ShowEQ

ShowEQ or simply SEQ is an open source program released in 1999 that reads network traffic associated with the MMORPG, EverQuest, and displays various statistics including a map which shows the player s location with respect to surroundings and creatures / non-player characters in the area.

= History =

ShowEQ was highly controversial from its introduction. Simply using the software is a clear violation of Sony Online Entertainment s (SOE s) End User License Agreement, and is an explicitly bannable offense. The program was a Linux-based based program, but there was a port developed for windows and there have been several windows programs that do similar things.

ShowEQ was created by Ashran from Hackersquest in 1999. Originally Everquest had no Encryption on the player packets. Because of ShowEQ and because of some of the hacks that were going on, Verant Interactive started encrypting the player packets. It was quickly broken by Ashran, Megaton and the community at Hackersquest.

Shortly after this, someone decided to port ShowEQ to Microsoft Windows. The program was passive, but the process for the program was visible. Verant discovered that they could detect the windows version of ShowEQ (AKA WinSEQ ) by scanning the end user computers task manager list. There were mass bannings of people who used the WinSEQ version. This had an unintended side effect: the program became widely known to the EverQuest community and brought in many new ShowEQ users. Verant tried to prevent its use by rotating the client s encryption several times a week. Eventually however, Ashran and Megaton worked out an unofficial deal with Verant by putting an end to the WinSEQ program.

Ashran and Megaton moved on to other projects and left the project in the hands of its followers to continue its development, fixing it when Verant patched EverQuest.

In 2000, the project was revitalized by a developer known as Ratt. He moved the project to SourceForge; organized ShowEQ again; and supervised the project. The project flourished under his direction and continues to this day.

Many of ShowEQ s features were useful and made their way into the designs of other MMORPGs and even EverQuest itself. Without the development of ShowEQ, in game maps, the find feature, remaining time on spells and many other features may not have been seen as a priority or developed for the EverQuest client. While ShowEQ s usefulness has diminished, it is still remains a valuable tool.

== Encryption ==

SOE has used a number of Encryption techniques to defeat ShowEQ, but because of the enormous bandwidth and latency demands placed on their servers, there is a point of diminishing returns with respect to strong encryption of the EverQuest protocol.

Because of this, it has been easy enough through most of ShowEQ s existence to simply crack the session key in use by the client that ShowEQ is watching in real-time.

However, for a brief period around the release of The Planes of Power expansion, SOE did go to a stronger encryption scheme (actually, stronger public key cryptography). During this time a number tools were written to recover the key directly from the client computer s memory and share it with ShowEQ, thus circumventing the need to crack the key in the first place.

== MacroQuest ==

In 2002, the introduction of MacroQuest (a tool for directly controling the EverQuest client) began to bring closer scrutiny on the community of EverQuest hacking, and SOE began making in-game changes as well as perform some high-profile user bannings.

Regardless, MacroQuest introduced a new era of EverQuest hacking with more developers getting involved in both projects.

= Guilds and ShowEQ =

Many raiding guilds have been known to use ShowEQ in order to coordinate raids on high-end content. So much so, in fact, that SOE introduced a number of special features only visible to ShowEQ that taunted the guilds for making use of it (e.g. the infamous ShowEQ Users Are Lame. message in the Zones of EverQuest).

= Changes in usage =

Initially the name ShowEQ specifically refered to this program, however, over time people have come to use the term as a general reference to any program that has the same purpose.

= External links =

*On SourceForge, there is a [http://sourceforge.net/projects/seq project page for ShowEQ] *[http://www.showeq.net/forums/index.php The primary ShowEQ forums] *[http://hackersquest.org Hackersquest]