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#77 Jan 30 2004 at 10:59 AM Rating: Default
Although I have to agree to many the last posterd have said I think this is getting to complicated.

Economy is not an animal that can be caged or tamed, its a living thing that's potentially as benefiting or malevolent as the people which act within its structure.

So I'm with those posters who want SOE to beat the **** out of dupers, cheaters and exploiters and show the guts to make live as hard for plat/account buyers as law permits them.

Personally i liked the bazaar a lot. Anyhow - I would gladly sacrifie its convenience if that helps the game but I'm afraid once you cant buy mid- to high-end gear there even MORE people will be attracted to buying it for RL money....
#78 Jan 30 2004 at 11:11 AM Rating: Decent
It seems to me the only way to wake SOE up is with a good slap in the face. Possibly a mass organized account cancelation event. Even if everyone just canceled for a few days and renewed I'm sure SOE would notice if say 5,000 useres canceled in one day.

Edited, Fri Jan 30 11:13:20 2004 by Edaer
#79 Jan 30 2004 at 11:27 AM Rating: Decent
Couldn't you create the same effect with a letter saying do something or we will cancel. Anyone ever click on one of those form letters that get sent to your congressman. They work. I don't have the time to create it today otherwise I would. Anyways if it does get created, it will only be successful if the message spreads through the masses. In the guilds, in the guild web sites, on the message boards etc..
#80 Jan 30 2004 at 11:36 AM Rating: Decent
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55 posts
I think the people making the plat aren't really making the huge bank off the bazaar, they make it other ways, but buy up the HIGH end items cheaply (250,000 or so) then sell them for say 500,000 so now you almost have to buy from them. Yes the items you listed are good for a normal player to make money, but not the hundreds of thousands of plat needed to get the Time-like items.
#81 Jan 30 2004 at 11:37 AM Rating: Default
gnomeruler wrote:
Ur actually quite wrong, u cannot craft/loot or quest everything u want on ur own.

If there is p.e. a gear-quest a Beastlord can make from lvl 59+ then WHY THE HELL shouldn't you be able to do it about 59??? Class or race-relatad restrictions are NO issue otherwise I could rant about not able to buy enachanted metal or imbued gems at the local vendor, hm?

Or are you talking about you would like to have items you are not supposed to have at your lvl? In that case (quite franky my dear) I don't give a damn ;)

Edited, Fri Jan 30 11:40:07 2004 by Leiany
#82 Jan 30 2004 at 11:38 AM Rating: Default
It's sooo easy....I just call upon every dumb A*****E who ever bought plat: "IT'S YOUR FAULT! DON'T DO IT EVER AGAIN - THEN THIS S**T ENDS TODAY1

...Arrghh...I forgot these loosers cant read...at least they never paid for that...

Edited, Fri Jan 30 11:47:59 2004 by Leiany
#83 Jan 30 2004 at 11:48 AM Rating: Good
Wow. This is ridiculous. I had no idea that this kind of thing was happening. Call me naive. Oh, I knew that you could buy in game stuff out of game for real money. But I did not stop to think that there would be people pirating the economy of the game like this. But, it makles sense that they do it. People will do anything for a buck.

I equate this to the problem with professional atheletes salaries. It is exactly the same. The sports fan sits around and compains about how many millions the athletes get and whether they deserve it. You here the "coal miners work harder than athletes ever will and will not make in a lifetime what an athlete makes in one year." And then that same fan and all fans who complain will continue to support the teams and athletes, thus perpetuating the entire process.

Now, being a complaining sports fan myself (go Lakers!) I know how hyporittcal this is...but it is the same with this EQ economy hijakcing. If all players decided that it is infinately more fun to earn their own plat and play the game as it was intended rather than buying plat in the real world, the economy and all of its' dynamics would be in the closed world of Norrath. The only reason these people exist in the first place is because so many are willing to throw real money at vapor-items like EQ plat. And, in my opinion, anyone who has built their character thusly is not a true player of the game...sorry if I offend, but speaking for the hordes that have labored to earn that first 1K plat and buy that first 1K+ item, you cannot know what the game is really about.

To those who have played so laboriously and then decided you were not going to do that for your next characters, just know that your need to be uber out of the gate has ruined a big part of what was fun about EQ.

Because of this easy plat access (if you have the real world cash) you can uber twink your character and bypass all of the newbie levels rather quickly...making it very difficult for new players and characters who do not have the ability to do so. (I am talking about major twinking here...like when you see a lvl 8 riding a lizard and wearing 500K worth of armor...not dropping a Berserker Sword to you alt tank).

Which brings me to another observation about a good number of these uber-twinks...and this hit me after reading the above post and realizing that the economy had the above problems. Why are so many uber-twinks rude and careless and selfish? (I said most) Why do they act like spoiled little rich brats??? Beacause they are! That is exactly what they are. There is very little liklihood that adults who are working to support a family are spending $1500 in real life for EQ plat. Hell, $12 is as much a month as my wife allows me on this game. (I did by EQ Atlas! Shhh). And most younger kids that have part time jobs are paying for insurance or cars or taking girls out or buying make-up and shoes and purses (gotta cover the young ladies being the father of a teenage boy and girl myself). So it is the rich kid that is dong this in large part. The kids that do not have to work for anything in real life. If you can afford to spend that kind of money on non-existant video game money, than you are not lacking for any of the basics, that is for sure.

This is ruining the game. Not quickly, but erroding over time. Soon there will be a need for new players and there will be none, because you need to group to get from 20 to 50 and if there are only 5 players your level on the entire server at any given time...and only 30 or so within your grouping range, it will be no fun and they will quit. So eventually it will be an uber-class only...and if you think that sounds fun, I think you will find it will not be.

Thanks for the time to rant!



#84 Jan 30 2004 at 11:49 AM Rating: Decent
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405 posts
It seems to me that beside the game exploits there is a much bigger problem that Verant/SOE needs to address: there are some security holes with your game large enough to drive a truck through. I hardly am a security expert (and am only a novice developer), but any server side code that accepts unsolicited input from a bot program is going to cause huge problems. All client side executables need to have some sort of certificate (or some other form of dual authentication and authorization mechanism) in order to be allowed to communicate in-stream to the server. The client exe needs to authenticate to the server, and the server needs to authenticate to the client. There needs to be some sort of embedded private key in the exe that is almost impossible to duplicate.

EQ is a game where most of the processing is done client side, where it is very easy to take security for granted. Take eqmacro for example. Here we have a program masquarading as eqgame.exe and sending movement codes up to the server. The server simply accepts these codes and assumes that it is eqgame.exe sending them, since the input is in the correct format and over the correct ports.

EQ has some impressive layers of security being applied, but is is becoming very clear by the existance of macros and bots that this security obviously is insufficient. Lock down your code! If a rogue program is able to lamprey itself to an executable client side your asking for serious trouble. In order to achieve this you may need a major code rewrite. EQ2 had better offer much higher security than it's predecessor.
#85 Jan 30 2004 at 11:54 AM Rating: Decent
just wanted to toss in my 2cp worth on this...
my char's bankroll has never been over 6kpp, I buy stuff in the baz all the time. Ive been playing for over 2 years now and have yet to learn many aspects of this game. I dont plan on going on to EQII at all, and like some I wish SOE would stop coming out w/new expansions every 3 months. The need to fix the current problems w/the game and perhaps revamp certian zones instead of creating more zones and headaches for players that play the game, but make even larger headaches for those that cheat/hack/dup or buy/sell in pp/good over the internet outside the game itself. After reading this I made a wrote a small message and went around to some of the guilds on the nameless in order to try and get organized, and to bring to the attention of SOE, and Sony that there's peeps willing to may our monthly fee's to play this game the way it was meant to be played. Not as a way to make an income in the rw, and if for some reason SOE can not fix this problem that has ruined many other games and appears to have a death grip on EQ... and if it should fall, then i will go back to playing games that dont require an internet connection. I hope that the players not just from the nameless server send emails to SOE, and /petition in game... and we send a message to them that we as EQ gamers dont want this in OUR GAME!!!!
#86 Jan 30 2004 at 11:57 AM Rating: Decent
I have never thought of this possibility!!
but its not just possable its probable

in fact i bought every HQ rockhopper hide i found in the bazaar under a certain price this was for legit purpose's (i can also log in from my office) i noticed people stopped selling for lower then the price i set for myself, so i stopped buying and it took 2 weeks for the price to go back to normal.

this is somthing that is obvious once you know about it but not something i ever stopped to concider before seeing it written out. i have just linked the message to my guild and local forums i use also. hopefully this can be stopped.

(or has the monster already grown too large?)

#87 Jan 30 2004 at 12:02 PM Rating: Default
Leiany, I have yet to see a post from you where you do anything but take some trivial little detail in something someone said, and try to "correct" them to show people how smart you and how much you know about everything. I'd love for you to link me a post where you were being helpful, rather than condescending and argumentative. (sorry to everyone else, but I just couldn't read anymore of her BS posts and keep my mouth shut)
#88 Jan 30 2004 at 12:06 PM Rating: Decent
i posted links to this forum on guild websites from the nameless to let peeps from my server know whats up... lets send soe a message... make it clear and simple, that we as eq gamers wont accept this, and if the cant/or refuse to resolve the issue's then i for one wont be renewing my subscribtion to eq, and i have no thought of moving on to EQ II. so pls sent soe emails or /petition ingame and make ur voice heard
#89 Jan 30 2004 at 12:06 PM Rating: Decent
Well this might be part of the reason SoE cant bring action against IGE..

Registrant:
Internet Gaming Enterprises (IGE-DOM)
C&C 5/F, Yeung Yiu Chung 8,
Ind Bldg 20, Wang Hoi Road
Kowloon Bay, Kowloon 33483
HK

Domain Name: cannotlinkto

Administrative Contact:
Internet Gaming Enterprises (OEULUEEYZO) cs7077@yahoo.com
C&C 5/F, Yeung Yiu Chung 8,
Ind Bldg 20, Wang Hoi Road
Kowloon Bay, Kowloon 33483
HK
+(852) 2743-4700 fax: +(852) 2305-5812

Technical Contact:
Network Solutions, Inc. (HOST-ORG) customerservice@networksolutions.com
13200 Woodland Park Drive
Herndon, VA 20171-3025
US
1-888-642-9675 fax: 571-434-4620

Record expires on 16-May-2006.
Record created on 15-May-1995.
Database last updated on 30-Jan-2004 11:56:29 EST.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.CHANGEIP.COM 66.185.162.20
NS2.CHANGEIP.COM 216.97.120.10

That is thier WHI IS info for thier webiste they are in hong kong. Also included is some MORE THEN LIKELY bogus email addie .. and thier PHONE NUMBERS! This info is publinc info I am not posting anything that is not easliy obtained form and WHOIS look up site.
#90 Jan 30 2004 at 12:15 PM Rating: Decent
This is a reply to BrankoZ,

I have seen plenty of posts from Leiany that are positive. But you have to find them in the correct threads. If you are reading threads where everyone is blasting each other and correcting each other, it is unfair to lash out at that one person.

Leiany has offered helpful advice and posted interesting posts that are not corrections or flames. And no, I am not going to find them for you, you can search for them yourself. :-)

interesting that you will complain aobut a flame with a flame! Hmmmm.
#91 Jan 30 2004 at 12:18 PM Rating: Decent
If there is a porift to be made, no matter who it screws, someone will make it. The other day I was complaining to my friend about the bazaar prices, and just like everyone else I complained that buying plat was ruining the economy of this game. His response was something that i think holds dearly true to the heart of this situation:

"Dude, 90% of the people that play EQ nowadays buy plat, the other 10% just dont know they can yet."

I'll admit, I too have made a purchase from IGE because I wanted to get my ranger some decent equipment. And when I did that 6 months ago, the 20k I got went a long way, and I thought hey, how handy is that. Well...I'd go so far as to say I wasn't the only one, and now here we are with inflation and a bunch of people pointing the finger at everyone but themselves.

Now quite honestly in the debate of the EQ economical ethics, everyone is a white-knight claiming that this is a problem that "other people" are causing. I'm thinking that most of us are a hell of a lot more guilty than we all want to play.

EVEN IF your platinum was FREE....:

-You still have to pay a large group of individuals 24/7 to packet sniff things and find the exploits.
-You still need yet another team of at least 46 people on 24/7 to be able to instantly deliver the plat to people on each server.
-You still have to pay for quite a few EQ accounts each month anyway.
-You still have to buy the computers/networking material/bandwidth to acctually DO this.

My point being, running an operation like this on so great a scale that it ruins the economy server-wide can't be cheap. I'm thinking that if everyone out there was on the straight-and-narrow like they all claim to be, we wouldnt be combating nearly the problem we are right now. I'm not pointing any fingers right now, my hands are just as dirty as most peoples here...but jesus lets just be honest about it and give it a rest.

The real bottom line here is this:

This is a company who is POWERED BY US, THE PLAYERS. If it wasn't for us pissing away our dollars and cents anyway, they wouldnt be around. If everyone really hated them like they claim to, IGE wouldnt be around because they couldn't AFFORD TO BE AROUND. Yes IGE is a problem, yes what theyre doing is wrong, but at the same time if they were as unwelcome as we all say they are then they wouldnt be here at all. I think this is probably how SOE feels about the situation too, because they sure as hell cant be oblivious to all these enormous platinum transfers. (Either that or they're ok with letting EQ slide so we all hop on the EQ2 bandwagon)

So what I'm saying is essentially, we have the the most efficient tools to stop this already in our hands. It doesn't take an act by SOE or someone else to ban these websites, we just need everyone to exercise(sp?) some control and just stop buying the platinum, before we totally ruin the point of having plat altogether.

-and thats my 2cp

Eumyen Entwise
61 Enchanter
The Seventh Hammer
#92 Jan 30 2004 at 12:19 PM Rating: Decent
38 posts
To play Devil's Advocate to the whole thread here... What if IGE/etc are in fact hiring people to play the game and farm plat/drops just like any other player and not using some for of macro'ing or cheating or duping at all? What if these players actually happen to know where to go for good camps and consistently day-in-day-out work those camps and level their toons and do quest stuff in order to sell MQs and in any normal, approved, way make plat that they then turn over to their employer and which then gets resold or used to invest/resell in Bazaars throughout the various servers? I'm all for stopping cheaters and for wanting loopholes to 'free' plat fixed, but in the end you cannot stop these folks from playing the game normally and simply pooling their resources together towards a unified purpose.

If it is the selling of plat/items for RL cash that you truly object to, then that is a different issue. The loophole there is that the folks selling online are very careful to let folks know that they are selling their time and effort towards obtaining the plat/items and SOE's usage agreement does not address it at all. If SOE wanted to remove these huge caches of plat/items from circulation, perhaps they should just up and buy out (either by buying the company or just buying up all of the plat and items they have for sale) and do a delete on the stuff in-game.

The way it stands, there are few money sinks in the game that are required in order to advance/upgrade since items in the world require no upkeep or maintenance and the very best gear is dropped and so when the best gear comes along, the droppable stuff that gets replaced gets put back onto the market. Add to all of this that mobs still drop money and items that sell for money to NPC vendors as an unlimited source of new plat into the economy and inflation is necessary and inevitable. The supply of plat is always increasing and the supply of items is always increasing and the demand does not pace as fast as the supply and even falls to nearly nil on items that are a few expansions old.
#93 Jan 30 2004 at 12:25 PM Rating: Decent
Possibly the answer to this market control is to make it available to everyone. What i mean is post all the techiques, tactics, programs, bugs and exploits so anyone can use them. All the sudden IGE has thousends of competitors and SOE has a major situation on their hands. This would fuel the need for truly ingenious solutions like some of the ones posted here.

This is OUR game, not anyone elses. We pay the bills, we built the communities that draw players in we have the ability to put an end to this damage of our economy.

"Free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny"
-Not me

Hissah 51 Necro Bristlebane
Oreman 52 Cleric Bristlebane
#94 Jan 30 2004 at 12:28 PM Rating: Decent
In NY City you have a ton of people, so housing demand is VERY high. Prices can shoot through the roof. So they invented this thing called "rent control." It provides a cap on how much landlords can charge.

Lets apply this to EQ. The most expensive vendor sold item is what? A top of the line horse for 100k or so? So lets set that (or something similar) as our cap for what people can charge for an item in the bazaar. I mean 100k is still a fortune to the normal EQ player but not impossible to get.

Now that we have this cap in place, and players know it, these high end items (ornate...etc) will most likely be put up for sale by a real player at 100k. Effectively removing these bots from buying low and selling high.

Most likely this will cause an inflation on the midlevel items unfortunately as it will be the only other items that are rare enough for these companies to corner the market on.
#95 Jan 30 2004 at 12:29 PM Rating: Decent
Thats why NO DROP item exist...never buy anything from bazaar anyway people are just to stupid to be able to set a fair price on item. Super common loot like ornate going for 100k+ bah take your character out of the most stupid zone in the game and go get 1 free by playing your character.
#96 Jan 30 2004 at 12:31 PM Rating: Decent
So if Sony can not or will not do anything about this situation the only way to bring things somewhat back into order is for another company to emerge selling plat for cash with cheats and such to compete with the two that merged?

I HATE CHEATERS!!!!

I have been playing this game off and on since 1998 and have never been able to afford any of the "COOL" equipment. The thing that gets me is I really always thought that there were people out their playing and making millions of plat legitimately, that I just hadnt found the right way to make cash yet.

What sucks is I have to pay real money now to get good items, no matter how hard, long, or intelligent I PLAY, I will have to literally WORK for REAL CASH just for PLAY CASH!!!

This is not acceptable. Sony must fix this, make a max price/trade number or something. There is POWER IN NUMBERS, WE ALL should email this to Sony, post it on their boards, over and over again. People should understand that with this going on THEY WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO AFFORD ANY TOP GAME GEAR EVER WITHOUT PAYING FOR IT WITH DOLLARS!!!! NO ONE WILL EXCEPT THOSE WHO PAY REAL MONEY!!!!

Please excuse the CAPS if that offends anyone, I normally wouldnt care but this is really just an ugly thing. The greed to which people succumb to is really disgusting and makes me want to vomit. Just think how many people out there are willing to pay money just so their man they have worked on for years will finally have that one piece they always wanted him to have. Or people with alot of cash who are willing to just buy a new level 65 with 300 AAs.

Society will fail when counterfeiters run rampant and no law stops them. EQ is an actual society being who's currency is being run by the mob.

If I could only find the people who ruin my good times and try and control me I would squat and lay a **** right on their forehead while they were sleeping...
#97 Jan 30 2004 at 12:34 PM Rating: Decent
If Sony doesn't get a handle on EQ1 then the same problems will arise Immediately in EQ2. Imagine having control of the game since day 1. How much is a magic sword that gives only a +1 to Strength going to go for?

Getting rid of the bazaar is not the answer either. Sony needs to tighten the game code to not allow the game hacks in the first place. Once that happens, then there will be no plat duping and prices will start to come back down.

I don't have a problem with people selling accounts or legit plat because it was EARNED.
#98 Jan 30 2004 at 12:34 PM Rating: Decent
No way you bought a Fine Antique Ring in the bazaar. It's a No Drop item.
#99 Jan 30 2004 at 12:34 PM Rating: Decent
they will find ways around that anything can be automated one way or another. Though youer idea gives them at least some work to do before they control the whole stuff again.

for the rest i would like to state that those companies don't need to keep the prices up and offer things themselves. If they have unlimited plat resources, they can buy and destroy. If the program indeed exists and they look for low priced items to take them out of the game, it's even easier to destroy them cause of lore items. The price will rise anyway so there will be a demand for plat so ppl will either farm or buy plat.
#100 Jan 30 2004 at 12:44 PM Rating: Default
they play dirty soe needs to play dirty hire pp buying spied give up the names of the ige/mysupersales tunes that pop up to deliver pp give name to soe wham bam delete acct rince repeat till they are crushed from existance
#101 Jan 30 2004 at 12:51 PM Rating: Decent
Sorry but it depends what kind of hack they are using one of the hacks takes over mouse and keyboard control by directly hacking into DirectX the game cannot distinguish between that and hand given commands. It might be one of the reasons that directX9 will be used soon. I also saw another macro posted somewhere to automate some things, no clue how it works cause it looked like programming to me, i believe it is called macroquest. Now if those are seperate programs the game could look for threads and possibly identify those threads and refuse to work but then again if they include a renaming feature for the thread it's again useless.

Another way to possible handle things is to have eq a proberoutine on it's own to see if other functions address certrain devices wich are thought to be used for such exploits and sending the data back to SoE but that could run into other legal problems.
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