style="background: transparent url('http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/193880') no-repeat scroll 50% 0%; -moz-background-clip: initial; -moz-background-origin: initial; -moz-background-inline-policy: initial; vertical-align: top;">One August evening my guild and I had spent several hours working ourway deep into one of the biggest, most complex, and certainlychallenging dungeons of EverQuest's Time-Locked Progression Server. Wehad dealt with several trains, a few deaths, and a lot of teamwork. Butwe were close to our goal. One of our clerics needed the Singed Scrollfrom Overlord Bathezid in Chardok and we were closing in on it. We wereon the verge of getting our first epic cleric in the guild and spiritswere high.For those of you who may not know what the TLPs of EQ are check out myarticle from earlier this year, href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/eq/editorials/tlp">ChasingEverQuest. To summarize it is aspecial ruleset server for EverQuest which launched in February withjust the classic game; no expansions enabled. As guilds defeat certaincontent a vote is activated and anyone playing on the server who islevel 30 or above can vote to unlock the next expansion.So on this August night we had set ourselves the goal of getting one ofour clerics their epic piece. With this quest complete it would allowour cleric to rez our members without the high mana cost, so it meant alot less down time during raids which in EQ is a huge deal. So there wewere, deep in Chardok, with no competition at the time. We could tastevictory. We pulled the last few mobs in our way, and then startedbuffing for the encounter.Suddenly a group of 8 characters appeared right in front of us. Beforewe had a chance to ask any questions the group ran ahead, pulled allthree bosses on top of our raid and poofed out of existence. We foughtvaliantly, but without being fully prepared we fell. It was a wipe.Lucky for us we had managed to save a rezzer from the train, so afterthings looked safe again we began rezzing our raid. Then, again, thismysterious group of 8 suddenly appeared in front of us, and begankilling the targets we were setting up for.As you can imagine, the guild started becoming a tad anxious. "What thehell is he doing?" my members asked. We tried more communications withthe group, at which the only response was another train, and then poof!the players disappeared into oblivion again. Recovery at that point wasno walk in the park as our safety net had been killed in the nexttrain. As I tried to get things organized for the corpse recovery Iwatched the group of 8 kill the rest of the bosses we were after andthen magically disappear again.We finished our rezzes and teleported the raid out and called it anight. Sure, we had wasted several hours of the night to come out emptyhanded but the real frustration felt was that all of our efforts werebotched by a hacker. We fought our way down legitimately and this guywho we suspected was boxing all 8 characters due to synchronizedmovement and casting, was able to simply warp in, train us until wewere no longer competition, and warp back out to safety.Hacking by use of third party programs has become an epidemic in ouronline world of Norrath. We even had one of our main tanks decide he nolonger wanted to be a part of the guild so one night he trained ourraid, warped out, and disbanded from the guild. I have to hand it tothat guy though--might as well go out with a bang. href="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/forums/show.m?forum_id=1444">Officialand unofficial forums for the game are filling up withcomplaints of hackers. Rare mobs that only spawn once every 24 hoursare being href="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/posts/list.m?topic_id=178701">de-spawnedby these folk before they even render fully ingame, preventing legitimate players from completing quests (wherethey've sat for days on end waiting for the NPC to spawn). Guilds arebeing beaten down by unfair competition. Some even go so faras having scripts set up to href="http://www.fippydarkpaw.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=1334">automaticallywarp dozens of shadow knightson top of a contested spawn as soon as it spawns and death touch it,downing it within milliseconds - without anyone actually at thekeyboard.Sadly, this sort of behavior has become common on the TLPs. Competitiveguilds cannot compete against computer scripts, so some have chosen tofight hacks with more hacks, leading to an automated battle of computervs. computer where the end user may or may not even be watching. Thefeeling among many is that these hackers have largely goneundisciplined by Sony Online Entertainment, so what's stopping anyonefrom cheating?In an effort to swing things back to a positive community, however,some end-game players decided to put a stop to the hacking at leastwithin their own guilds. href="http://www.fippydarkpaw.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1472&p=16359">Leadersand officers were demoted or removedfrom the guild and efforts were made to reach out to the rest of thecommunity to say "hey! We're not hacking anymore!"In a fundamentally socially dependent game, not seen in most moderntitles, community policing and player reputation were paramount tosuccess within the game... at least back in 1999. However today withmore advanced technology which enables even the most modest computersto run multiple instances of the game these elements have been madelargely obsolete. When a player can run their own boxed group, or insome cases href="http://www.fippydarkpaw.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1555">evenguilds, reputation has no consequence. As the game isalso maturing past the 12-year mark, its popularity has suffered whichin turn means a decline in resources SOE can put into customer servicestaff. With these limited resources players may feel that communitypolicing has become an uphill battle with no chance of victory in sight.So what can be done? Check out Part Two of ourthree-article series as Ten Ton Hammer talks toSean "Rogean" Norton and "Haynar" of href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/features/everquest/nostalgia">Project1999 fame to see whatthey've done on an emulated server to combat their own onslaught ofcheaters.