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Old 05-21-2008, 07:24 PM
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trevius
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Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: USA
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You mention that MQ2 was meant as a means to help assist players. Yes, that is true, and some of the features like the /stick autofollow feature is nice. But, when it gets to the point where players are starting to use scripts for the command /tell options where they tell one of their characters something and it does whatever they tell them (heal, buff, etc), that alone is giving them a large advantage over players without MQ. Not to mention that if a server wanted to allow people to play their characters that way, they might as well enable the offline bots so all players can have a similar experience.

Then, you get into more advanced scripts where entire groups could be killing in an area for days to XP or farm cash or whatever, and that is just wrong and completely abusing the system. Combining these macros with warping ability makes MQ a huge threat to any legit server. Both of them give huge advantages over players who play legit and have caused endless drama between players. Not only that, but all server admins work hard to develop content and create balanced zones for character progression. By warping, players are negating all of that hard work and skipping straight to the reward. IMO, if a player wants to cheat, they should go to a non-legit server so there is no need to use MQ to do it.

I allow the use of MQ on my server for maps only. This is mainly because there is no way to ever detect it and it only gives a slight advantage over players that don't have it. Also, there is not much of a chance that seeing which spawns are up will cause any dispute between players like we get from players that warp or macro.

As for server admins with harsh punishment for being caught by MQ detection tools, there isn't really many other options. In the past, I used to give players every last chance to stop cheating and time and time again they just lied to me and continued cheating. I spent countless hours watching them to catch them with my own eyes when possible. I have MUCH better things to do with my time, so now I just rely on my detection tools and make a judgement call as to when to ban. If you see many character in the same guild all tripping MQ detection, then there is a good chance that they all have MQ and are abusing it. There are other ways to check into this as well. But, there is no reason why any server admin should have to spend so many hours just to keep their server free of cheaters. It is a slap in the face to any admin every time someone cheats. We make these servers for players to enjoy, so all of the hard work we put into them gets the middle finger when players can't follow the extremely simple rules and policies of the server.
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