I won't confirm or deny any statistics being recorded.

I take into consideration what got flagged, and how many times. Something happening just once, like getting stuck behind a wall while following, won't get you banned.

Its a rare (1/100) chance to spawn right now, and will never spawn more than 1 in the same zone (unique spawn code).

If you get "lucky" you can always go kill wisp else where in the zone without fear of another ancient wisp spawning on you.

You rock Hunter, do like the afk quest and all, but it added lots of lag for some reason...Today server running like a well oiled machine!

Awesome, glad there is no lag now that Progress Quest was disabled for Holidays.

I really wish it didn't lag the server so much, cause it is a neat idea

Updated posted, added Coward Augs.

Cause its fun!

Call in server wide support to help banish that new evil!

Will bump up the chance for CT Essences a little bit, maybe 1/15 boss and 1/300 trash. I don't want to spam them out like they were before though when this zone was first made custom.

Our AFK Progress Quest will be disabled for now and at least for the holidays.

This is to reduce lag since we know more people will be logging online for Christmas, New Years, etc.

That AFK Quest was pretty big, thousands of lines of code, all stats saved to quest_globals, calculating combat rounds, etc, maybe too heavy for server if 200+ online.


Added Cowardice Augments to Qvic, CT, and T1-T9 zones at a general drop rate of 5% off bosses.

Rank 1 - Qvic Bosses and Angry Beholder
Rank 2 - CT Bosses
Rank 3 - T1/T2 Ornate Chest and Ancient Dragon
Rank 4 - T3/T4 Bosses
Rank 5 - T5 Bosses
Rank 6 - T6 Chest and OMM
Rank 7 - T7 Bosses
Rank 8 - T8 Bosses
Rank 9 - Chest
Rank 10 - Future Tier 10 Zone

Combine any 2 of same rank to get next rank.

Shoulders Only

Reduces Aggro

Something that shouldn't affect most people, is another program I have written up is something similar to FairFight.

http://www.gameblocks.com/

FairFight is Server side statistics of what the players are doing, and it doesn't scan your PC for files or memory or anything.

It keeps statistics on your game play, and knows what is normal behavior or not.

One extreme example of using FairFight on a shooter game is that its's highly unlikely that if either player is strafing, that they would be able to perfectly aim their weapon/crosshair dead center of their opponents head locked on AKA aimbot. Or constantly shooting people through walls that your not suppose to see through. Or traveling X distance in Y time that would be impossible without speed run hacks.

Anyways, back to what I'm doing here, is I wrote up a program similar to that for EZ Server, and was immediately successful at catching a few people afk botting in several zones. My program will not auto suspend or ban you. What it does is give me a list of people with the statistics recorded, into the format like you would view Leader Boards popup window along with output to chat window. Trust me, these are not Leader Boards you wish to be on. And its not limited to just top 10 flagged players. The most obvious afk botters that were botting without a doubt have been suspended already for 1 week (next offense is perma ban). There are other people on the list flagged as possible botting, with statistics to back it up, that I'll be keeping my eye on. There are very few false positives, and I know what a false positive would look like. I personally botted a Mage on WoW up to level 60 before getting bored and quitting. I even tested some scripts on EQ live back in the days for farming, but never really used them for any gains, was just curious on possibilities. I know what bot like behavior looks like.

EQEmu already has written into the source code something similar to catch people using MQ2, and using stuff like speed run hacks based on distanced X you traveled over Y time, flags you with date, time, location for possible speed hack. It can even be adjusted to allow how much X distance over Y time so people don't get false positive flags. Of course if you get flagged once, might be false positive with laggy server, but if you get flagged 400x per day, it gets obvious. Some of you may have already seen the messages you get for traveling too fast, and yes this means a record was made in the database as possible speed hacker.

I'm also keeping eye out for other abuses and exploits that I won't mention, but did want to mention the botting one. I am pleased to find out that the majority of players are not botting. I can understand that if people bot in their own instance and don't hurt anyone, then what does it matter. Well, if they are farming up tens of millions of platinum easily, and flooding the market with certain items, it affects the prices and economy, then normal non-cheating players have to compete with that when I balance things.

Even if I'm not available for a few days or week, my program will still be watching, and I'll be checking who's on those leader boards when I get back. I'm purposely not saying how the program works or what statistics are being recorded, otherwise people would try to find ways to cheat without getting detected.

You are allowed to use /stick to follow the leader of the group, and your allowed to use it on a mob AFTER your already within melee range of a mob. You are allowed to script a few Bard songs that will cycle through like melody or whatever that was. You are NOT allowed to have the program automatically attack, heal, or search/goto new mob without you having to press a key. You must be at the keyboard, and playing manually. People have been already suspended or banned for spam hailing their pet for buffs, or spam /say to enter guild instance that didn't exist, and were obvious bot with owner afk. Do don't do that stuff either.

Just waking up here, hope that made sense. I know I probably wrote too much. Will revise my post as needed if any confusions. As much as I would like to enjoy the success of my program catching people that don't know they can get caught, I'd rather people not get flagged so I wouldn't have to take time to see what they are up to and ban them. Instead I'd rather use my time to play games myself, or make more content for EZ Server.
 

Updated recipes for UW 1-7 to allow you to use a Master Essence of Frozen Shadow instead of the Essence of Frozen Shadow ranks 1-7. Its optional choice, how to craft the UW 1-7.

Light on items will be reduced by a lot. Reports some zones are hard to see cause too bright.

Druid Epic click Vine Grasp now has more -resist checks to land on bosses.

A new rare boss now spawns when killing Willowisp.

Just waking up, will reboot soon, see if that helps.

Made another tweak, and bringing up server now, hopefully this helps with the lag.

[ONE]

I spent over 2 hours on floor 5 trying to get resists up. It took me that long to build ONE 45 resist stone (9) and I had in the bank a rank 4 and two 5's. I think the amount of time spent on getting resist stones built up is ridiculous.

The best way is to triple aug them with 5s or 6s, depending how high you want to go. Getting to rank 10/11 seems a waste of time imo. of course you might have to now for your maintank anyway

See, now we're thinking about our options.

Yes getting strait up to rank 10 resist stone is not so smart. It would be better to have multiple 5's and 6's inserted into several armors for faster +resist gain.

Leaderboards showing top 10 resist players have 3800-4800 resist already.

Those are likely all main tanks.

When T9 was originally created, the resist checks was working properly AND players were AoE Rampaged by bosses.

Then I did a source code update ... and resist were broken. I'm not sure if it was the updated source code that also made Warrior's Way Warriors invincible vs certain mobs, or the fact that I lowered the mobs levels from like 85-90 down to 1 level above players (Yellow Con) which Hate originally made 400% cause of the level differences.

So it went from difficulty as intended, to invincible Warriors and npc spells all resist. Now we're back to original difficulty intended.

I turned off qs_tables logging for now, since we don't reimburse items anyways.

Was logging literally every action of the players to the database with date, time, item id, slot id, npc id, etc etc, such as selling to merchant, turning in items, looting items, trading items, deleting items, moving items, etc etc. Logs were about 3+ GB so far and I wiped them out (although they are in a backup).

I also rebooted the machine too.

Hopefully lag is a lot better today.

Currently, not many mobs in T9 cast spells. Most of the trash is insects, animals, etc. Some of the humanoid shamans might cast some poisons on you.

I might add some more spell to T9, haven't decided yet.

When I create Tier 10, that'll probably have lots of npc spells with even higher -resist checks than T9 had. So if anyone took advantage of T8 ToV with broken resist, they won't make it far in T9/T10 unless they have a LOT of HP or go back and find various ways to increase resist above at least 4k.

You can drop the fairness thing right now. They will have to back track and get resists to even continue what they are doing now

Um, who cares about getting the resists. You still have to survive the AE and heal  it, as well as trying to maintain aggro from rollover.

Actually, if you have enough resist, you won't have to heal up the spell damage.

So you can focus on resist and/or hp with healing. Both is better

you mean if everyone has 4k resists you dont have to heal?

Not from spell damage. Just main tank would need to be healed from the bosses melee damage.

So you see, either resist and/or healing, take your pick.

Unlocking server now, hopefully running lot smoother now.