May 2007 Explained:
Around the end of April, KenetixEQ and a couple of other sites all released a "No Delay" weapon hack, as I'm sure most of you here have heard of at some point. While it was not the only game-breaking Plugin that had been put out at that time, it was the most hardcore and completely overpowered.
While MQ2 hacking had been around for a good long while at this point, Sony had, for the most part, looked the other way. People who were using the hacks weren't really interfering with the gameplay of others, so they didn't make it a priority.
With the advent of the damage hacks, all of a sudden everyone's eyes were on the hacking community. We had pretty much remained in the shadows up until that point. We could have stayed that way, but unfortunately some people are just plain stupid and don't use discretion when they break the rules.
Once everyone started crying fowl, Sony changed part of the coding of EQ and the way that the server sent and received Packets. They were then immediately able to not only track, but auto ban ANYONE who used ANY ACTIVE HACK. (Caps for emphasis). On May 15th, 2007 (if I remember that day correctly. We called it "Black Tuesday"), Sony banned pretty much everyone who was using active hacks. The rumor was that between 75,000-100,000 accounts were banned that day.
That completely decimated a good chunk of the MQ community. It took almost a whole year for most of the hacking sites to finally break Sony's code and get active hacks back out to those that were willing to risk using them. Since then, while Sony has cracked down a bit on hacking, they had mostly gone back to ignoring those of use who didn't cause a stir and didn't get reported.
While the new posts by the SOE Devs could be a bluff, I wouldn't put my money on it. I've heard talk that they've been working VERY closely with the EQ Emu devs (surprisingly) to work out a solution to actively tracking people who hack.
Now, SOE has already been sued at one point for including an active scan in their program that looked for running processes, so I don't think that they would worry about those folks that are using passive hacks (
MQ2Map,
MQ2Melee,
MQ2MoveUtils, Non-Warping macros, etc.), I can almost garuntee that they will have an auto-ban program set up very soon to just start nabbing anyone who uses an active hack of any sort (MQ2RWarp, MQ2Piggyzone, MQ2Ghost, etc).
With that said, use MQ2 at your own discretion at this point forward until the Devs here and at MQ2 actually know what the changes that Sony has made actually are, and their lasting effects. If you've been using active hacks, I would back off. If you've been using them in front of people this whole time, well, I'm sorry but you deserve to get banned. It's people that use them in front of people and also to gain an unfair advantage that ruins it for everyone else. The TLP servers are the perfect example of this.
I hope that sums it up for those that were wondering. Remember, be careful.