MASS BANNINGS AND WEIRD PATCHES [Author: Tick]
That and they seem to be keeping a remarkably level head about it.
The situation was summed up pretty well by Warlight Du’Xaviere, a Cleric from Tribunal:
In the past few days, there has been an undetermined number of individuals who have all received the form letter stating that their account has been suspended pending review for banning. The form letter states that their account was found to have attempted to hack into EverQuest multiple times and in multiple forms.
As we put the pieces together, a common bond between the players starts to form:
1) That during the days preceeding the suspension, each player found themselves forced to download an unscheduled patch a number of times over a number of days. It’s possible that the corruption of this file on their machines is a sign of what was going on.. or could be the cause of the flags going up in Verant.
2) Each system, as stated by the each person, is free from 3rd party software normally associated with “hacking” EverQuest.
3) Each system, as stated by each person, is free from viral infestation. Personally, I can vouch that upgraded Nortons and McAffee don’t find anything on the machine.
4) That ALL of these problems originated around the 11th of this month which lead up to the suspensions.
I’m not asking anyone to make any leaps of faith here. I’m just asking that you look at the situations that are common to a number of *UNRELATED* people. Too many things are similar. We’re not talking about a string of people from one guild which could hint at a shared program between them and a valid accusation that perhaps they did something wrong. We’re talking about several people, people who are well known on the server for being “honorable” and against hacking/cheating/exploiting of any sort. We’re talking about people who have hundreds of played days, multiple level 50+ characters and years of investment on accounts to what? Start trying to hack a system? Does that really make sense?
So far, the list I have of people who have had this happen recently is: Saxa, Trindle, Joppa, Corna, and Wolfgardain. Do we know of anyone else that this has happened to? Let’s get a list going of people and perhaps we should approach Verant as one voice.
And people, no. As has been demonstrated by a couple of the people involved, let’s remain calm. Screaming and harassing Verant will not alleviate any of these problems. We need to approach this rationally, intelligently, and calmly if we’re going to get it resolved.
Now we all know there’s lots of script kiddies out there, and the temptation to use some hack or third party application can be pretty strong if you think it’ll give you a leg up on the competition. That said, I don’t think it would hurt for Verant to have a closer look at this one, if for no other reason than it’d be good for people to know when they should start firing off emails to Verant Customer Service saying “hey, something weird just happened, and it wasn’t me.”