http://eqlive.station.sony.com/community/dev_view.jsp
Cheaters and the recent up swell of concern (12-8-03)
Over the last few days there has been a growing community concern about
possible cheating, exploiting and platinum duplication. Rumors and
speculation have begun to run rampant, and I've received a lot of concerned
email on the topic.
First of all, I want to thank you for your concern. The fact that you worry
about this stuff as much as we do makes me feel good about the community
that I work for. I want to especially thank those that have sent in
detailed information about what they thought might be dupe or exploit
situations. That information has been very helpful.
With your help, we have been able to discover and eliminate some unusual
ways of cheating. Obviously I can't go into detail about exactly how this
cheating was done. I can tell you that several of our programmers and
designers took lengthy breaks from working on their current tasks to define,
investigate and smash those exploits. Most of these methods for cheating
have been removed. The few that remain will be fixed shortly. We will be
watching, and anyone using them will be banned.
At the same time, our Customer Service folks have been diligently tracking
down the cheaters. We have banned accounts and deleted characters in the
hundreds. It's never a good thing to be forced to remove so many accounts,
and we're not happy that such cheating was possible. We are pleased,
however, to let you know that we are confident that we have located the
majority of those that exploited the game and have removed their characters
or accounts.
Obviously we won't be able to prevent all of the possible ways to cheat.
The folks that insist on trying to cheat have proven to be persistent and
clever (and here is where I wonder why they don't apply that energy and
skill to something beneficial...). We need your help to locate these
issues. The multitude of eyes and ears of our players is always the best
source of information for us. If you ever suspect that you have discovered
something that seems like an exploit, please send that information to us
through the Developer's Corner AND through /bug. Please don't assume we
have heard the information already. We'd rather have ten reports about
something like this than none.
I'd also like to address a rumor about the nature of some of the cheating
that people have been talking about. There has been speculation in the
community that in order to pull off some of the rumored exploits someone had
to be working on the "inside".
We take such possibilities very seriously. And we have investigated this
very thoroughly. We keep track of all special EverQuest commands issued.
We have looked into the possibility that someone working here had a hand in
helping others cheat, and we have discovered no evidence that indicates that
to be the case. Also, the nature of the cheat did not require such inside
help. I can't describe the cheat method in any detail, but there was an
experience cheat that allowed extremely fast leveling. This required some
rather sophisticated cheating, but was being done without inside help.
Obviously we have removed that exploit and banned any accounts that used it.
Thank you for playing EverQuest. And thank you for you help making the game
fun.
Have a great holiday season.
Alan
Sony's official stance on plat cheats 
Sony's official stance on plat cheats
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