BOTS ARE IN THE WALLS!!!

*Go to Ul'dah*
*use idle camera*
*switch between every character in the area*

OH MAH GAWD! THEY ARE IN THE GROUND AS WELL! /panic

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

please.. do not report these!

do you people have no common sense? if you report them, the STF has to actually do some work. I mean otherwise the reports just add up if someone doesnt delete them.

unless they recently hired an intern to do that so the 3 person team can remain drinking tea...

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LOL

Maybe, one of those drinking birds, aimed to hit the delete key! Cheaper than an intern.

I see tons on the new Raiden server. It's like a lalafell clone army.

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Originally Posted by Raoabolic

*Go to Ul'dah*
*use idle camera*
*switch between every character in the area*

OH MAH GAWD! THEY ARE IN THE GROUND AS WELL! /panic

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We better run.

I saw them flying in Central Thanalan a few years ago, without mounts!

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Originally Posted by Jagick

It's been going on for years. All you can do is report them when you see them.

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It will always happen. The people that have bots make money. All this world is focused on is making money. Nothing else matters. SE can ban them endlessly and the cycle will continue. Get used to it. It will NEVER go away.

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Originally Posted by Reap00

SE can ban them endlessly and the cycle will continue. Get used to it. It will NEVER go away.

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There are many things that can be done against it. If i see how long advertisers can stay it is a clear indication that there simply is a severe lack of checking to begin with. Spamming the advertisement a few times should be more than enough to indicate a red flag. And sure, if those advertisers then suddently need to act like a player, this also increases the costs as code to actively play the game costs a lot more power than just idling in a main city.

Its not always about instantly stopping them, raising their costs is generaly far more effective. Since if the rmt price becomes too high, people wont pay for that either. This is still the most effective way to disrupt these.

And thats why ingame reporting is such important tool. Even though currently SE barely uses this information (too many bots just spam a message in the NN and never do anything else. A message that for the past month has never changed). SE shows clear signs of lazyness, and yes, then bots become excessive. Runescape used to be plagued with bots as well. until at some point the dev simply used pattern detection to detect the bots. Causing a massive banwave and reduced botting for a quite long time. Even if the bots are based on private code, they are very likely to show patterns. This is info that is very well usable and quite easy to detect. Each hotspot node for a bot only needs to check players inside that zone, and based on timestamp patterns, you can generaly detect which players are very likely to be bots as they are very consistent in timing (and note, if the botter has to slow down the bot, that means the costs already increase). And those hotspots that you check are very hard to identify on the botter side (since its not 1 zone that detected them, but many). Forcing complete randomness on their side, and this is very hard to do efficiently.

I feel like they could nix the teleport hackers by adding kill zones in out of the bounds areas they need to pass through and/or adjusting enemy AI so it resets if it's unable to execute its script properly due to its target being in the floor or in the air.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

They allow it because the bots are paying customers, but they don't want to make it publicly available because it gives the anti-bot players a measure of hope that SE will one day fix it and strings them along. It also means the bots have customers and keeps the cycle going.

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the ideal way to solve this is breaking the cycle on our end. I mean: no one buying gil.

Like I said, ideal way. Not a factual one, since there are a myriad of varied persons out there and some don't give a s... for ethics or fairness. Anyway, I encourage people to do their part telling this: NEVER BUY GIL.

Some people don't know the connection between bots and the gil black market. I think it's up to us to tell them, since SE don't mind doing that in our stead. If we reduce the number of gil buyers then the bot companies will take that as a non profitable work and maybe they reduce the number of bots.

It's like an ant fighting an elephant... but it's what we can do beside reporting :(

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Originally Posted by Shibi

LOL

Maybe, one of those drinking birds, aimed to hit the delete key! Cheaper than an intern.

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not sure how I missed thinking of that innovation. I mean they have a fountain like that so would explain how they thought of it! and saves money at the same time! good call

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Originally Posted by Wanzzo

the ideal way to solve this is breaking the cycle on our end. I mean: no one buying gil.

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We will fix that right as soon as we teach modern humanity the concept of moderation. I'm sure we will be done any second! :^)