I don't think it's a formal, written agreement, but what niente just mentioned there is the kind of agreement I thought was in place - a gentleman's agreement to not touch the program in question. I use the word 'believe' because when it comes to eqmule and his written agreement, as it's hard to filter what is true and what is bullshit with that guy. I suppose if we ever see the entire EQ source code leaked publicly, I'll take back what I said about him being a liar.
They don't mess with MQ as long as it's not used on truebox servers. I still think they're loosely adhering to that, as the folks getting banned are all on special ruleset servers.
The setting in question also would only use the code I mentioned earlier in the thread (a 'block list' for programs that I pointed out) so that also confirms to me that they're using server-sent data to prohibit specific software (and thus, MySEQ, as I mentioned earlier)
The only capacity they have for detecting ISBoxer is that setting, too. As I mentioned before, MySEQ has been detected using that same 'setting'. MQNext evades that setting because it hides its own modules and processes, but it does not hide MySEQ from their detection by default.
There's a financial benefit to allowing ISBoxer on live servers as opposed to truebox when it comes to player perspective. Which I imagine is the primary motivator for them allowing ISBoxer on live, but not on truebox.
Also, yes, everyone already knows that about eqmule. He threatened to leak the "Entire EQ source code" that "JChan gave him" during one of his meltdowns, he's a staunch COVID denier, and he is the reason why EQMac died after I worked with Todd to close the loophole for PC and promised not to update it. He also had a pissing match publicly with brainiac after brainiac basically carried the weight of the project for multiple years.
He's like me but actually unstable, and not a tranny obviously.
I'm glad Knightly and brainiac took over development and cut him out, as eqmule's not the person I'd want publicly developing a cheat program like that.
Yeah, I think at the most, and we're trying to stitch things together here from what Redbot has been willing to say (he was one party that did also have discussions with Daybreak back in 2015) + what Mule has claimed, back in 2015 Mule may have been told something to the effect of "make it so your customers can't trivially run MQ on our Truebox servers, and we will find other things to focus our attentions on than going hard after MQ2."
Mule's claim is that MQ going back to fully open source "broke" the agreement and is why the ban waves came. It should be noted--MQ was fully open source from its creation by Plazmic up until 2015 or so when Mule unilaterally violated the open source software license on the project and closed source parts of it, from 2011 to 2015 there was also an era of very low enforcement against MQ2 outside of the so called "active hacks." It certainly wasn't fully allowed, but it was "widely tolerated."
From 2015 to 2019 there was indeed a stretch of very low enforcement against MQ, particularly on live servers where enforcement was virtually nonexistent, somewhat seeming to confirm there may indeed have been an "agreement." In 2019 things even got to the point that Holly met with me, Suineg, and a number of other TLP guild leaders to discuss our views on MQ use on a "boxing" server aka Rizlona. Holly made it explicit in that meeting that she was okay with MQ use if it didn't facilitate automation. This has been interpreted as MQ "going legit", and Redbot has now admitted that is how he interpreted it, but he (and the rest of the MQ community) all admit that they were basically trying to read more into it than was really there. There was no formal blessing, just some commentary that you wouldn't get banned for it if you followed a few rules--which I note is not the same thing as saying it's truly allowed, it's kinda like the situation where some cities decriminalize cannabis, it's still not technically legal, they just aren't arresting you for it.
At the same time this "golden era" of cheating, still featured what seemed to be an annual ban wave, and several Redguides content creators (Sic and Maskoi) were prominently mega banned for streaming MQ2 use on Twitch during this time.
My read on it is basically that Holly was very revenue focused, and this can be seen in several of her initiatives (Overseer is something she pushed, and apparently the dev team absolutely loathed.) Holly felt that as long as people weren't mass automating and warping around, and as long as they stayed off TLP...the boxing with tools be it MQ or ISboxer are basically not causing "enough problems" to justify the loss of revenue. I thnk MySEQ was largely ignored for all these years for the same reason.
When Holly left, from all I can tell from my sources, the dev team started running the company and basically seem to be allowed to do anything they want with little supervision. The big ban waves this year were started by a dev, who implemented it without any corporate approval. When the first wave went out, Jchan retroactively said it was fine to keep doing it. While I think the rampant MQNext use on Mischief and Thornblade may have been a big part of why they allowed the ban waves to go on, the other reality is the couple of developers involved in anticheat all raid with a specific live EQ top raid guild that has a very strong anticheat mentality (this same guild gets datamined personal data from Daybreak's customers, given to them by Daybreak staff, so they can get a list of their own guildies who use MQ for purposes of gkicking them.)
I've always found the whole MQ community pretty interesting, a lot of good developers have been involved in it, and some sketchy ones as well. The personalities are fairly autistic. I know several people who went on to careers in real programming based on learning to code from fiddling around with MQ2 back in the day. I think the reality is SOE/DB/DPG created a big mess by choosing to intentionally "minimally enforce" rules against cheating for over a decade--including letting prominent TLP guilds on several servers get away with massive levels of MQ use (including the Lockjaw guild I was in, lest people think I'm just randomly throwing shade.)
At the end of the day I do think the game would be better off without rampant cheating, but I also reserve the right to say DPG sucks real bad at how they go about doing things.