it's not a technical issue that the GM's here can deal with.
Printable View
The other day, I saw a "person" with a gibberish name posting stuff in shout chat...except it was a bunch of garbage characters. Eventually, out of curiosity, I pasted the chat message into a hex editor.
It was that garbage filler that's used on unallocated memory. Compiler and OS programmers often make it so that when reserved memory is no longer reserved, it's filled automatically with recognizable junk for debugging purposes. Stuff like 0xDEADBEEF.
I haven't laughed that hard in awhile. I guess I really am a nerd.
I would recommend a community ban system.
If 200 people all vote to ban the same person, its removed from the server until a gm looks at it. If it was an exploit, those responsible get banned instead. (Acount wide, btw) We could also just "Send" it somewhere. Like the GM prison. That way Gm could hover round and when something pops up thats clearly not a player, ban them.
Do not restrict it by level.
Do not restrict it by Mentor status.
At least let us interrupt the functions of the bots somehow. Like throwing them off by killing them. If they keep dying to players, they cant farm gil, if they cant farm, why would they pay to run a bot?
The other day I was in Mor Dhona when a bot pack of BLMs appeared in the middle of my FATE. It then teleported into a tower shape off to one side and stood there until I kited a couple magitek machines into AOEing a few times on them. They cleared the rest of the magitek, I got to move on.
Maybe they earn to much money from all those bot accounts?
I see them ingame and i have not clicked report on any of them, not even the spam in chat and you wanna know why, cause you get flagged when you report, like it says, you can get the ban from doing the report click.
So, i let those who are Hired to do this job handle it.(like gamemasters...)