ShowEQ users are bad, cheating, *ssholes? Huh?

[binky]

I keep seeing all of this talk on different forums etc, about how people who use ShowEQ are "cheating" and they're "bad" people (even "assholes") who are ruining the game for everyone, and how they'll have to learn to play the game how it was supposed to be played..

Well.. I really disagree with all of that because i use ShowEQ for the following:

1. Finding my way around a world which, because of lack of unique models and textures like a REALISTIC world would have, looks the bloody same and is too easy to get lost in.
2. Camp checking because 1/3 of the people don't speak English well and don't know what "camp check pls?" means. 1/3 of the people are rude and anti-social and don't respond. The last 1/3 of the people don't see the /ooc camp check because it's flooded out with battle spam.
3. Checking to see the exact level of mobs so i know what is single-pullable or not, because frankly the whole /con system is botched.
4. Monitoring for idiots training mobs.

Now what are those 4 things? Time savers. It's not cheating. It's not stealing anything from other players. They're at no disadvantage because of any of our actions. What, they want a whole bunch of people getting lost and training them? What, they want people arriving at a camp and compete for it and ruin the camp for both of them, when they could've seen the camp was taken with ShowEQ long before and gone somewhere else?

How annoying is it getting lost in a world that looks the same no matter which way you turn? How annoying is it to spend a lot of time getting to a camp you want, only to find that it's taken? How annoying is it for 2 supposedly identical mobs (blue con, they look the same) to not assist each other one time but then assist each other the next time, forcing you to run away or die and waste time? How annoying is it for idiots to train mobs over you and then you have to, again, run away or die?

Facts:
* Other people idiotically train.
* The /con system is botched.
* EQ is not big enough to accomodate everyone and you are forced to compete.
* EQ doesn't have enough textures and models thus making it too easy to get lost.

ShowEQ fixes those problems.

If you're content with paying SOE money for EQ "how it is meant to be", then you're pretty insane. Pay them money to compete for camps and waste of lot of time getting what you deserve as a paying customer? Pay them money to turn around and get smacked in the face by 10 dragons which some idiot trained onto you but didn't /shout TRAIN!? Pay them money to get frustrated losing yourself or your corpse or dying and wasting all that time?

I don't know about anyone else but IMHO, EQ + SEQ is the only way to play. When SEQ is broken it really just takes so much longer to get things done and it opens a whole can of frustration.

Pay money to get frustrated. Yeah i like the sound of that.

"Assholes" huh? No, ShowEQ lets me avoid all the assholes, save a little time, and lets me try to have some fun. I pay to play a game to have some fun. If i wanted to deal with assholes and time wasting, i'd just walk out the door and try to deal with people on the street.

Opinions? Please, i'd like to hear what other people think about the bad light shed on ShowEQ users.

Cheers.

[PlanetBOB]

Alot of the people callin SEQ users for aholes, believe seq does a whole lot more than just display spawns, whith accurate level information and such...

But no matter how much you defend your use of seq, its still cheating, in the most basic concept of the word.. you have an edge others dont have, which per definition you shouldnt have, even if you just use it for pur gps purposes..

Its arguable if it makes you a less cheater if you smart enough to make it work though with out whining, or borthering others, i believe sometimes it does..

[Exo]

It's more basic than that.

The people that make the rules of the game say you can't use ShowEQ. You use it and get away with it, that's cheating because you are breaking the rules If your gonna cheat at least be able to look at yer self and say, "What a wonderful cheater am I!" that's what I do :P

[LordCrush]

/agree Exo - it *is* cheating, but i have no problem with that...
I did change the games-save-files of Bardstale too...

[AbaddonxXx69]

Hehe, /cheers Lord Crush

Bards Tale II here, lol. I was able to buy all the 7 rod pieces from a store. I'm pretty sure thats not how that game was meant to be played.

[anon2]

Ohh.... I remember HEX editing Bard's Tale, and Might and Magic II. Gawd that was a long time ago

Anyone ever HEX edit Sim City to give yourself infinite money ?
Ahhhh those were the days.

[binky]

True, true. What you guys say is right, it *is* still cheating, but not stereotypical "cheating". As i said, people seem to put all ShowEQ users into this "bad person" "*sshole" type category. Really though, there's a lot more decent people than there isn't who use ShowEQ, i am sure.

As i said, i don't use it gain any extreme unfair advantage over other people. I'm sure a lot of other people don't use it like that either. But it's extremely limited to what it can do anyway. ShowEQ is not even close to the same category that macro tradeskill pp making programs are put in, nor anything to do with item duping, or using any sort of strange modifcation to get skills or spells from other classes or anything like that. It's not a *huge* cheat.

There's two ways to cheat, remember. The first is to be an *sshole and disadvantage others, steal from them, annoy them, etc. A big problem in PvP huh? The other way is to passively improve your game while still respecting others and letting them get what they honestly earn.

As long as it doesn't affect other people, can it really be even called "cheating"? Barely, i guess.

Another thing i use ShowEQ for is to calculate xp gains and to look at combat stats. That's not "cheating", but it is "cheating".. You know what i mean? Hard to describe really. Only people who use ShowEQ would understand it.

"Alot of the people callin SEQ users for aholes, believe seq does a whole lot more than just display spawns," <-- I think that's very true and it's a shame those people can't be educated.

I'll admit to that using ShowEQ is cheating. Yes. But it's not even close to being that simple. There's a whole can of moral worms to be chewed on. I use ShowEQ to save myself time because quite frankly, the current "rules" of EQ are slow and boring. It's not really worth playing otherwise. Who here can tell me EQ isn't the biggest damn timesink since the beginning of time?

Cheers.

[smoothielover]

please do a serch on lawyer and read my opinion

seq does not BREAK eula

[binky]

I forgot to mention...

I'd like everyone to remember that i started this thread to discuss the issue of us being called "*ssholes", not whether it's "cheating" or not.

SEQ is cheating? Whatever. It's cheating if that's what you want to call it. But anybody with any skill other than grandmaster nitpicking (250!) will know that it's not as simple as that though. If you do think it's that simple then i'll quit EQ+SEQ and put you, along with people who macro to make pp, dupe, crash, annoy, KS, etc into a boat labelled "*ssholes" and stamp "cheater" on your forehead. No, didn't think you'd want to be in the same boat as those cheaters. There is a big difference you see.

I'd also like to know what other people use ShowEQ for.

Cheers.

[binky]

Originally posted by smoothielover
please do a serch on lawyer and read my opinion

seq does not BREAK eula

Good post. Not the direction i wanted this thread to go, but nevertheless, a worthwhile post with solid reasoning.

The URL for those who haven't trained Search at their guild master yet:

http://seq.sourceforge.net/showthrea...&threadid=2239

Cheers.

[BlueAdept]

Most people dont know what ShowEQ is or does. It is like those people on SOE's message boards that say "Nerf this class it is too powerfull" or "Nerf this class because they can do this that my char cant do". Instead of complaining, try the other class.

I have to admit that on my first char, I almost posted one of those messages (3 years ago), but instead I went and played that class and liked it. Of my 12 chars, he is my highest one.

What got me into SEQ was Verants talk about how detrimental it was and how it would destroy EQ. At first I thought it was a good thing that Verant was going to try to put an end to it....until I actually researched and found what it does.

The first one I ran was the WinSEQ, but didnt really like it. Since I needed to learn linux for my work, I decided to set up the linux one and never looked back. Im kind of glad I did since about a month later, the mass WinSEQ bannings began.

Originally SEQ was more of a threat in the begining. Rares were pretty much everything. Now with the auction channel and the bazaar, rares are pretty much useless.

I use SEQ for navigation, avoidance of stuff, sometimes for finding stuff that is in my level range to pull, occasionally finding a specific NPC for a quest. I dont think that SEQ is detrimental to EQ. I think it is more of a handy tool rather than an exploit.

Heh...I used to play (and cheat) on bards tale on the apple. I was so happy when they finally ported it over to the PC. I liked Might and Magic over Bards tale though. Ultima 3 was probably by far my favorite game. I still play it on the apple emulator.

[three-p-o]

I cheat and I'm proud of it.

[fryfrog]

Remember that time you were level 12 and you lost your body in a new zone? You spent hours and hours looking for it, you learned that you should issue a "/loc" right before you die the hard way. Remember that person that finally said "/ooc hey, I just passed your body at about loc X,Y"... they were using ShowEQ. Wasn't it great having your body back without having to track down a bard or necro?

Remember when you were in dreadlands and you found this really great group? The puller was on top of his game, rarely pulling more than 1 or 2 mobs at once? Wasn't it great that most of those mobs were higher cons? The puller was using ShowEQ.

Remember when you and a group of friends decided to goto a fairly new zone, which none of you had experience in? You all wandered around and got hopelessly lost (or so you thought). When it came time to go home, one of your group mates just KNEW where the zone out was. Wasn't it great not being lost for hours when you needed to log because you were already late for work? Guess who was using ShowEQ.

Remember when the uberguild you were in was raiding that really cool uber mob? Do you remember how the pull worked very well and was coordinated between a few monks and other classes? Wasn't it great when it got to the right spot, didn't agro anything else and the fight was won and well planned? Yeah, guess who was using ShowEQ to coordinate the pull...

Remember when you went to fear/hate for your epic piece? A "tracker" told everyone that your mob was up, and you were very happy. The raid started, and eventually your epic mob is pulled and you get your epic part... someone there was using ShowEQ.

Do you remember KC? Boy, that zone is train city. Remember that time you grouped there but somehow managed to never train the zone, never pull more than was intended? Or maybe a train was approaching and the puller said "run, train". Did you really think he was just "narrowly escaping it" himself? He was using ShowEQ.

Remember when you were search for that rare spawn that drops a part for your epic, but EVERY time you stood a chance of finding it some druid or ranger was already there killing it and offering to sell you a cloak they didn't need for 10k? Bet you wish you had ShowEQ.

Remember when VI messed up that encounter, but refused to fix it because it was "working as intended"? Or when that skill/ability seemed to not really be doing anything? What tool do you think was mostly responsible for figuring out that something was truely wrong in the first place? Some hidden tool that VI uses? No, it was SEQ.

Will I quit because SEQ only works as a GPS? Probably not. I won't have as much fun in the game, I won't stand much of a chance against the uber guilds and the loot farmers. I don't think I will get lost, but I might run accross mobs that kill me.

What would it take to break ShowEQ perminently? Add some of its features to the game. A "Map Making" skill along with a "Map Reading" skill would remove the need for a GPS. Some way of actually losing agro when you finally outrun a mob would help. Tracking classes that had an instinctual picture of the close mobs surrounding them on their "map". Instead of trying to break ShowEQ with encryption and banning, perhaps focus should be spent on making the features of ShowEQ not needed.

[throx]

Someone made an excellent post on a board somewhere (forget where):

A game is defined by a set of rules. If you are using SEQ then you aren't playing Everquest because you are using a different set of rules.

In response to fryfrog, this is actually great material for those who want SEQ to continue to be broken. Each and every case given is a good illustration of the ways SEQ gives players an advantage over those who do not use it and continuing to extol SEQ's virtues in this way is the best way I can imagine to keep Sony's wrath focussed on it.

For me, SEQ was a nice technical project. I enjoyed both the defeat of the pseudo-encryption that Sony put into the products and the challenge of porting libeq.a to Windows every time it changed (a lot easier than it sounds, believe me). In may ways I'm glad Sony has finally figured out how to make decent encryption and shut it down. I'm not sorry to see it go and I think Ratt's post was childish at best - reminds me of a 5 year old threatening to hold their breath until you give in to their demand for more cookies.

[Virusmaster]

Lol. Those folks calling SEQ users names don't realize how many of their "friends" are using the proggie