Everquest - Selos Server - 20th Anniversary Casual Server

LachiusTZ said:

Why did he get banned?

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Because he actively doxxed people in the past.

Sterling said:

Because he actively doxxed people in the past.

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**in this thread

Flaw said:

Just curious, might a lot of people got hit by a ban wave or something? I've noticed lots of elemental named up for longer periods of time than normal lately?

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Ban hammer finally hit the a-holes

Surely one of you nerds with an Amtrak medal can come in here and tell us why you've been unjustly banned. Or better yet, someone from Faceless should pay Ice T again to make a video about it.

The guild isn't banned. There's some number of people suspended, but that's not specific to Amtrak.

People already summed it up, but it seems the suspension or ban wave was targeted at people who bypassed the truebox code, either through VM's or other programs and if you so happened to account share with people using said programs then Rip. Moral of the story is, MQ2 is fine apparently, but getting around truebox is the lowest of the low in DBG's eyes apparently.

Dalven said:

Surely one of you nerds with an Amtrak medal can come in here and tell us why you've been unjustly banned. Or better yet, someone from Faceless should pay Ice T again to make a video about it.

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Cukernaut said:

How many people / accounts got the van hammer? % of guild?

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8 human beings I think have suspended mains? We lost more people/accounts to quitting just a couple days before the banwave though, so it happening back to back made it feel like over a dozen people all left in short order and was a noticeable hit that way.

The tricky part is that one of those dudes who had quit right before was also an apparent patient zero - ANY account he used got hit; I assume he was running vms and/or hacks while boxing other people. Really shitty for the people who just let the guy use their chars for races here or whatever activity on coirnav/ri -21 day suspension. That also led to some awkward outcomes like drillisen's personal accounts (rogue nobody ever cares to box and the guildbank he wont share) that only he used obviously stayed clean but the account with his war (formerly toxn's) and some other alts got banned I assume due to who was using them. Amtrak does a pretty hefty amount of account sharing and that probably fucked us extra hard.

I'm also not gonna argue these bans were unjust. From what I can tell, the amtrak who got hit were all either using vms or an RI leader boxed the account - probably while using a vm.

I wish I got banned.

Word is that the botters are already back out there doing their thing on the servers. It amazes me that DBG literally could care less about botting. You would think they would be against anything that causes paying customers to quit playing the game.

It just makes no sense. I mean there is next to no reason for this to be an inside thing because lets face it, if a GM or some other DBG employee wanted to make money on the side buying/selling krono, they could literally just summon items and or plat in game to sale. They don't need to farm anything. So, it's hard to believe the botters are connected on the inside, but then why the hell does DBG turn a blind eye to the extremely obvious botting in the game? I don't get it. Someone edumacate me on this one.

Regime said:

I actually did laugh out loud when I saw your name Griscuck lol


lol but dude you Fake Newz me while I was on the metro. I thought the entire guild was banned or something. 8 people ? These Hard Pipe hittin Wakandanz (from all those guilds banned) will be back to 65 in 2 days.

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They were 21 day suspensions. A few dudes are 7 or 14 (RI touched accounts got 21, but other probably-vmers potentially less). No permas in amtrak to my knowledge.

Knowing a lot of the real scummers of EQ, it sounds like the ban wave as has been said was almost entirely focused on people who were bypassing truebox, be it through VMs or through third party software. It also seems like back in April when the rumors of a "ban wave" were coming, due to some changes the MQ2 community had seen in the client, Daybreak did actually start logging violations. I know a couple of people who ate suspensions that had last bypass truebox over 30 days before the suspensions went out, so it seems like it's similar to the big banwaves of 2012 for warping on Fippy/Vulak, where SOE at the time would log weeks worth of detected warps and then mass ban periodically.

I was surprised as many members as we have we only had two that ate suspensions, both 14 days. From what I'm hearing in the MQ2 / kronolord community a huge number of these 14 days suspensions went out. Back in the old days SOE used to permaban for the first "cheating" incident like this, so my suspicion is these suspensions are intended as a warning. Daybreak didn't want to lose the business on all the affected accounts (probably because it was so many), so instead of an outright ban they put these suspensions out to try to curtail behavior that is embarrassing Daybreak on a regular basis due to constant forum posts.

I also know at least one "big time" RMT/kronolord who uses MQ2 on both Mangler and Selo, he had dozens of accounts full banned, all were newly made krono-funded accounts w/no action history that he spun up to RMT w/the 20th Anniversary servers, and he ate permabans on almost all of them. He also said a few other big kronolords he knows ate large amounts of permabans, so it sounds like they may have done some specific targeting of really egregious "problem" players. People that are using VMs or ways around truebox to do normal group/raid content probably don't actually worry Daybreak too much, but they kind of have to go against it. The guys who ate bans were the guys who never raid, but who disrupt the economy and XP/group loot areas on all new TLPs.

Interestingly too a week before the truebox banwave went out, two prominent people in the Redguides MQ2 community ate permabans on all their primary accounts. They had been streaming their usage of RedGuide's "Very Vanilla" MQ2 build on live servers (the one EQMule has sworn on his life is kosher, personally approved by Holly and etc), there's yet to be a satisfactory explanation as to why that happened but my guess is Mule is probably overselling how fully Daybreak embraces his "approved" MQ2 build--Mule basically makes all his money off of MQ2 as far as I know so, despite being a decent enough guy he has motivation to not admit that his business may not be entirely kosher w/Daybreak.

Pharone said:

Word is that the botters are already back out there doing their thing on the servers. It amazes me that DBG literally could care less about botting. You would think they would be against anything that causes paying customers to quit playing the game.

It just makes no sense. I mean there is next to no reason for this to be an inside thing because lets face it, if a GM or some other DBG employee wanted to make money on the side buying/selling krono, they could literally just summon items and or plat in game to sale. They don't need to farm anything. So, it's hard to believe the botters are connected on the inside, but then why the hell does DBG turn a blind eye to the extremely obvious botting in the game? I don't get it. Someone edumacate me on this one.

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The biggest reason botting happens so heavily is because the automatic detection tools as they are (at least that I know of), are very poor on Daybreak's end and will generate a decent amount of false positives. Additionally the typical EQ GM in 2019 has never played EQ himself, has probably worked at Daybreak maybe 5 or fewer years, and frankly doesn't know enough about ordinary EQ gameplay to notice the super obvious "botting" red flags the normal players can easily spot.

yerm said:

The tricky part is that one of those dudes who had quit right before was also an apparent patient zero - ANY account he used got hit; I assume he was running vms and/or hacks while boxing other people. Really shitty for the people who just let the guy use their chars for races here or whatever activity on coirnav/ri -21 day suspension. That also led to some awkward outcomes like drillisen's personal accounts (rogue nobody ever cares to box and the guildbank he wont share) that only he used obviously stayed clean but the account with his war (formerly toxn's) and some other alts got banned I assume due to who was using them. Amtrak does a pretty hefty amount of account sharing and that probably fucked us extra hard.

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Hasn't happened on Selo but on Agnarr we had a number of accounts actioned (including permabans) for "account sharing" violations, situations where two guildies shared say, a Cleric they both used for rezzing or two brothers who shared accounts. Most of the ones I'm familiar with large krono movements between accounts had happened right before the "account sharing" ban went out, which has always made me suspect Daybreak has some sort of reporting that is triggered off of large krono moves, they investigate an account and see obvious signs of account sharing (any type of account sharing is actually 100% against the EULA but 99% of the time this isn't ever enforced) and see tons of krono on the account, so they issue a ban. Removing hundreds of krono at a time from the game permanently is an accounting benefit for Daybreak.

My take away from Agnarr is anyone engaging in heavy account sharing is running the risk of eating a ban some day. Account sharing has been pretty common in every guild I've been in, and the % of bans is very low, but it's kind of like having unprotected sex w/hookers, you can't really be entirely shocked when your chickens come home to roost.

Sieger said:

The biggest reason botting happens so heavily is because the automatic detection tools as they are (at least that I know of), are very poor on Daybreak's end and will generate a decent amount of false positives. Additionally the typical EQ GM in 2019 has never played EQ himself, has probably worked at Daybreak maybe 5 or fewer years, and frankly doesn't know enough about ordinary EQ gameplay to notice the super obvious "botting" red flags the normal players can easily spot.



Hasn't happened on Selo but on Agnarr we had a number of accounts actioned (including permabans) for "account sharing" violations, situations where two guildies shared say, a Cleric they both used for rezzing or two brothers who shared accounts. Most of the ones I'm familiar with large krono movements between accounts had happened right before the "account sharing" ban went out, which has always made me suspect Daybreak has some sort of reporting that is triggered off of large krono moves, they investigate an account and see obvious signs of account sharing (any type of account sharing is actually 100% against the EULA but 99% of the time this isn't ever enforced) and see tons of krono on the account, so they issue a ban. Removing hundreds of krono at a time from the game permanently is an accounting benefit for Daybreak.

My take away from Agnarr is anyone engaging in heavy account sharing is running the risk of eating a ban some day. Account sharing has been pretty common in every guild I've been in, and the % of bans is very low, but it's kind of like having unprotected sex w/hookers, you can't really be entirely shocked when your chickens come home to roost.

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Yeah they definitely flag both large krono moves and large krono stockpiles. Our guildbank also distributes spells, so it got temporarily hit shortly after pop launch and nobody was surprised or blamed them. It was unsuspended pretty quickly but I'm sure they took a good look. If there was any dirt there they'd have nuked it.

For botting, I try to put myself in the gm's shoes. My guess is >90% of petitions are just completely salty people sperging out. Most botting accusations end up not being automation and/or they aren't when the gm goes to look. If I'm a gm and see a guy was legit when someone checked, and a ton of people are just rage petitioning creating useless work for me, I'm not gonna care for long. That dude ends up botting away because of people crying wolf. Gms stop looking.

A lot of people think that petitioning someone they are pissed off at will hurt em. I've come to realize that bullshit petitions probably help the target. Gms likely close one and then ignore other (potentially good) ones. It's why I get so vocal on the forums about take a video and make a real report.

Yeah, I've been accused of botting multiple times but I'm a mediocre six man true boxer. I mean, I am so inefficient, but salty people said they have reported me. If any GM investigated me they would probably think it was stupid I was reported. I imagine a fair amount of boxers get that.