What is being doing against botters?

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Originally Posted by Vidu

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So while there is stuff being done, this isnt something they can get rid off completly, without shutting off servers from character creation (Hello, Balmung!).
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A fact that was a large factor in my moving to Balmung back when I did...
I had to keep tells in a seperate chat tab and the sound off just to function on another server. (there wasn't context menu reporting of rmt at the time...)


While the lack of new players is a bit of a con, I do enjoy there being practically no RMT on Balmung.

The RMT bots aren't the problem, honestly. It's the "legit" bots owned by actual players (Reflected by that tiny number of people banned for botting) who tend to utterly screw up the economy by flooding the market that are troublesome. These guys are perfectly controllable, but SE either doesn't care about them or simply isn't able to tell that they're botting despite how precisely scheduled and repetitive their actions tend to be.

Logically, the number of bans should've gone up due to 4.3's release drawing back a ton of players and with them, bots, but the number of bans has been decreasing instead.

The issue has been so persistent on Cactaur that I see more and more players caving and starting to bot so they can compete with the other dominant forces on the MB and it's rather sad.

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Originally Posted by TaranTatsuuchi

The important thing in the fight against rmt is to get the accounts holding the money, depriving them access to their stock.

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The problem is that they don't even have a "bank" account that stores all the gil like one might think, and everything is totally expendable.

I've actually witnessed someone in the process of conducting a RMT transaction before, and they simply invite you to the FC all of the gil farm bots are in and trade you the money from the FC chest that way.

This means that when SE does decide to crack down on the FC, it's almost a certainty everyone who's purchased from them is going to get punished.

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Originally Posted by akenatoth

Yeah, I tried to post the names but I was 1k characters over the allowed limit.
If they're all lvl 35 I guess they're not disappearing all that fast.

Can they get this far with a trial account?

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They're bots. How long do you expect them to take to accomplish anything? They can probably bot their way to 35 in less than a day.

There are regularly level 50 BLM/WHMs flying around so they have to be using a sub, and it takes less then a day for them to hit that level.

The thing that confuses me is that the devs have shown themselves capable of fixing other hacks such as the Ruin IV hack, so why can't they stop the teleport hacks when they're far easier to detect?

The only way i can come up with is to cut the demand. Make the game less grindy and over all simpler. I'm not sure that would make a good game though.

The demand for gil is already low because there isn't anything major to spend it on outside of housing and honestly, I don't want that to change since the botting would just get even worse.

The majority of people who bot for gil currently are either trying to RMT or just have a strange obsession with making more gil even if they have nothing to spend it on

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

There are regularly level 50 BLM/WHMs flying around so they have to be using a sub, and it takes less then a day for them to hit that level.

The thing that confuses me is that the devs have shown themselves capable of fixing other hacks such as the Ruin IV hack, so why can't they stop the teleport hacks when they're far easier to detect?

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I think I found an answer to this. The "teleporting" bots aren't actually teleporting (as in teleporting via aetheryte), they're sending the "set position" instruction that the game doesn't send until the character stops moving, and hence from a data analysis side, they don't look like they're teleporting. What isn't being sent are the movement vectors, which is why if you stand outside the Waking Sands and wait for the level 35 bots to do the "Bringing out the Dead" quest you will see them literately bend from the entrance to the first corpse.

What they would need to do to fix it, is require that the movement vectors match the position being set, and that probably just makes the processing slower since it would have to do it every half second multiplied by every character and NPC in the zone. It also doesn't solve the problem.

A more obvious fix is to actually count the movement vectors between positions being set. If movements are being sent every 0.5 seconds, then there should be greater than zero movement vectors between each position.

When I was following one of these bot groups, I noticed that they actually move at the same speed as a normal player doing these quests, so I have a feeling that they were already "cracked down" on for doing the quests too fast. However they're obviously not checking the positions they are moving to, as every single bot stands on top of each other, and directly on top of the exact position of the NPC they target.

The developers would need to block joining a FC/invites to a FC, and maybe straight up block doing the level 30 jobs without a subscription if these were in fact disposable RMT bots. So the question is what loophole is wide enough open to allow 100 bots per server to operate with impunity all week?

Let's do the math:

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Time Period: Jun. 7, 2018 to Jun. 13, 2018

・Participation in RMT/prohibited activities
　・Accounts terminated: 3,334
・Botting activity (Using any number of third party tools that allow for automation)
　・Accounts terminated: 4
　・Accounts temporarily suspended: 16
・RMT advertising
　・Accounts terminated: 409

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Ok, how many servers does SE have?
66

So divide "participation in RMT" by 66 and we get 50. That is TOO low, so they're clearly not getting all of them.

Then look at "Botting activity", oh wow 4. SE needs to step up their game. SE could list the numbers by server, but then that would simply cause players to take that into consideration when moving or creating new characters. Maybe a data center breakdown would tell us that SE is treating each data center with equal priority and not simply cherry-picking the JP servers.

I've seen some gil farming FCs last for well over a month before they finally got purged (Despite me reporting them), so their response time isn't exactly the greatest.

As far as the "normal" bots go, it honestly seems like the only way they can get banned for it is if they specifically talk about botting in a chat channel before/after they've been reported for it. There's probably close to 20 or so of these bots on Cactaur alone (Not necessarily active simultaneously), so they seriously need to step it up.

There are ways to combat them. Blizzard is getting better at it. One way Blizzard is fighting it is that they recently contracted out to a company that writes really great detection software that was finally able to pinpoint Bots with pretty good accuracy. Another way is that they don't allow free trial accounts like this game does that lets them spam their messages. Botters are usually players with the money to pay for accounts, but RMT are doing their work for free and that is really easy to stop: Prevent trial accounts from talking or remove trial accounts altogether. Another way is to ban the serial number of the game- so that players who are banned will have to repurchase the entire game on top of their new subscription price.

Another way Blizzard put the hurt on RMT was when they introduced the Token system that let players turn cash into gold legitimately. This actually got Blizzard sued by the RMT companies for loss of profit, but Blizz won the lawsuit.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

They're bots. How long do you expect them to take to accomplish anything? They can probably bot their way to 35 in less than a day.

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I can get there in a day by hand.