given application instead of having to trust the programmers. Checks and balances.

      Surely you kid, right? ShowEQ isn't used as a security program. It is a cheating tool. Even in its most beneficent uses, it is for cheating. Period. This has got to be the most sad apologies for cheating I've ever seen.

      Sony made a game. Someone made a cheat program that unbalances the playing field. Sony has every right to try and disable this cheating program. However, their rights end where ours begin. But if they want to change the encryption in their program or make a client that monitors game traffic or the use of a specific cheat program manditory for using the game, guess what? That's their right. You don't have to play the game.

      And your analogy with ad programs that uninstall Ad-Aware is both faulty and inflamatory. Those programs are unistalling a security program from your computer so that their spyware will work. Sony is just not letting you play their game if you have a known cheat tool running on your computer. Huge difference.

      • The comment was intended as a general thought on whether users should have to trust the programmers of any application, whether it be a game or a browser or a specialized net/Internet application. I use Mozilla, for example, because it's open source and in part because that way the authors can't hide anything sneaky in it.

        These are my personal feelings, but: if Microsoft et al think the user is untrustable and thus needs to be walled out from the system, then why should users trust Microsoft et al in return?
        • Re:Well written! (Score:4, Insightful)

          by UberOogie ( 464002 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @01:05PM (#4788170)
          The comment was intended as a general thought on whether users should have to trust the programmers of any application, whether it be a game or a browser or a specialized net/Internet application.

          It is a client/server game. By watching the information that goes to and from the server and decyphering it, you are cheating. Period. You have a choice if you choose to play the game: You can play the game and cheat, or you can play the game and not cheat. If you chose to cheat, you have to accept that Sony will try and stop you.

          That is all this boils down to. MS is just a straw man that has nothing to do with this. Apples, oranges.

    • Maybe the DMCA should be updated to also include interfering with the IT centric business process of a corporation. That would make things like what ShowEQ and BNETD do illegal and leave no doubt as to their activities.

      Then the folks who pay to play these games can get back to their fun without having to worry about as many cheaters as there are now.
      • The answer is simple: DO NOT LET THE CLIENT KNOW MORE THAN IT ABSOLUTELY HAS TO, and be willing to CHANGE THAT DEFINITION on an ongoing basis.

        Serverside cheating is the real bitch of the matter in MMORPGs, and no law will save you there. Only long term vigilance and quick response will protect a MMORPG population from serverside exploits.

        In a related note, BNETD is not even the same thing as ShowEQ. BNETD is a server emulator, and in fact is more conducive to lower cheating rates simply because one can create "walled gardens" wherein only trusted users can play, and the player population can be more appropriately vetted for fair play- mechanics-related, sportsmanship, and otherwise! ShowEQ is akin to a EQ debugging program, showing data known by the client but not revealed normally.
      • Y'know, it really makes me sick to watch people giving up their rights for really stupid reasons.

        First off, BnetD is NOT a cheating tool. It is a program that allows the user to run their own Battle.net server, and connect to it with the standard clients. It violates no portion of any existing software license, and besides, reverse engineering is a perfectly legitimate reason to make such a program. Don't forget that Sony sued Connectix for basically doing the same thing -- allowing gamers to use their PCs rather than a PlayStation console -- and lost, miserably. Your association of it with ShowEQ, and your last sentence's insinuation, are both fallacious and totally incorrect (not to mention misguided.) I use BnetD so that I can play on my own server, with my friends, and not have to deal with the pathetic losers that clog Battle.net with Pindabots and other hacks.

        Your suggestion that the DMCA be 'upgraded' is totally off base for something of this magnitude. So there are cheaters. So what? Do we really need another law to explicitly define (for the umpteenth time) that cheating is wrong? Let the companies deal with the cheaters on their own time, with their own money, and according to their own rules. It is not the government's responsibility to play mediator for every dispute, especially when it's about a simple breach of contract.

    • Re:Well written! (Score:2, Insightful)

      by EulerX07 ( 314098 )
      I'm probably gonna get karma burned for this, but I'll answer to your post. I call this reply : "A word of sanity".

      Your association of this story with the video player that removed Ad-Aware is a gross misassociation and an inexcusable exageration. You then proceed to linking Sony with that situation and advancing that they will be sued. A fine example of poor logic. What Sony is doing is simply trying to level the playing field by making it harder for cheaters to gain an advantage through outside means. They OWE it to the other 99% of ALSO PAYING CUSTOMERS that do not want others to have unfair advantage. The customers paid for the right to access the online world, not to try and break the rules.

      There's a reason the client gets a lot of info about thing the player cannot see. For instance the tracking skill needs the info of all the mobs in the area to work properly. Sony is not uploading your e-mails to the CIA. And of all things, what people using ShowEQ are doing is anything but fair. Your post is seriously delusionnal.
  • Clickthrough License (Score:5, Interesting)

    by man_ls ( 248470 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @12:22PM (#4787943)
    In EverQuest, the license agreement must be accepted each time you start up the game.

    No auto-yes option. No "I understand and agree, don't tell me again" option. You [b]must[/b] click "I Accept" every time the game EXE is called.

    If you've accumulated any significant level or /played time, you've seen that license hundreds of times. Whether or not you've read it is illrelevant, but you've willingly clicked yes to it hundreds, if not thousands of times.

    I'd say that makes it pretty binding.
    • by Flamerule ( 467257 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @12:30PM (#4787979)
      In EverQuest, the license agreement must be accepted each time you start up the game.

      [...]

      I'd say that makes it pretty binding.

      Well, no. A contract forced on one party by another, with no negotiation whatsoever, is never a real legally-binding contract, no matter how many times the powerless party is forced to click "I Agree".

      Also, I'd just like to say that having to click through an EULA every time one uses EverQuest is, ah... extremely fucked-up.

      • A contract forced on one party by another, with no negotiation whatsoever, is never a real legally-binding contract, no matter how many times the powerless party is forced to click "I Agree".


        It's not forced on anyone. There are two buttons: "agree" and "disagree" (or something like that). If you disagree with the license, you don't have to play the game. The whole point of a contract is to manage the exchange of X for Y. With EQ, you are giving up your rights to reverse engineer, sell your character, and God knows what else, in exchange for being able to play in a really big chatroom where you also get to kill giant spiders.

        • There is no license on the outside of the box. I buy a piece of property- game cds and install it on my computer and after the seal has been broken and who knows what is now on my computer they say I have to accept this license to play the game. And they do it again after I pay ten bucks a month?

          For any normal contract you are told the terms before you pay. This was the case with my apartment, car loan, and ISP. Why should any software be subject to a different set of rules?

      • by NDPTAL85 ( 260093 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @12:51PM (#4788100)
        There is no forced contract with EverQuest. You don't want to agree to the contract? Fine. Then you don't get to play the game. No one is putting a gun to your head and telling you to click the Yes button. You make a concious decision to agree to the contract each time you play the game. Its a VIDEO GAME, how you could even arrive at the concept of a "forced contract" in order to play is simply amazing.
        • by Surt ( 22457 )
          The force involved is that they already have your money, and aren't willing to return your money if you don't agree to the EULA.

          Since you can't negotiate the return of your funds for the return of all services, the EULA is void as a contract.
          • Your wrong, when you first purchase the game, you get the first month free. You are still required to click through the license a few dozen (if not more) times during your trial period, once that is up, you pay or move on, if you pay, that is implying you have agreed to the license which you agreed to so many times before hand during your free trial. Just because said people have not read it, does not make it any less legally binding.

            Everything inside EQ belongs to Sony, they can dictate to you what they want.

            On the otherside (yes I play eq, no I dont use showeq), the seq peeps can do whatever they like as well.. what it comes down to is, both parties need to obey the law, whether or not they do is irrelavent, they just need to follow one simple rule... "Don't get caught"

            Sony scanning machines etc, and the seq peeps reverse eng. the encryption, are technically both illegal according to current US law, but if neither party gets caught, who cares :)
        • by ajs ( 35943 )
          Every patch can change the license. How often am I expected to read it all. No, I click a button that for all intents and purposes reads "get me the f**k into EverQuest".
        • You payed money for the game. You were not told the conditions of the contract before you paid for the game. Failure to agree is like throwing away money. Any eula is extorting you to agree.

          Go get a clue before you give away your rights.
      • "Well, no. A contract forced on one party by another, with no negotiation whatsoever, is never a real legally-binding contract"

        Does this include the GPL license agreement with all open source software?? Yay, im gonna go steal me some code.
        • the GPl gives you extra rights when you agree to it. If you disagree it reverts to standard copyright law where you have no rights at all.
          • The sony EQ EULA gives you EXTRA rights when you agree to it: the right to connect to their server.

            As we all know, it's illegal to attempt to connect to a non-public system that you don't have permission to access. The EULA gives you permission to play the game on their server.

            You can RUN eq on YOUR computer all you want. In fact, sony hasn't tried to shut down the "run your own crappy eq server" projects, mainly b/c it'd take a huge company with a ton of $$$ to run servers on the scale sony/verant does.
        • You are never forced to accept the GPL. Of course, nothing else grants you the right to redistribute Copyrighted materials. Hence the difference between EULA's and the GPL, EULA's take away your rights, and the GPL grants you additional rights.
  • by Jerrith ( 6472 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @12:26PM (#4787963) Homepage
    The big advantage people get from decoding the zone information is the name, and to some extent, the position of monsters all over the zone. If Sony changed EQ to only send data about monsters that are near you (within a reasonable distance) there would no longer be a big reason to decode the zone data. 99% of what you'd be seeing you could also see by turning in place, and clicking on each monster.

    Due to how the servers are setup however, it seems to be more efficient for them to send out all the monsters, rather than do the range calculations and just send the nearby ones.

    My prediction, if a Windows version is released and becomes widespread (and I consider the latter likely if the former occurs), is that Sony will, finally, bite the bullet and change the code. It's not quite as straight forward as I may have made it sound, as there are some other systems (such as tracking) that will have to be significantly rewritten as well. However, if they really want to stop people getting at this data, really the only way to do it is to stop sending the parts that aren't needed. :)

  • by Valen0 ( 325388 ) <michael@elven s t a r.tv> on Sunday December 01, 2002 @12:34PM (#4788007)
    According to the Sony developer that everyone talked to, the changes that Sony makes to the encryption only takes 20 minutes or so. I believe that part of that time included remaking about 5 different binaries with the new code. Sony just has to change the 5 or so #define's on the encryption and everything breaks. Also, according to the same developer, Sony will not spend much time on breaking ShowEQ until management decides otherwise.

    How ShowEQ is fighting back is very interesting. Encryption information is stored at a preset offset in the client. About a month ago, SOE changed it so that, on NT/2000/XP boxes (this didn't effect Win 9x), other programs (even on accounts with "Administrator Access") couldn't read that memory space. However, ShowEQ developers eventually got around the limitation by making the key reader run as a service on the NT LocalSystem account. This service can then send the key information to the decoding system.

    As for WinShowEQ, I have sources that have told me that WinShowEQ is an easy port to make. If they are serious about making it and releasing it, expect to see it sometime soon.
  • by fimbulvetr ( 598306 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @12:34PM (#4788009)
    I hear all of your posts, about how they should get a life, blah blah blah.
    I myself played everquerst for about 18 months on and off. I averaged 15-40 hours a month, depending on the month and how I felt.
    Everquest "zoned" me, to another world. In our(Non-eq) reality, it left me behind a computer, with closed curtains, fighting and sweating while in battle.
    When I was 17, I robbed a firestation, got a drinking and driving minor, and sold adderol (Meds for ADHD) to my school peers.
    By the time I was caught I had 30 felonies(Possession with intent to distribute in a drug free (school) zone.), and 50 years in prison staring me straight in the face.
    I lost my license and was on house arrest for over 4 months.
    About a year later, I was accepted and attended one of the top engineering schools in the nation.

    Now, my question to you, is: If I can't spend my time playing EQ, and raising my daughter, do you want me selling a perscription legal meth to your brothers and sisters?
    Don't get me wrong, I'm well past that stage, but I'm sure if I did not have habits that keep me home, or somewhat entertained, I'm sure I could find something to do outside in a city of ~3 million people.
    I have not done drugs in 6 years, and have drank about 24 beers since I was 16.
    I save TONS of money, $15 a month is a lot for EQ sure.
    But consider what it saves you.
    If I'm spending 40 hours of afterwork/weekend time on this game, I'm not eating with my friends, I'm not buying gas driving around.
    I'm not doing anything that will harm you.

    Sure some people will kill themselves over this game, just like some willl spend $9000 on a character on ebay. But that's evolution. If they killed themselves prior to reproduction, we won't have to worry about those genes surfacing for at least a little while, but hopefully they will be rid of just as fast.
    I'd rather have joe schmo killing himself(maybe a few others) because of distress from the game, than driving with his drunk buddies at 1:00 at night while I am on my way to drop off my daughter at her mother's house.
    It is more probable Joe kills me while driving drunk than if I was an innocent bystander near his EQ game.
  • Emulators (Score:2, Informative)

    by cjunky ( 89004 )
    EQEmu [eqemu.net] (An Everquest Emulator) was also having a problem with the encryption until our master coder (Go Quagmire!) Found out that it uses a default key if sent the right packets to the client. Since then, we are able to run with the latest client.

    I have watched EQEmu [eqemu.net] grow over the last year, and this Wednesday, we should have our best release yet! We are going on 1 year of releases on Dec 4th, so why dont you download EQEMu and see what it is like to run your own server.
  • by Tseran ( 625777 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @12:41PM (#4788047) Journal
    Firstly, no matter how you paint it as creative coding and a good hacking & cracking job at the code, it still is cheating. What the article failed to mention is what else the ShowEQ program does. It doesn't just show a map, it also shows all the monsters in that zone. So, someone who has that can walk through a very dangerous zone, unhindered by evil beasties should they desire. Or perhaps they are hunting the elusive Gobbleygook dragon, and they can find it within minutes. If Player A uses it and starts gaining levels and platinum faster then Player B, who elects to do it normally, what happens when Player A decides to attack Player B? (assuming this is on a PvP [Player versus Player] server) It is cheating, plain and simple. Like Microsoft's closing out of modders of the X-box (And as much as I am loathe to agree with MS on anything, I must on this), Sony is trying to keep the game fair for everyone. I wouldn't want to play a game where people could cheat like that. Who knows, now they can see the map and monsters....what's next?

    As to the Click-thru EULA, I think that with the way that they force you to think about clicking on the button, it is legally binding. However, I still don't like the idea of companies attatching unreasonable things to their EULAs. Next thing you know, MS will be asking for the soul of your first-born in the Windows EULA, and a sacrifice of your spouse in the Office one. But the question is, would a clause against cheating be a fair addition to a game where dozens of others are paying to play? Your cheating makes it a worst deal for those others who pay and play nicely.

    And no, I don't play EverCrack...I just know lots of people who do.
  • *sigh* (Score:4, Interesting)

    by kasek ( 514492 ) <ckasekNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Sunday December 01, 2002 @12:46PM (#4788078)
    Although I have played EQ off and on for the last 3 years or so, and have heard of ShowEQ, i never really knew what it was used for. I dont have a Linux box, so it didnt make much difference for me. What does concern me about this is that with a windows version, the program can and will become far more widespread. I would compare it to the recent developments in the diablo II community.

    There has always been trade hacks, and this hack, and that hack, but to execute them, you usually need packet sniffers, have to understand how the program works, and basically know what you are doing. Every once in awhile, one would come along that was easy to use with some fancy UI and mass chaos would ensue.

    Anymore, most players use Pindlebots or Mephisto bots, to just endlessly kill those bosses over and over for hours on end, hoping for some uber item to drop, and in the meantime racking up exp. They are extremely easy to use, just run the executable, configure the config for your character, and it does everything else for you with zero interaction. Now, you can't create a game without having to wait in line on the USEast Realm, and you can get just about any item you want in the trading channels.

    I ran pindlebot for two weeks, and in that time, i got alot of the best equipment in the game. It seemed nice, to have this great character, but ultimately it ruins the game, because you have the best equipment, theres no challenge, theres no point in playing the game anymore.

    If ShowEQ does get ported to Windows, I can only imagine similiar situations like this arising. The masses start using the program, and ultimately the legitimate players become too frustrated and leave, and the players with the cheat / hack / dupe / whatever ultimately become bored with the game, and a game that was once a great way for people to pass time becomes the playground for the people have ruined the game.
    • Not likely in this case as showeq will not give you items, or help you make some items through macro's, or other forms of cheating.

      Most useful function for showeq was actually getting around without getting lost, its not used for duping at all thankfully.

      this was an issue a few months ago, massive amounts of coin was being "macroed" (someone at a trader running macro's that used bugs in the code to get very rich). Sony seriously cut down on those exploiters awhile ago as it was ruining the game economy like you mention, but showeq did not have this function.

      Showeq is good utility that can be used to assist players who routinely get lost in large zones (and then killed, who then create more work for the Game Masters who have tell them tough shit that they got lost and killed by a bunch of creatures...). But, in the wrong hands it can be used for players for doing worse things, like finding that elusive mob from way across the zone.

  • by kakos ( 610660 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @01:12PM (#4788200)
    As I understand it, ShowEQ is usually run on a different computer on the same network as the EQ box. It sniffs packets and then does its thing accordingly. Why not use that ShowEQ box to block the initial key exchange and generate and send its own key. The EQ server will then encrypt the key and send it to the ShowEQ. ShowEQ can then just decrypt it. It would only be a matter of figuring out the protocol and type of encryption that the servers use.

    The Man in the Middle attack is one of the oldest and still most effective attack on public key encryption.

    I don't know all the details, unfortunately. They may very well have tried this already.

    • What I never understood is why they don't use the cd key + your account password as a private key or something really tedious like that. 99.999% of casual hackers would give up if they had to do that, and I can bet almost no one would type their EQ password into a "hacking" program (EQ account piracy is big money, remember those accounts sell for a few hundred each).
    • Sigh... A Man in the Middle attack only applies to key exchange where neither of the parties has any way to previously authenticate each other.

      The easiest way around this (that Sony probably uses) is using a "shared secret" which was communicated using "out-of-band communication". Your web browser uses this to make sure that websites are secure. Your browser came with some public keys which can verify a web site's own encryption keys. These make sure that https://www.buyme.com really is who you think they are.

      The out-of-band part is because these verification keys came with your web browser when you downloaded it and weren't part of the transaction with https://www.buyme.com where you bought something.

      Everquest can simply come with a set of keys to verify that traffic which appears to come from the EQ servers really did come from there. Without modifying the Everquest binary, you're probably SOL for being able to fake these on the client side, and I'm pretty sure they check for binary modification at this point.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 01, 2002 @01:16PM (#4788217)
    Pardon me for posting anonymously, but at this point I don't QUITE feel like losing my account... which wouldn't be so bad if I could give the character to someone else. But, I digress.

    I use ShowEQ. Does this make me a cheater? Yes, in the strict sense of the definition, it does. Here's comes the more important question: would I still play if I didn't have ShowEQ? No, but not for the reasons you might think.

    I do not use ShowEQ to benefit myself at the expense of others. If I was playing on a PvP (Player vs. Player) server, that might be one thing, but I do not. When the packet decryption was working, I would use ShowEQ to avoid monsters that would assuredly kill me (I'm not a melee class.) I also used it to track down the location of groups that invited me, track how much experience I have left to level (as an iidle curiorsity), and find friends' corpses. None of these helped me at the expense of others; in fact, one might argue they helped in others' benefit.

    Much more important, and this function still works without packet decryption, is that I use ShowEQ as a GPS. I have a horrible sense of direction in these games, and a lot of the time EQ's terrain in a zone is uniform. I could never get the hang of the /loc system, and Sense Heading never told me much except where I was facing. Without a map to tell me where the hell I was, I was lost and useless. This game is absolutely worthless to me if I can't figure out where the hell I am. Other games such as World of Warcraft come with a built-in map function, so I really wouldn't need a packet sniffer for it. But for me, in EQ, I need it to play. Otherwise, I'd just cancel my account, and Verant/Sony would be the ones to lose, because they would not get my money.

    In the end, yes, you could say I cheat. But maybe, just maybe, if Verant made the game a bit easier for me to figure out where the heck I was, I wouldn't need ShowEQ. I can't be the only one with this problem; there are a LOT of us ShowEQ users out there. (We may not admit it, but we're out there.) As it stands, I really enjoy playing EQ, and helping out my friends. If Verant wants to lose me as a customer over this, that's their loss, not mine. (Friends of mine will tell you that while I like the game, I'm not addicted.) And for those of you who condemn me for being a cheater... well, go right ahead. But I still say that I need the tools Verant provides... not for my own score and glorification, but as a basic aid to help myself and others.
  • Cheaters = Wankers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Czernobog ( 588687 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @01:27PM (#4788279) Journal
    Flame me all you want. Mod me down.
    But anyone who doesn't condemn the actions of this group is no better than them.
    This game belongs to Sony. They make the rules, so either play the game as its creators intended the game to be played or don't play it at all.
    If you think that this app is a valuable addition to the game, convince Sony to accept it and help those wankers develop it. If they say no, then just go away. It's their game.
    Otherwise, you're no better than the people who exploit the in-game weaknesses. A cheater.

    • Umm, right. Because all those Doom mods that we didn't convince id to help us develop were cheating too. And the quake mods. Oh wait, they were the birth of the concept of the mod community.

      Don't sit back in your armchair and dictate in 24 words the entire world of cheating as you see it, with no evidence.

      ShowEQ has done a lot to make the players and developers understand how the game world works, and a lot of official changes to the game have resulted from the data players collected using ShowEQ. For this, it is good. But for finding monsters that are supposed to be hidden, or for gaining an unfair advantage over other players, it is bad.

      Research what you make declarations on, and speak responsibly.
  • by The boojum ( 70419 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @01:29PM (#4788292)

    Asheron's Call has been like this for years. There's a program called Decal [sourceforge.net] that intercepts and can forge packets between the client and the server. It exposes them through COM to a plugin architecture, allowing people to easily create plugins that interact with the game.

    On the one hand it could considered cheating, but at this point, most people seem to run it and it's made some fantastic things possible. For one thing there's a plugin called ACArm which allows figures out how to switch between armor profiles at the touch of a key, much more easily than figuring out the right order and dragging and dropping manually. There's another called Robochef that automatically does crafting. And one of the oldest and best known, Sixth Sense which can scan for items/monsters/players etc. is almost required for some challenges in the game. (Find random spawn monster somewhere out in the wilderness.) It takes much of the tedium out of a game that's supposed to be fun.

    The down side, though, is that people have come up with money making trade skill macros where you just load up your character with enough starting cash and some of the ingredients, and it crafts a bunch of items, sells them at a profit, buys more ingredients and continues. That inflates the economy a bit, though not much it seems. Worse, some people have made combat macros that automatically camp a spot and kill all the monsters. It's very annoying to be running around in a dungeon and finding a mage perched in a corner stealing your kills. (Combat macros are now a bannable offense under the CoC, however. Also, the Decal devs are very anti-combat macros.)

    Anyway, I know that's AC and not EQ, but I just thought I'd mention that as an existing example of where this can lead. It's got its down sides, but it's mostly been a good thing for the game.

  • ShowEq (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Char Lander ( 584162 )
    I just have to say this. If cheating was meant tob e part of the game then Sony would have added it themselves. They would have added special commands or buttons or what have you, to allow you to cheat.

    They did not and they are trying to fight the battle understandably. Is it going to hurt their market? I doubt it, but who is to say. If it is going to make a series of high end multi-account gamers quit then so be it. I am sure that is minor to the 400,000 subscribed users. (That is what I heard at last read on an EQ article)

    It is in my opinion that Sony is in the right to fight this. It is also in their ability to do whatever they please to keep ShowEq from working as I am sure breaking the encryption is violation of the DMCA.

    Frankly I think this whole topic of debate on whether ShowEq is okay or not is a waste. If you can't tell right from wrong now, then you never will be able too.

    Play the game as it was intended. Without 3rd party software.
  • Honestly, why would you want to hack in? To cheat of course! One reason I avoid online massive games is because of the rampant cheating. It drives away good customers and players and leaves the cheating scum behind who are generally people you don't like to associate with anyway (their personalities are distinctly lacking...)

    So I can see why Sony wants to stop people from doing this kind of thing. Cheating ruins online gaming, so why is /. so upset when they try to stop it? Worry more about Sony and their backing of the RIAA/MPAA and DMCA. Don't waste energy worrying becuase you can't be unfair in Everquest anymore.
  • by LostCluster ( 625375 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @02:12PM (#4788484)
    The comparison to TiVo is an interesting one. TiVo's policy is that they will gladly look the other way for some hacks, and in fact even make some of the hacks as easy as possible to pull off, in exchange for being able to declare certain hacks off-limits.

    Specifically, they make it easy to upgrade a TiVo with a large hard disk by designing their single-disk designs to have a place where the second disk can fit nicely in the box. They also it possible for users who want to accomplish their "daily call" over the Internet rather than a phone line by just happening to leave the server that handles those sessions at an Internet-accessable location rather than requiring that the only way into their network is through their chosen dial-up providers. The company sponsors (but does not actually run) message boards at TivoCommunity.com where hacking discussion is encuraged, and people can compare notes and share experiences.

    The tradeoff is that there are certain hacks that the company does not want to see made, and will not allow the TivoCommunity.com boards to discuss. There are the hacks that would either harm the company, like any hack that would provide another source of listings, which would eliminate the need to subscribe to TiVo's listing services, or any hack that would allow content to be extracted from the device which would surely bring down the wrath of the MPAA and friends.

    By allowing wide open back doors into their system, TiVo has been able to direct hacking efforts into the areas the company wants to see them go. Yes, there are a few people trying to drill through the concrete and get the "forbidden hacks" to work, but their numbers are few and they operate in obscurity compared to the company-sponsored forums.

    It's a total 180 from Everquest's "Thou shalt not hack us!" perspective. TiVo's offering carrots, Everquest is using rather ineffective sticks.
  • by eagl ( 86459 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @02:28PM (#4788532) Journal
    The phrase "most resourceful" in the article is a rather thin disguise. The author is trying to say "Sony's best customers are also the ones most capable of becoming cheating bastards with the potential to ruin the game for the wider and less technically adept player pool."

    Hacking the protocol is great, nothing wrong with that. Actually USING the hack during public gameplay is cheating, plain and simple. I personally don't think it's something the courts should have to deal with, but it's still a game exploit and rampant cheating has ruined more than one online game in the past. Sony has every right AND THE OBLIGATION TO IT'S NON-CHEATING USERS to do whatever it can to hamper efforts to use game cracks/hacks/whatever to gain an unfair advantage over other players.

    That said, Sony better come up with something other than legal action in their efforts or they will suffer an amazingly embarassing loss. Short of pulling the game off the shelves, it's unlikely they'll actually succeed in "winning" this battle.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Like other ShowEQ users, I'll happily admit I used it. And I knew a LOT other people who used it too.

    Using ShowEQ is cheating, I'll admit that much as well. But the truth is, ShowEQ IS a benefit to Sony/Verant and they know it. Most of the ShowEQ users like myself would have quit EQ LONG ago if not for ShowEQ. It's kind of hard to explain, but I played EQ RABIDLY for about two years. I mean it was a total obsession. I had a level 60 Shaman, and level 57 Rogue...played both characters at the same time, and was pretty bored with the game. When I installed ShowEQ, I ended up playing at least 8 months longer, because EQ became FUN again.

    And you'd be suprised how many ShowEQ users are out there... I'd guess nearly 20-30 percent of the current EQ users use it. I know for a fact that ALL of the high level guilds use it. It's just too powerful of a tool. Here is an example, and excuse me for not remembering the names, but there is a super rare giant turtle in EQ, that spawns in an very large and usually devoid of users zone. If he did spawn, he'd usually wipe out any players in the zone that wandered to close, and then he'd despawn. Well I happen to be passing through the zone with my two characters, when this guy spawned right next to me, way out in the water. I check my ShowEQ map and see that there is only 20 people in the zone. most of them lower levels like 30-45. The funny thing was though, all of the higher level players in the zone, anyone level 59 or 60 where running on a BEELINE to my location. I'm talking level 60 warriors with NO TRACKING ABILITY, for some reason running RIGHT AT THE turtle, from accrossed the zone. Obviously all of the high level players where using ShowEQ, because there would be NO other reason to be running way out over the water for no reason, unless you KNEW the turtled had spawned.

    In the end, the "elite" guild on our server (Cazic Thule) got the kill, and I could tell all of them were using ShowEQ.

    Sony is definitely in a tough spot because they know as well as I do that ALL of the elite EQ guilds use ShowEQ. If Sony ever did find a way to block ShowEQ users I'd be willing to bet 20 percent of their user base would quit EQ, because once you've used it, you'd never play EQ without it.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    ..but the reason why ShowEQ works is because of core design decisions. Core issues are pervasive and will never be solved trivally. They will probably be in the game till it dies....

    Planes of Power in general is the smoothest, best release of an Everquest expandsion yet. It does some things that render ShowEQ weaker. They've removed as much client side monekying as they could. "Cheating" now is more about information wars than gaining a tactical engagement advantage.

    Information is power in EQ (there is a huge stink about the players who were allowed to close Beta POP had a HUGE advantage over those who did not). If you know what drops to look for, what monsters are key, what pitsfalls to avoid then you'll be spending more time advancing than picking up the pieces. With POP the barries for entry are quite high. Power Players who feel the crunch now more than ever are relying on external ways to farm information.

    So the things Sony/Verant are fighting are the non-obvious shortcuts. They want players to hunt high and low for the 4 monsters (out of the 1,000) that live in hidden caves. ShowEQ is used as a valuable short cut. ShowEQ can show you where the 4 monsters in the zone that you need to progress but only lightly helps you kill them.

    Any competent guild can survive without ShowEQ. With that being said, its something that most competent guilds use because it lets them focus on solving problems instead of farming information. How much of this is cheating and how much of it is getting around annoying RP-isms that don't work well in games is still up to debate.

    One thing that is being touched on in the debate is the idea of 3rd Party programs. Every game including EQ has shown that the developer does not have enough time and energy to extend the game's functionality exactly the way the players want it. However the players do. The spiffy UI is extensible and a great boon to players. If Verant/Sony is unwilling to extend the game to match Player's requirements then why not let them? If one wants to create a bot that hooks up a character to an irc channel then why not? If one wants to create a bot that emails people who aren't online then why not? This kind of extensibility I really love and all game makers should do more to promote.
  • by merigold77 ( 156634 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @03:19PM (#4788782)
    I've been playing Everquest for nearly 2 years, my husband for nearly 4 years. It is a remarkably cheat-proof game. Nothing that ShowEQ does for people really impacts us. In fact even though we have never used it and never will, it's helped us because it supplies information to the people who supply it to the sites that we go to for information.

    The creators of Everquest have not allowed item duplication cheats, item stealing cheats, run speed cheats, etc. such as those described in the article referenced. In fact everquest "cheats" are things that you can do in game anyway: tracking (get a ranger of any level, or a sufficient level bard or druid), see invisible (a spell that takes hardly any mana, that casters all get at fairly low levels) etc. And things that everyone benefits from, not some unfairly (knowing what spells are available, what each spell does).

    Unlike other online games that I've played, Everquest hasn't been ruined by cheating. It's also fun for all levels, and though its true that those starting today may never catch up with the uberest players, that doesn't matter: it's fun at all levels. It's fun from beginning to end. It isn't about winning, it's -- like a tabletop rpg -- about playing and having fun.

    I don't think ShowEQ or its like applications (EQWin, that lets people play everquest in a window) cause any harm or help really. They are nice for people who like that kind of thing, but they are not cheats that ruin the game for everyone else.

    Maps are nice, but there's maps all over the web and freely available to anyone who cares to look for them; there are maps for sale by Sony in an official EQ Atlas as well.

    Basically, it's an excellent game that was well designed from the beginning to make sure the server took care of all important information exchanges. When there are occasional client side cheats allowed by new bugs introduced by a patch, they're always fixed super-fast.

    There are things Sony has done not that well with Everquest, but allowing cheaters to ruin the game for the rest of us isn't one of them.
  • www.hackersquest.org
  • by SnapperHead ( 178050 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @04:12PM (#4789000) Homepage Journal
    When I used to play on normal blueservers, I would use it all day long and it didn't bother me. There was many places where I just got lost running through it. No matter what I did, I got lost, so seq was my guide.

    Well, 4 months ago, I got bored of the blue servers, and headed towards PvP. (Sullon Zek) I was using seq as a basic idea of where PKs where and such, or knowing someones level when I zoned it, to know if I am gonna be screawed. But, right before PoP was released it started getting insaine. PKs would zone in, they knew where you where, how your HPs was (if there kinda close to you, around the corner, where you can't see em) Suddenly, you didn't know what hit ya.

    Each zone has some nice hidding spots, which can only be found by a druid, ranger or bard. (Those with a tracking skill) Its kinda funny how a wizard comes running from across the zone to that spot where you are. Durring which time, I shout hey, hows seq working for ya ?

    Since its more or less broken now, requires you to run some programs on your windows box that are very risky, very few people are using it. People have to use there real game skill. Honestly, its much nicer that way. Belive it or not, I really hope they find an even tougher form of encryption for it.

    Those who flame me from carebear servers, go try PvP before you open your mouth. You will soon learn how harsh of an enviorment it is. Things like seq make it really suck.
  • by Indy1 ( 99447 ) on Sunday December 01, 2002 @05:59PM (#4789606)
    "For every technology, there is equal and opposite hacker technology".

    The funny thing is, the orginator of the qoute is a PS2 and Xbox game developer in San Jose.
  • Re: ALL COMMENTS (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MegaFur ( 79453 ) <wyrd0&komy,zzn,com> on Sunday December 01, 2002 @10:05PM (#4790651) Journal

    bitch, bitch, bitch.
    Geez!

    To the "It's ok to cheat!" group (Group One):
    No it isn't. If it were, it wouldn't be called "cheating".

    To the "cheating is bad" group (Group Two):
    no shit. But someone will always cheat. This isn't the simple, clear cut right-and-wrong thing that some people make it out to be though. It would be if everyone was Dudly Do-Right, but they're not and they never will be.

    If it were automatic for everyone to do-the-right-thing, banks would not need safes and locks and guards and all else. There is always, in human nature, the struggle between what society says you should do and what you actually want to do. Note that things get even more confused because certain elements in society will say that it's okay to do what you want to (i.e. Group One). For some people, some of the time, there is a temptation to cheat.

    Suppose, for example, that you and I are playing a game of cards. Now suppose you've got to get up and leave the room for a bit. I stare at your hand lying face down on the table. Do I look at it and see what cards you've got? In my case, no I don't because I have a certain ethic about cheating in games (that have human opponents--when the opponent is a computer, whether I cheat depends on how much respect I have for the game and other factors) and I'm pedantic and I want to try to play by all the rules. So no, I don't look at the cards.

    But another person might look at the other guy's cards and rationalize it as being a "more technically advanced style of play". Note that it becomes easier to rationalize cheating when you don't actually see the person that you're screwing over. It also becomes more tempting when there's money on the line. Don't people still pay big bucks on eBay for high-power EQ chars?

    When you look at it that way, it's easy (for me anyway) to start to see the EQ "cheaters" as "power users", even though I know they're not. It becomes easier to lie to myself, because it becomes increasingly tempting to become on of them so I can set myself up a nice little business on eBay and make money (this is human nature in action, folks) out of little bits of data and other people's gulibility. :-) But making money off of people's gulibility always leaves a bad taste in my mouth (so to speak). That's why I'll never be a politician or a lawyer.

    But the point, Group Two, is that there is no need to let Group One get away with so much in this situation. The server could, perhaps, be better written to give away less information. That would be a perfect example of doing the Right Thing [tuxedo.org]. (But also note "deserves to lose" [tuxedo.org]. I suppose this is where some of the Group One people are coming from.) Yes, unfortunatetly, that might require some rewrites and it might increase the required bandwidth, but... Think of the Children!! (sorry, couldn't resist. ;-) )

    So how can we get to that point? What would get Sony to rewrite the code some more so that the client has less info to go on? Simple. Release WinSEQ. Then they won't have much choice.

    This is not a new battle. It's just the age-old war of access to information being played out AGAIN . Other examples include: illegally copying mp3s, application programs, games programs, ALL programs. Where do YOU draw the line? What level of information access do you think is okay, and what do you think is wrong? Does your philosophy have any contradictions? Are you aware that arguing for illegalization of spam whilst also arguing for legalization of file trading implies that your right to privacy is greater than the right of copyright? But copyright is explictiy referred to and defined in the Constitution and, AFAIK, the right to privacy is not. Have you ever thought about the implications of that? How many more times will we have to go through this, I wonder? A hundred times? A million?

    I think fifty years from now, people will look back on this age of poorly defined/handled information access rights and laugh. Heck, I live in this time and I already laugh at it!

"Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?" -Ronald Reagan

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