The AFK elephant in the room.

I know name/shaming/witch hunting isnt allowed, but can we take a minute to talk about the giant afk elephant in the room?

I did a quick tour of marjame ravine and found every lair had 1-2 people at it. No one responded to tells, and they stayed there for 48+ hours at a time.

I check when i wake up at 5 am, when i get home at 4 pm, and before bed at 10pm.

So I wonder to myself how prevalent the problem is so i did a quick survey and found the same issue in kamhir drift, and morimar basalt. Even to a lesser extent in inner/outer raz.

A seemingly endless supply of people drinking enough red bull to kill the same lair every 5 minutes for 24/7.

Now i have taken to STF to report said people a few times. In fact, every day for almost a month straight. And guess what, my list of over 20+ people who do this 24/7 are still there.

So my only conclusion is this activity must be allowed. I've heard in the past this was punished and people recieved bans, but I am just not seeing it.

I actually use lair reives to skillup sometimes, so I'm guilty of camping at least one spot. I was working on magic skillup for my GEO, and was camping one of the lair reives. Someone came by once the reive started and simply blasted it away. I attempted to chat with them, but I got no response. After two or three spawns of them repeating their actions (I believe they were running from Reive to Reive) and just ignoring me, I simply left the area.

1 person actively camping a lair and chating isn't exactly what i was talking about. More so the 20+ people who are 'not so actively' camping it and dont respond to tells but manage to kill it 24/7 for days straight.

I myself use lairs/colonizations to skill up as well since they have 0 evasion, but like you if someone sent me a tell they would get a responce.

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Originally Posted by Pups323

1 person actively camping a lair and chating isn't exactly what i was talking about. More so the 20+ people who are 'not so actively' camping it and dont respond to tells but manage to kill it 24/7 for days straight.

I myself use lairs/colonizations to skill up as well since they have 0 evasion, but like you if someone sent me a tell they would get a responce.

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a) Why do you care?
b) How are they hurting you?
c) Why should someone respond to you if they don't want to? Just because you respond that means everyone has to?
d) How do you know they aren't just zonked there and afk most of the time? Just because they are there doesn't mean they are THERE the full time.

Lastly, why would you actively seek to get people banned for something that has almost no impact on you at all?

a) i care because it means i have to find different lairs so i can participate in to actively farm (and see B)
b) if i cant find a lair to farm i cant get bayld/skill ups/skirmish pops/cloaks
c) you dont have to respond to me, but if a gm shows up and you are still farming and not responding to him dont be suprised if you get a vacation
d) i dont know if they are there 100% of the time, just the 3 times a day i check, see my above post...but lets be serious, there are magically 20+ individuals with the stamina to farm 24/7? come on how stupid do you think we are.

Because it actively affects the economy and availability of HQPB (devs think there are a lot more than there really are), prices of skirmish items, etc. There would be a lot less ergon weapons if only legit ones were allowed. Its not the person who is buying's fault, they have no way of knowing where it came from, but at the same time, but if only 1 ergon had been made to date the developers would be more likely to acknowledge the need for alternative forms of acquiring HQPB.

You can try to justify it all you want, in the end its cheating, and against the ToS, just because the STF seems to be super laxed and not banning for it doesnt mean they shouldnt.

You're probably right that AFK bots (and let's be real, that's what they are) skew the number of HPB (it's not HQPB, please don't let that catch on). As I recall they did a sweep many months ago to catch reive bots as well as people who were farming JP afk. I'd thought that they had remained vigilant since then but I guess not? I've not checked the usual spots on my server but I wouldn't be surprised if SE has been slacking.

That said, I've made 2 Idris and it was absolutely horrible finding HPB to buy after said sweeps. The supply was horrible and you were stuck buying maybe a single here or there which is not fun when you need so many. So I'm sure a ton of what I bought was botted and I even refused to buy from certain people at the time but that just made me finish slower.

I'm not convinced that SE would adjust the acquisition methods or quest requirements unless some absolutely massive exploit was being perpetuated and that's clearly not what this is. Those people you see out there are taking real, serious risks with their accounts and that's why there are so few of them. It's actually funny because after they made their last sweep they went ahead and nerfed Courier Coalition from... I want to say 16.8k Bayld to 10k something Bayld today. So no, I don't think what you're recommending would affect SE's balance at all.

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Originally Posted by detlef

That said, I've made 2 Idris

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Geez just making 1 epeoltry made me want to slit my wrist. How'd you do it man

GEO is incredible and my group needs the crutch so that's why I felt it was necessary. As for how it was funded, I'd say one of them was fully funded just from selling etched memories when they were hot. The other thing I did was Couriers on many, many mules daily. The AH update has made things a lot easier for both buyers and sellers. I think people are more willing to convert and sell now that it isn't necessary to bazaar.

I think I'd prefer for SE to go easier on these people for now while they find a longer term solution to keep people creating new bayld. Hopefully something beyond just the WKR event they have periodically.

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Originally Posted by peculiar

a) Why do you care?
b) How are they hurting you?
c) Why should someone respond to you if they don't want to? Just because you respond that means everyone has to?
d) How do you know they aren't just zonked there and afk most of the time? Just because they are there doesn't mean they are THERE the full time.

Lastly, why would you actively seek to get people banned for something that has almost no impact on you at all?

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Don't even need to read pups' reply to answer this.

A) Care because the game should remain fair to everyone.
B) Botting does indeed negatively affect the economy as a whole, while positively lining someone's pockets.
C) Sure, one person not replying, 5 people not replying.. Okay but no replies is pretty suspicous.
D) If she sees them attacking the reive, they're probably there.

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Originally Posted by detlef

GEO is incredible and my group needs the crutch so that's why I felt it was necessary. As for how it was funded, I'd say one of them was fully funded just from selling etched memories when they were hot. The other thing I did was Couriers on many, many mules daily. The AH update has made things a lot easier for both buyers and sellers. I think people are more willing to convert and sell now that it isn't necessary to bazaar.

I think I'd prefer for SE to go easier on these people for now while they find a longer term solution to keep people creating new bayld. Hopefully something beyond just the WKR event they have periodically.

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Yeah guess buying it would be easier if you had a decent supply and was making the monies. I got real stubborn cause someone said it couldn't be farmed so I did. I did the courier mule thing too as well as multibox reives which led to using the parts for multibox balyd skirmish runs. Fun times

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b) How are they hurting you?

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They hurt people by continually wrecking them, e.g. you don't get a chance to get credit for them. Lair reieves are super squishy.

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Originally Posted by Pups323

I know name/shaming/witch hunting isnt allowed, but can we take a minute to talk about the giant afk elephant in the room?

I did a quick tour of marjame ravine and found every lair had 1-2 people at it. No one responded to tells, and they stayed there for 48+ hours at a time.

I check when i wake up at 5 am, when i get home at 4 pm, and before bed at 10pm.

So I wonder to myself how prevalent the problem is so i did a quick survey and found the same issue in kamhir drift, and morimar basalt. Even to a lesser extent in inner/outer raz.

A seemingly endless supply of people drinking enough red bull to kill the same lair every 5 minutes for 24/7.

Now i have taken to STF to report said people a few times. In fact, every day for almost a month straight. And guess what, my list of over 20+ people who do this 24/7 are still there.

So my only conclusion is this activity must be allowed. I've heard in the past this was punished and people recieved bans, but I am just not seeing it.

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Same on this server, Marjami has a few /anon /noLS /randomname mithras spamming the lair and colo reives at flux 4, on a loop for 24/7. I noticed this because I keep changing my Seekers ring which costs me 300k bayld every time (lol) and I have changed it around nine times now. And I farm bayld from Coalition runs (mainly) WKR sometimes, and top up my bayld by spanking a few reives in Marjami. Every time I go there, the same mithras are killing the flux 4 reives on a tight loop, day and night.

They are not all AFK, but yes they do play 24 hours a day. If you watch documentaries about RMT Sweatshops, they are often homeless children who are locked in basements full of old PCs, and being forced to play 24 hrs/day for basic food and a blanket. It is a very cruel life, and they are mistreated if they don't play efficiently enough. They are ordered not to answer /tells or add friends in games, this coupled with (in many cases) lack of basic English, is why you don't get replies. They aren't AFK, they're just doing what they're told to do. You may notice that if you try to talk to them, sometimes they will run-away and log off for a while, this is because they are not allowed to communicate with "real" players.

This problem of course exists in all the other online games to varying degrees, and it is not a failing of FFXI specifically. FFXI is on /shelfmode now and has a small team working on it, so there isn't the manpower to track this type of activity. The other problem is that XPing and building a serviceable lvl 99 character has now become so super fast and easy, even when an offender get banned, they are right back the next week on a new character.

Dynamis Qufim is the most obvious place for this, there is a taru team working the same 4 camps 24/7, again /anon /noLS /randomnames and again they don't answer tells. They will sometimes get frightened and log-off if you /tell them.

On one level I feel sorry for the ones who are sweatshop kids, it is a global humanitarian crime by any standards. But at the same time, this activity does ruin the computergame for most normal players, who may only have a single free hour in the evening, to farm Reives or Dynamis. We are all victims of one kind or another, in this often brutal RMT experiment, nobody really wins. It is sorrowful to see it, and while I have sympathy for the mistreated kids, I still always hope to see the camp-dominating teams get booted from this and all online games.

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Originally Posted by Stompa

If you watch documentaries about RMT Sweatshops, they are often homeless children who are locked in basements full of old PCs, and being forced to play 24 hrs/day for basic food and a blanket. It is a very cruel life, and they are mistreated if they don't play efficiently enough. They are ordered not to answer /tells or add friends in games, this coupled with (in many cases) lack of basic English, is why you don't get replies. They aren't AFK, they're just doing what they're told to do. You may notice that if you try to talk to them, sometimes they will run-away and log off for a while, this is because they are not allowed to communicate with "real" players.

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Holy...wow. ; ;

But yeah, there are also reive bots too. Someone I knew was banned (rightfully) for running such a bot.

There are also people still afk killing.

Come on people, when you are in a zone for 24/7 and you move at 90 degree angles its supper obvious. The worst part, is you can report them and they are still there 4 months later still doing it on another job. I have tried in game reports, and STF reports and some people just seem immune to punishment.

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Originally Posted by peculiar

a) Why do you care?
b) How are they hurting you?
c) Why should someone respond to you if they don't want to? Just because you respond that means everyone has to?
d) How do you know they aren't just zonked there and afk most of the time? Just because they are there doesn't mean they are THERE the full time.

Lastly, why would you actively seek to get people banned for something that has almost no impact on you at all?

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Still chaps me that an obvious guilty party would come in here and try to defend it...

Example A:
You see a long line to check out at a grociery store. Do you wait in line for your turn, or go to the front of the line and cut in?

Most people will wait in line, you are not anonymous, and people can see who you are and what you are doing.

Example B:
You are in a car and see a long line of cars in the exit ramp/turn lane. Do you wait in line, or drive to the front and cut in?

Due to the anonymous nature of cars, more people are willing to be rude and try to cut to he front and possess one of the following mind sets of:
'its just cars, who am i hurting by doing this'
'i am the smartest person ever check out this short cut'
'i only do it because everyone else does it, and if i dont, i have to wait longer'.

Finally, you get to example 3:
You see a long tedious grind for something in a game (basically a line you must wait in to get to where you want to be). Do you grind it out and earn it, or do you cheat to get it without working?

Now due to the lack of real world consequences to most actions taken in video games, the number of people willing to say 'cheat' grows exponentially, with the justifications becoming more outlandish.

'Who does it hurt, i am only benefiting myself'
'why do you care what i do in an online game'

As you can see, the more detached from human interaction you get, the more people try to justify bad behavior. It
'its only a game, and games are supposed to be fun!'

Your examples aren't really comparable. The fastest/easiest way to make an ergon weapon is to buy HPB. As a buyer I was glad to find people who would sell me 400 HPB a day every day because 13099 is a pretty big number. The people selling 400 HPB (who are likely botting) aren't cutting any sort of a line - they're probably not even making ergons themselves. They are cheating, but they aren't denying you from also participating in a reive. You could camp with them and both get lower evals but still get all the other things you mentioned wanting from a reive. I don't think SE is going to clue in to how hard it is to get HPB even if you get every single bot on every server banned. They've decided that their system works and not much is going to change that with the number of ergons already completed.

But it does in fact hurt everyone, even if it makes it easier for someone to make an ergon. 1. As Pups said, it artificially inflates the economy with HPB, making SE feel like the current ways to gain it are enough.
2. It prevents legitimate players from getting as much contribution from reives.
3. It raises the supply and thus lowers the selling value of HPB. With no bots, in the current system, HPB acquisition rate would be so low that it would be valued at more than 30k a pop. Thus botters hurt legit players' income as well by artificially driving down the economy.
4. It then drives gil to the cheating players who can then pay higher prices for other items making it even more difficult for legit players to buy ,say, crafted materials. IE, the rich get richer, the poor stay poor.
Sure, it makes it easier to make ergons, but it without a doubt hurts the entire server economy.

So either you have two states. You have the state of HMP: Good luck finding some (not even that common during event) or the state of HP Bayld: Not hard to find, the bots will get it for you.

:/

There's Alexandrite too, but many jobs can solo Salvage II now, so it's a large investment of time or gil, your choice.

RMT just doesn't seem to be an issue these days but I could be wrong. I think the vast majority of reive botters were actual players because you could check them and see their linkshells and everything. At least that is how it was.

Obviously letting people run wild on Reives isn't tenable but as I stated earlier I'd rather SE not go crazy with bans until a better, more sustainable HPB solution is introduced to the game. Then by all means.

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Originally Posted by OmnysValefor

So either you have two states. You have the state of HMP: Good luck finding some (not even that common during event) or the state of HP Bayld: Not hard to find, the bots will get it for you.

:/

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So much this. As is people have to server transfer to get enough HPB from some servers. I'd hate to see it become that much harder to make an ergon.

The long and the short of it is: This is the situation we end up when you tie a drop to otherwise-worthless content.

30-40k/piece is not enough that it's worth farming, but it's enough for bots to do, because it's simple and not dangerous at all. Nobody can stop them from doing it either

This is actually surprising to hear considering the ban waves a few months ago.

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Originally Posted by Angemon

This is actually surprising to hear considering the ban waves a few months ago.

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It's surprising that people afk farm? *REALLY?* It's ALWAYS been a thing, and is ALWAYS going to be a thing.

"The Grind" is the enemy, and there is always, and I mean ALWAYS people trying to circumvent it.

As for the real issue at hand it's a vicious cycle. HPB is literally impossible to get for the sane person. If there were ZERO afk farmers, basically all Idris would be non-existant. Square creates these insane grinds for the mentally insane players, and then the programmers use that insane grind to make money. Everything looks good on squares end, because people ARE making Ergons. Everything looks good on players end, cause they're making BANK. Everything looks perfect on paper, and that's all that counts.

A very small amount of people (vocal people) are the only complainers, I don't even know why. It affects you in no way at all. Except positively.

Theres no reason a regular player should care whether lairs are up or not. There is no reason to do them. If you lack skill, use Uragnites, they're EPIC for skill ups.

No matter how many you ban they will come back. I also know some people that aren't actually killing them afk but just afk at the area and kill it whenever they are there. Like knew of some people who would even do it at work when boss not looking or during lunch break. Then when get home etc

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Originally Posted by dasva

No matter how many you ban they will come back. I also know some people that aren't actually killing them afk but just afk at the area and kill it whenever they are there. Like knew of some people who would even do it at work when boss not looking or during lunch break. Then when get home etc

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I totally agree with this as to why a lot of players go AFK or why there are AFK players for long periods of time by knowing where there playing from and knowing what's keeping them occupied in real life to be jumping back on to their online characters always being online "is only half the battle" in mental health smarts!

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Originally Posted by Vae

It's surprising that people afk farm? *REALLY?* It's ALWAYS been a thing, and is ALWAYS going to be a thing.

"The Grind" is the enemy, and there is always, and I mean ALWAYS people trying to circumvent it.

As for the real issue at hand it's a vicious cycle. HPB is literally impossible to get for the sane person. If there were ZERO afk farmers, basically all Idris would be non-existant. Square creates these insane grinds for the mentally insane players, and then the programmers use that insane grind to make money. Everything looks good on squares end, because people ARE making Ergons. Everything looks good on players end, cause they're making BANK. Everything looks perfect on paper, and that's all that counts.

A very small amount of people (vocal people) are the only complainers, I don't even know why. It affects you in no way at all. Except positively.

Theres no reason a regular player should care whether lairs are up or not. There is no reason to do them. If you lack skill, use Uragnites, they're EPIC for skill ups.

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Yeah but they didn't ban people as harshly as they have been in the last few months. I don't care either way as I don't mind them doing it personally.

While the AFK bot is autoattacking the reive log, you go and attack the monsters and get a decent evaluation. The TOS says don't bother reporting someone if they aren't directly griefing you.

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Originally Posted by kittycat

While the AFK bot is autoattacking the reive log, you go and attack the monsters and get a decent evaluation. The TOS says don't bother reporting someone if they aren't directly griefing you.

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we're talking about lair reaves, which can be destroyed in like 30 seconds or less by anyone. I'd argue failing to communicate, and allow someone else a shot to get one when they need one for an objective or operatiom is certainly greifing- although perhaps not as bad as back in the day when people would cast spells on you fighting an HNM to try to make you wipe by drawing hate.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

we're talking about lair reaves, which can be destroyed in like 30 seconds or less by anyone. I'd argue failing to communicate, and allow someone else a shot to get one when they need one for an objective or operatiom is certainly greifing- although perhaps not as bad as back in the day when people would cast spells on you fighting an HNM to try to make you wipe by drawing hate.

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While they can be killed that fast you are most likely not getting anywhere near the new balyd caps on them so it can actually pay to not go quite that fast. As in higher balyd per hour if you are camping a single one. Of course if you are going running a circuit of them and aren't waiting on repops probably better to zerg

New bayld caps? When did they get changed

A few updates ago (novemberish I think) they roughly doubled them. At the time they also seemed to increase the rate you acquired them so basically I was getting straight up double what I was getting before. Like almost 6.5k off some lairs 10k off some colo.

Then a few days after that update they had a reive campaign which doubles rate but not caps which ended up not actually doubling rate... but when the campaign ended the rates went back down to old values. At first I thought it had completely undone that update but playing around with things it seems caps are still raised but might be completely unreachable even solo with rates unchanged. I've reported it as a bug but they don't appear to be doing much about it

And even if not it's not always great to take more time. Like I used to do a few in inner courts a lot. Normally just going at it pre-cap would be around 3-3.4k usually capping or near capping with up to 2 people if we did just AoEs and didn't go super fast. Ie just simple spaming T1 agas. After update you could get a lot more but going at the same speed same method would end up with about the same (ended actually being a tad less for me since my gear had improved since I had last seriously farmed which is kind of hilarious). Even solo didn't end up with too much more unless I would wait for add repops a few times

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While they can be killed that fast you are most likely not getting anywhere near the new balyd caps on them so it can actually pay to not go quite that fast.

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I've never cared about the bayld from a lair reive. For me, it was either to complete a coalition assignment, or to unlock the CAP bonuses.

It's mostly nice for people who want to continually farm but can't be there 100%. So you can fight for like 30-60 sec then afk for 5 minutes etc. Or even just engage/send pet at it and afk. For the real balyd/hr should be doing circuits of lairs and colos or skirmish runs. Or even wkr during campaigns

The problem with doing circuits of skirmish though is you need to farm a ton of lairs/colonization to get the simulcrium to do them, and even then you need to bring 5 mules with you just to make it more profitable then just spaming WKR campaigns.

Well I mean you do circuits of lair/colo and you get parts fast and get fast balyd. That said kind of depends on the wkr campaign. Like the last set we had I noticed not a lot of people did the first half which iirc only gave 2 hpb and so going in with small numbers would take awhile but the 2nd half was 4 and tons of people there so you could do several an hour. Also depends on how fast you are at skirmish... like when I started and didn't know what I was doing well was getting maybe 50-60k an hour per character but by the end I was more around 120-130k. Just using parts I had stored up from doing reives that I couldn't sell on ah fast enough.... so it's not too horrible for something that you can do anytime. Even more so if you have mules that don't have to do anything other than use exit item