Teleporting Group of Bots

[Omegabear]

So few days ago I found a group of maybe 10 bots completely breaking the rules of the game. They've clearly hacked the game in a way that allows them to instantly move from one place to another, repeatedly (every few seconds), to any place they desire without casting anything.

The bots were found inside a cavernous area in Central Thanalan in "The Clutch" area. The bots would appear above a group of monsters, kill, disappear, then appear above another group of monsters. The bots were also seen in Ul'dah, zipping in and out of thin air en masse. I'm assuming they are turning in quests. I've taken screenshots and recorded the bots but I can't post here due to forum rules.

I've reported it to GM ingame but unfortunately (as expected) they haven't responded in any way, not even a "we received your message" notice. I'm relatively a new player here, about 1 month old. Are bots like these a normal occurrence?

[Rufalus]

Yes sadly it is a normal occurrence throughout the lifetime of the game. You are encouraged to report them in-game and there's supposed to be a team responsible for dealing with them, but more bot characters will be created.

[Hasrat]

I'd be just about willing to put money on bots being common in nearly any game. If someone somewhere can make money off of selling game resources for cash, bots will flourish. Stopping them is like trying to stop counterfeiters. You can do everything you can to craft the perfect defense, but sooner or later, someone will find a way around it.

[Bacent]

Only way to counteract bots is to make everything in the game untradeable, and having a queue system where you were put into parties at random and couldn't do anything in a premade group. But then you have a terrible game.

They used to be very visible at the start of the game, including spamming the /shout chat so it was basically unusable. Now bots tend to only spam certain gil selling sites around main hubs, and they warp around underground to do MSQ stuff, always as blm lalafell

[REPROBEAN_CHILD]

So few days ago I found a group of maybe 10 bots completely breaking the rules of the game. They've clearly hacked the game in a way that allows them to instantly move from one place to another, repeatedly (every few seconds), to any place the desire without casting anything.

The bots were found inside a cavernous area in Central Thanalan in "The Clutch" area. The bots would appear above a group of monsters, kill, disappear, then appear above another group of monsters. The bots were also seen in Ul'dah, zipping in and out of thin air en masse. I'm assuming they are turning in quests.

Oh nO! ThAt roBoT iS a GhoSt!

[ImDingDing]

That's common and they don't care (bots pay sub too) even on the ghost JP server (we still have large house spot) here, there are lots of BLM bots.

[MsQi]

If that teleporting thing is real that's an exploit.

Multi-boxing, as far as I tell, is not against the rules. This is where multiple characters from multiple accounts respond to the same manual input.

Botting is when there is no human input; it's just running a script, usually repeating. if they are turning in one time quests it's probably not botting. I suppose one could script repeating leves, but those change from time to time.

[KisaiTenshi]

If that teleporting thing is real that's an exploit.

Multi-boxing, as far as I tell, is not against the rules. This is where multiple characters from multiple accounts respond to the same manual input.

Botting is when there is no human input; it's just running a script, usually repeating. if they are turning in one time quests it's probably not botting. I suppose one could script repeating leves, but those change from time to time.

Teleporting is just how it looks to the client. What's actually happening is the bots are moving without sending the movement vectors (the actual animation.) So they go from X/Y/Z to X+Δ/Y+Δ/Z+Δ without going "I'm moving at Q rate of speed on Axis T, rotated by R degrees"

There are about 200 active on Excalibur alone. They start creating new bots on monday morning, and then they run all week until next maintenance, which is when I assume the bots are actually banned, but they've already laundered the gil through the FC and market by then.

[KageTokage]

Stopping the gil farm bots would honestly be as simple as changing boss AI to auto-reset if they're being hit from a location that's impossible to reach legitimately.

They break the boss AI by hacking to float above them at max casting range which makes most of them do nothing.

[SaitoHikari]

Only way to counteract bots is to make everything in the game untradeable, and having a queue system where you were put into parties at random and couldn't do anything in a premade group. But then you have a terrible game.

They used to be very visible at the start of the game, including spamming the /shout chat so it was basically unusable. Now bots tend to only spam certain gil selling sites around main hubs, and they warp around underground to do MSQ stuff, always as blm lalafell

They used to be able to spam /tells as well. It was so bad that I knew plenty of PC players that actually downloaded a third party program known as Guildwork to completely block tells if they contained certain keywords or phrases set by the player. Shortly before Stormblood release, the SE staff disabled the ability for trial accounts to send /tells, which appears to have completely destroyed that intrusive advertising method. The creator of Guildwork hasn't updated the program since (and it no longer works for FF14 as far as I know), likely because the primary function is no longer needed.

I think that recently, the devs might have disabled their ability to send messages in /say as well, judging from the amount of players in Brayflox and below dungeons who don't type back when others ask them questions/try to give them advice regarding their skill usage, but the players are clearly behaving/gesturing as if they are listening. I haven't actually seen any bots advertising /say messages in Limsa as of late, unless they stopped advertising in Sargatanas entirely. These days, I only ever see adverts from trolls/moles in novice network inviting advert bots in before said bots are swiftly booted out.