Another ban wave, another disappointment.

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Originally Posted by Xeon

Oh they handle their bot problems. When they have strong enough evidence to do so. What you don't understand, that if they start cutting ties with legit players "because they fit your description as bots," they could potentially be sued. Sorry, but we live in a land where someone assumes the cup of coffee from that chain burger joint isn't hot, spills it on themselves, gets burned, sues, and wins. Not only that, but the angry person decides to hit the servers with a DDoS attack, which screws everybody up.

90% of what you're saying about bots fits me, so you are indirectly calling me a bot. Last time I checked, I wasn't. But if calling me a bot makes you feel any better at the end of the day, then so be it.

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It's really not worth arguing with your dismissive attitude. Bots have been running wild since 1.0. You should try observing the city aetherytes, northern thanalan or anywhere in player search with WHM/BLM's.

And for the record, I'm not for bots either, but as a legacy player, I've seen every kind of behavior that you have listed as criteria for bots from legit players. I have been around since nearly the start of 1.0, which most of you never got to see. If you had been here as long as I have, you would know that SE has continued to reduce the number of bots running around. If you don't like them now, you really wouldn't have liked them back then in a time where they were literally 10 times more of them than present.

I dont miss 1.0. Not really. Only the beautiful graphics it had. Nothing in this game to date compares or even comes close. Who would've thought, that many years into the future when general computing has advanced so much, especially with graphics cards, that we would still be seeing the shit graphics that the current game has to offer.

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Originally Posted by Xeon

And for the record, I'm not for bots either, but as a legacy player, I've seen every kind of behavior that you have listed as criteria for bots from legit players. I have been around since nearly the start of 1.0, which most of you never got to see. If you had been here as long as I have, you would know that SE has continued to reduce the number of bots running around. If you don't like them now, you really wouldn't have liked them back then in a time where they were literally 10 times more of them than present.

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Not a legacy but start of ARR when it dropped on the consoles and I remember the sheer amount of bots that were in the game at the time, you had to either turn off the noise for a /tell or move it to a separate tab all together so you didn't get bombarded by bots.

See now that's the point I'm trying to make. If SE "didn't care," or "didn't do anything," then there would be way more bots than there were then, but there's not. Literally 90% of the bot activity has already been removed from the game and they are still working on the rest.

So OP, you really need to take a chill pill or a puff off the doobie. Quit blowing up at everything you don't understand and saying they're a bot, because there is no proof of what you say that these people are actually bots, and if they are, SE will get to them. They have been doing this all along, but maybe you've not been around long enough to notice.

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Originally Posted by Chiramu

FFXIV just need a bigger team

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It has nothing to do with the size of their team. Our server reported several notorious botters for months. I even persistently grabbed GMs to say, hey, come look, catch it in the act. I also posted video evidence to youtube to submit that via their web form, and every other method that the supervisory GM suggested. In at least three separate cases, the botters changed their name, and left the server. After a year of repeated reports from an entire server community, it's safe to say that it's a policy issue, not a team size issue - in other words, that they don't actually care. The only effective thing was the side effect - word got out, and they fled to escape their negative reputation on the server. But they're still doing it, just somewhere else.

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Originally Posted by Xeon

See now that's the point I'm trying to make. If SE "didn't care," or "didn't do anything," then there would be way more bots than there were then, but there's not. Literally 90% of the bot activity has already been removed from the game and they are still working on the rest.

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On the off chance that you're just slow on the up-take, rather than a botter who is trying to claim "nope, no problem here", the issue is that only the most obvious botters get picked up by their algorithms. They don't actually respond to, or even investigate individual reports.

I'm not sure how anyone could think that someone who's online for days straight, never idles, and follows the exact same path to each node every time isn't a bot.

You'd probably find a reason to dismiss even the one I saw repeatedly suiciding on FATEs in Yanxia for the better part of a day because their gear was broken and the script that tells them to fix their gear wasn't working (This was during early SB before the aforementioned bots had finished the MSQ).

Come on Xeon, there is a lot of players using bot program without trouble, and it's easy to prove it.
Like Kage say they follow the exact same path nodes to nodes, some are sometimes stucks in wall or do some weird not human movement (always with a pattern with same timing blabla)

I know some players using them, some don't even hide it. Alt tab doing something else irl, or going out then come back ig with tons of mats. Years of report, none of them ban.

It was the same on FF11, and some MMO I know, where players using program never got ban. Only RMT bots are.

I've been reporting people that used bots to level everything to lv60 back then, and now everything lv70 just doing FATEs, and they're still there botting everything.
The same people that bots in gathering, and they're not banned.

I only managed to get somebody banned once while he was clearly botting to break the market.

Maybe there are too many botters and SE can't afford banning a huge amount of people. That would mean a loss for SE, and I can understand that, sadly.

Then there are the "bot-deffenders" that will deffend bots with weird excuses, no matter the context, leveling, gathering, buying houses etc... and probably they will laugh at you because they bot too.


Anyways, if you really want a bot to get banned, show to other players that bot so they can report it too. It worked for me and it helps the SE team since it's not an individual report.

If Aethersands\Consumables are expensive on your server, gather\craft your own. Am I missing something as to why you can't do that? Do they have legions of bots that open up trade windows with you when you try to hit ephemeral nodes or something?

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

You can when you see them selling several dozen stacks of 99 consumables with their name on it, coupled with the fact that whenever they aren't gathering, they're sitting in/outside their houses and crafting for hours on end.

I know some people are devoted to making money and all, but these guys are online and active 24/7. Even the richest legit (?) players on my server don't spend more then a few hours crafting daily.

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Hence why I mentioned why they're slow with their bans. They're trying to decipher who is legit and who is not. Being online constantly isn't a rule breaking offense, just because player A is on for 18 hours a day doesn't make them a farmer/seller. Controlling the market certainly, but there's no rules against that.

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Originally Posted by Shouko

While not 100% accurate, you can kind of tell the crafter/gatherer types that tend to buy the same stuff over and over and then see a retainer with 3-4 stacks of that item being sold or even when you see a lot of crafted items, look for the name.

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Which shows that it may be a player attempting to control the market, which isn't illegal. If we follow that logic a lot of people are gil farmers/sellers. As mentioned in my reply, they're slow in their bans due to an extensive investigation in trying to find sources and actual farmers/sellers.

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Originally Posted by Kyuuen

Hence why I mentioned why they're slow with their bans. They're trying to decipher who is legit and who is not. Being online constantly isn't a rule breaking offense, just because player A is on for 18 hours a day doesn't make them a farmer/seller. Controlling the market certainly, but there's no rules against that.



Which shows that it may be a player attempting to control the market, which isn't illegal. If we follow that logic a lot of people are gil farmers/sellers. As mentioned in my reply, they're slow in their bans due to an extensive investigation in trying to find sources and actual farmers/sellers.

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I never claimed they were bots, I'm saying that you can find out to a small degree which retainers belong to which retainers.

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Originally Posted by Kyuuen

they're slow in their bans due to an extensive investigation in trying to find sources and actual farmers/sellers.

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It's impossible to know if they're even investigating the reported players because of their "no replies" policy. If they send me a message saying that the players in question weren't found to be cheating, then I'd just drop it and not even bother anymore, because it would tell me that they're just inept to get rid of them.

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Originally Posted by Saint_Angeles

If Aethersands\Consumables are expensive on your server, gather\craft your own. Am I missing something as to why you can't do that? Do they have legions of bots that open up trade windows with you when you try to hit ephemeral nodes or something?

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It's not that they're expensive, it's the opposite.

I used to be able to actually make a reasonable amount of money off of selling any type of aethersand, but the sheer number of bots farming them now drove the prices into the dirt to the point where it's not even worth the effort now and other non-bottable sources of income like selling materia from hunts are more viable for the time investment. They could care less about how little they're selling stuff for when they have an infinite amount of time to invest into farming it.

Dismissive attitudes are also largely why nothing is ever actually going to be done about the botting. I've tried to convince other gatherers/crafters to report the major offenders on my server, but most of them simply don't care and just choose to avoid the markets they're involved in instead. Which annoys me, because we shouldn't be allowing cheaters to influence how we choose to play.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

Dismissive attitudes are also largely why nothing is ever actually going to be done about the botting. I've tried to convince other gatherers/crafters to report the major offenders on my server, but most of them simply don't care and just choose to avoid the markets they're involved in instead. Which annoys me, because we shouldn't be allowing cheaters to influence how we choose to play.

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The reason why bots continue to exist is because people continue to buy gil for various reasons, if you kill the reason aka kill off buying gil then it becomes a dead market for them, that's literally the only reason they continue to farm 24/7 for it. Reporting them won't make a world of difference, banning them does little to no good, there's not much else you can do. For every one bot you ban 10 more are right there willing to take it's place. Also they pay a sub so they're not going to be quick to ban a sub when they can earn money off it.

Alright well, today is the last day that I spend posting on this subject, because nothing you say will be considered.

You think everything you can't explain is a bot, just like you think anybody from SE actually checks this forum... Which for those who don't know, they don't.

To the guy who says they are seeing a bot on 24/7, never going idle, hitting the same nodes, taking the same path, I guess that means you're on 24/7, never idle, and are always going in the exact path following this bot, which, by your own definition, makes you a bot. Ima be honest. If I see you stalking me like that and IDK you, and I see the term "bot" in my chat window, Ima report you for harassment, contact a GM, and probably have you banned as a result. I may, or may not be on your world. I'm a legacy player, and with all other legacy players, I get 8. Count em, 8 characters per world. Not per data center, but per world. Some of us legacy players use them for nothing but gathering and storage, because our 2 or more retainers AND our personal storage is maxed out, for both storing and selling. Some of them have gibberish names, because, really, they're not for interaction with any other person.

there comes a point where everything is leveled, and everything worthwhile has been completed with the game, and the only thing to do is to hit those nodes that come available and make money until the next patch comes out, so when we are online, whether it be for 2 or 24 hours, we're hitting the same nodes over and over again. I, for one, work out a system for nodes. When I mass gather, I'm always hitting them in the same order that they pop. I'm always teleporting to the same spot, and am always taking the shortest path between that spot and the nodes, and yes, that means taking the same path virtually everytime, so because of this and other reasons, you're obviously calling me a bot, and you've suggested that for no reason, even with no concrete proof of such. OP has been a part of this game for what? Not even a year? And you think this is enough for you to make a judgement call over what is going on here? More of a right than a legacy player that's been here since the start?

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Originally Posted by Xeon

Some of us legacy players use them for nothing but gathering and storage, because our 2 or more retainers AND our personal storage is maxed out, for both storing and selling. Some of them have gibberish names, because, really, they're not for interaction with any other person.

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So, uh..... What exactly do you do with the stuff you are gathering/storing on those characters, if they're not for interacting with others?

Your OPINION is that I'm a bot.
Your OPINION is that I support bots.

You're wrong on both assumptions. So, what's next?
Your OPINION is that this response is an auto-generated bot response?

How the HELL do you expect me to consider any of the points that you've made, still a noob in this game, when you consider nothing I say? I, having been here BEFORE the start of ARR? Literally, and I mean that strongly, 90% of the bots have been removed, and that figure is probably lower than the actual amount of them that are in service. If you hate bots now, then you'd really have hated them in FFXIV 1.0 and the early days of ARR, when there were literally 40-50 bots standing around the nodes, and I mean that! I do not believe that all those bots were "just the top tier," or "only RMT accounts" either.

There are no bots that can make you walk through walls or disappear. This happens because of hardware problems with all AMD hardware. PS4 is not immune to this because it uses the same hardware from the same manufacturer of computer graphics cards. I know this because I used to run this hardware, and it did the very thing that you're describing. Lag is also very guilty of this too, because your PC or PS4 isn't receiving correct data from the server. Reporting of player position is handled server side, not so much client side. If that weren't the case, everybody would be doing it. If bots were the cause of these issues, then you'd see everybody flying out of zone boundaries, and it doesn't happen. There isn't a bot around that can influence the operations on server side. Just google search this crap. It's all out there.

This will be my last post on this, because I'm tired of your shenanigans, and have more productive things I could do.

I just want to end all this by saying, thank whatever higher power there is that you are not SE and have no authority to make these decisions.

If you did, I, right along with a crapton of other legit players would have been banned long ago.

One thing you don't understand, is that SQEX all but went bankrupt after 1.0 was released. They decided to remake the game, and have admitted that the remake was a make or break for the company. If the remake hadn't been a success, we might have by now seen the fall of a great company. I agree 100% with what they're doing. If they were aggressive like you, many, many legit players would go down, and that would likely spell the end of SE.

Again, thank goodness that you're not the one making these calls, because you would've taken many innocent players and spelled disaster for the company.

Peace out. Enjoy!

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Originally Posted by Xeon

Nothing of what you said constitutes bots or cheating. Quit being an ass. Sorry you are dirt poor and don't have a house. I truly am. Maybe somebody on this thread will throw this guy a big mac so he doesn't starve.

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Originally Posted by Xeon

And for the record, I'm not for bots either, but as a legacy player, I've seen every kind of behavior that you have listed as criteria for bots from legit players. I have been around since nearly the start of 1.0, which most of you never got to see. If you had been here as long as I have, you would know that SE has continued to reduce the number of bots running around. If you don't like them now, you really wouldn't have liked them back then in a time where they were literally 10 times more of them than present.

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Originally Posted by Xeon

So OP, you really need to take a chill pill or a puff off the doobie. Quit blowing up at everything you don't understand and saying they're a bot, because there is no proof of what you say that these people are actually bots, and if they are, SE will get to them. They have been doing this all along, but maybe you've not been around long enough to notice.

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Originally Posted by Xeon

OP has been a part of this game for what? Not even a year? And you think this is enough for you to make a judgement call over what is going on here? More of a right than a legacy player that's been here since the start?

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Originally Posted by Xeon

How the HELL do you expect me to consider any of the points that you've made, still a noob in this game, when you consider nothing I say? I, having been here BEFORE the start of ARR?

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Maybe people are so quick to dismiss you because of your tone, and because you make statements like these.

We get it; you’re a Legacy Player. Doesn’t make your opinions and your posts more important than anyone else’s though, and it doesn’t give you the right to act like a jerk either.

I'm mostly confused as to why you're so aggressively adamant about defending the players I'm accusing when you haven't actually seen them first hand to know what I'm talking about. I've never seen someone get so triggered by me accusing obviously rich players of botting before, and I know from experience that such reactions can come from people who are doing the very things they're speaking out against.

There's a difference between following the same general path between nodes and following the exact same path every single time, and it's even more peculiar when there are multiple players in the same zone forming a conga line while they go between nodes because of how perfectly they're aligned with one another. If you seriously think that kind of behavior can be considered normal, then I think trying to reason with you is a completely lost cause (Though I kind of got that impression from the very first post that was made...).

There were actually a lot more bots around during early SB, but I feel inclined to believe loss of interest in the game or server transfers are the reason for their current absence, considering that they were running the same scripts as the ones I have a beef with right now (Who've been around much longer) and thus wouldn't have any more reason to be banned then the ones that are still active.

Lastly, the GMs and devs do read the forums. It's precisely why Yoshi P. was motivated to make a statement about the housing situation, because things blew up when Shirogane got cleaned out in the matter of 5-10 minutes per server. Sadly, I don't think people are ever going to make that much of an uproar about bots for any reason (Largely because they're just oblivious to it), though you can darn well bet there's going to be a ton of them botting the new Frontlines for the achievement mount in no time at all...

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Originally Posted by Kyuuen

As to the matter of the slow bans. From what they explained before they don't want to simply ban the obvious small fries that show up. They do a lot of investigating and trace work in attempt to find sources. Or at least that's what they've said before.

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This has been their policy for 15 years now. They have never answered why it is ok to let the equivalent of contraband into the game. Years ago one might think they are going to get all the big fish and win. HaHa, they aren't winning now or ever in current model. Move on and protect the players from the market flooding.

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Originally Posted by VertoIncantation

They would need to ban the buyer too. But they never do ;).

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The botters/gil sellers and SE have one thing in common: the same customer base.

Banning buyers cuts the customer base to the gil sellers, but it also cuts SE's customer base. That costs long term revenue. Any business grad is going to have to ask the question of if you really want to ban your own customers.

Banning sellers is different, because they'll make a new account and come back, so no lost revenue, while SE gets to say that they're doing something about it. And that's before you look at the cynical idea that by driving down costs of goods in game, botters are helping more players than they're harming.

Actually solving this problem is hard and expensive even if you want to. If you screw it up and falsely ban a legitimate player, you've got both a lost customer and a PR problem. Since things more or less work in the status quo if they're limited in who they actually ban, that's what they do.

You'd think they could at least find a way to keep people from multi-boxing, because the gil farmers thrive on the fact that they can run 20+ accounts on a single PC by completely disabling the game's GUI to eliminate CPU strain, while the small-scale botters are often running one or two accounts in the background while they're actually playing on their main account.

Xeon, it's nice that you are a legacy player. Unfortunately you don't seem to know anything about bots program and scripts.
Have you never seen them teleporting around? Being in a place you can't reach even if you tried hard to glitch? Really?
btw about real players using the same script, when they are more than 1, you can see them following the same path, have the same timing and everything.
I too used to gather for hours but I'm sorry. I was NEVER able to do that, there is always a moment I'm a bit on left or right compare to the previous path even if I tried to use the shortest way, 1sec later because of a missclick, etc.
If you tell me you can do the exact same thing, with the exact same timing, landing at the exact same place at the right pixel... you must be really good, like really.

Like I said, they don't even hide it, they even talk about it (not ig unfortunately) I have even see it with my own eyes from someone else. (oh and there is even a guy who used a TP hack on a video a bit before 4.0, hiding his UI of course, to not show his name.)

It's nice that you are still on FF14 after all these years, love it, and want it to grow. I'm here since the second closed beta. So what?

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Originally Posted by Chiramu

FFXIV just need a bigger team, particularly a larger community support team. The current sized support team can't keep up with the amount of players coming into the game, I really can't believe Square is not putting money into this. If you want a growing game with a large community, you need community support.

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Up until recently Square was putting FFXIV profits into the development of other titles (they may still be doing so) so it's unsurprising they haven't seen fit to allocate more funds to the community support team.

I think one of the most frustrating things about this whole situation is that even though I can try to make a slight difference by trying to make people aware of which players are frequent botters and encouraging them to not support them by buying their items or allowing them in their linkshells/FCs, I have to be insanely discreet about it, because if one of said bots found out, they could easily report me under the flimsy accusation of harassment because of the fact that the GMs only look at chat logs and from their perspective, I'd be the bad guy.

Having the customer service not only being too inept to do anything about the bots but also effectively supporting them due to how horribly reports are handled (They need to look at BOTH sides of the story in detail, not just reading the chat logs of the accused and the accuser) is really pathetic.