Discussion: How Can We Handle Botting Better?

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Originally Posted by JackHatchet

The moment someone complains about being poor--you give them a pickaxe and tell them to stop being a lazy scrub!

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Incredible.

This man made millions doing this one action. Poor people hate him! Find out how he did it by clicking this!

So quick update here.

I found one of the bots, without the busy symbol on them. I got to see how it works. Someone was trading the bot as it was trying to teleport, so it'd get stopped. It went miner, tried again, put up truth of mountain, tried again, then got on its mount, put up busy, jumped, and flew away.

Seems what program it was, it looked smart enough to register if someone's messing with it... kinda.

It has been quite some time since last i posted on the forums, having recently come back to the game after 13 months I do not have any solutions for how to resolve nothing. However, I was doing hunting logs to ease myself back into the game and bore witness to black mages/thuamages clipping below the player world in the two circled areas in Western Thanalan. Specifically in the northern indication, many (and I mean 7-8) evil eye (level 40) mobs were attacking one such character below the world.

I put them on my blacklist but here\\'s the thing I noticed though. The name was as you\\'d expect but they also were part of an FC and they weren\\'t the only only one out of bounds, just the only one I physically saw. (The mobs were targeting different people)

https://i.imgur.com/hdxvXty.jpg

In case the image doesn't load, a direct link: https://i.imgur.com/hdxvXty.jpg

Talk to your government and have them pass a law that the buyers of IG currency will be prosecuted.
1st offence would be 3 months Community service and fine of $1,000 online service account cancelled.
2nd offence would be 3 month jail time with no internet access. $2,500 online service account cancelled.
3rd offence would be 1 year jail time with no internet access, fine of $5,000 online service account cancelled.

Where if games have issue with RMT they are required to forward on transaction info to Government to take action. IE User contact info of who got the currency.
Government only takes action on 2nd report of same user to make sure it's wasn't a one of or mistake.

SE could make RMT script to weed who they are. And who they sent it to. The buyer should be punched as my as the seller.

Make it part of any new LOOT BOX LAW.

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Originally Posted by Jijifli

So quick update here.

I found one of the bots, without the busy symbol on them. I got to see how it works. Someone was trading the bot as it was trying to teleport, so it'd get stopped. It went miner, tried again, put up truth of mountain, tried again, then got on its mount, put up busy, jumped, and flew away.

Seems what program it was, it looked smart enough to register if someone's messing with it... kinda.

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If you see bots active at a normal time of day, there's a fairly good chance their owners are monitoring them.

It's not a good idea to pester them like that because a lot of them are so petty that they'll deliberately just ignore people until they've been pestered enough that they can make a case to the GMs about it.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

If you see bots active at a normal time of day, there's a fairly good chance their owners are monitoring them.

It's not a good idea to pester them like that because a lot of them are so petty that they'll deliberately just ignore people until they've been pestered enough that they can make a case to the GMs about it.

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I wasn't the one pestering, so I'm good. I was getting the node myself, since I was still waiting on GP when they showed up.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

If you see bots active at a normal time of day, there's a fairly good chance their owners are monitoring them.

It's not a good idea to pester them like that because a lot of them are so petty that they'll deliberately just ignore people until they've been pestered enough that they can make a case to the GMs about it.

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Or.. just don't be one of those people. Might not have been a bot at all.

I know from my own experiences levelling gatherers, righteous bot hunters can definitely be one of the worse scourges on eorzea. Not going to shed any tears if they get actioned for harassment, they deserve it every bit.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

Or.. just don't be one of those people. Might not have been a bot at all.

I know from my own experiences levelling gatherers, righteous bot hunters can definitely be one of the worse scourges on eorzea. Not going to shed any tears if they get actioned for harassment, they deserve it every bit.

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It's kind of pointless to even try to disrupt them as they mostly have fail-safes enabled that will ensure their scripts start working properly the moment they're left alone.

Some people really don't have any idea how to properly identify bots and might just use faulty methods such as "Selling too much stuff on the marketboard" as a reason to be suspicious of somebody.



They do have very obvious, almost unmistakable tells that can be noticed once you become aware of them, though, and they're mostly related to their movement patterns. The things I look for are:

-How they behave after gathering from a node. In flight-enabled zones, they always jump in place, then abruptly veer towards their next destination the moment they take flight (Even if it's directly behind them), which both looks unnatural and would be clunky/impractical for an actual player to imitate, let alone constantly due to the camera shenanigans that would be involved.

-Jerky "Point A to point B" style movement reminiscent of how one would move in a point and click game. More noticeable in ARR areas, but also applicable in HW/SB areas if they don't move directly to the node before dismounting.

-Inability to path to unspoiled nodes in an efficient manner. Since they can't "see" nodes until they actually register in the game's memory via proximity, they'll path to a central point between all of the possible spawn points for a node then move to it from there, even if means going around or straight past the node in question.

-Repetition. If you feel any doubts still after noticing any of the previous red flags, just take note of whether you see them doing the same weird things over and over again or not while you're gathering.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

They do have very obvious, almost unmistakable tells that can be noticed once you become aware of them, though, and they're mostly related to their movement patterns. The things I look for are:

-How they behave after gathering from a node. In flight-enabled zones, they always jump in place, then abruptly veer towards their next destination the moment they take flight (Even if it's directly behind them), which both looks unnatural and would be clunky/impractical for an actual player to imitate, let alone constantly due to the camera shenanigans that would be involved.

-Jerky "Point A to point B" style movement reminiscent of how one would move in a point and click game. More noticeable in ARR areas, but also applicable in HW/SB areas if they don't move directly to the node before dismounting.

-Inability to path to unspoiled nodes in an efficient manner. Since they can't "see" nodes until they actually register in the game's memory via proximity, they'll path to a central point between all of the possible spawn points for a node then move to it from there, even if means going around or straight past the node in question.

-Repetition. If you feel any doubts still after noticing any of the previous red flags, just take note of whether you see them doing the same weird things over and over again or not while you're gathering.

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Yep. I try to pay attention to them for these. And while you did mention the "listing a lot" i wanna mention a little thing.

It alone is not how you tell, but I did watch a bot farm what I couldn't tell at the time, was Yanxian Parsley. I already knew this person botted, but usually it was just unspoiled nodes. There were other factors I tended to notice, in this situation.

Strangely, they never used an action to assist the gathering, such as increasing the amount they gather. Seems like a good idea to use if you're mass farming for hours rather than wasting it. They also, like up here, were moving very perfectly to the spots, never correcting their flight, outside of changing vertical. And what was strangest, was every 6th node, they'd start to fly over, but then suddenly appear above it. Even my girlfriend watching said that the teleport was too much for the game to just be "having issues with placement".

What I did in this case, since it was spammable node, was I gathered one of each item. I was in the area originally for tea mats. When the bot finally stopped, I saw 20 listings of 99 Yanxian parsley's up for sale suddenly. Nothing changed for the rest of the mats. Really strange.

You can't do anything against bots from the gill sellers. This is such a big business that they keep comming no matter what a company does.

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Originally Posted by Ilan

You can't do anything against bots from the gill sellers. This is such a big business that they keep comming no matter what a company does.

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They could, honestly.

The gil farm bots abuse several flaws with how the game is designed, such as the enemy AI in dungeons/trials never resetting and walls only having LoS on one side. If they fixed either of those, they wouldn't be able to complete dungeons or quest properly which would effectively shut down their ability to farm gil. They wouldn't even need to make sweeping changes in this regard, since fixing just Satasha would wall off their progression, since they can't kill bosses if they can't go out of bounds to avoid their attacks, whether due to LoS issues or the boss resetting because it can't reach them.

That wouldn't stop the "legit" gil farmers who make their money with gather/crafting bots, but they're a minority compared to the mass-produced hackers.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

They could, honestly.

The gil farm bots abuse several flaws with how the game is designed, such as the enemy AI in dungeons/trials never resetting and walls only having LoS on one side. If they fixed either of those, they wouldn't be able to complete dungeons or quest properly which would effectively shut down their ability to farm gil. They wouldn't even need to make sweeping changes in this regard, since fixing just Satasha would wall off their progression, since they can't kill bosses if they can't go out of bounds to avoid their attacks, whether due to LoS issues or the boss resetting because it can't reach them.

That wouldn't stop the "legit" gil farmers who make their money with gather/crafting bots, but they're a minority compared to the mass-produced hackers.

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Do you really think that just these stupid bots exist that we have? There are enough advanced bots out there to avoid even that not to mention how much money SE would have to invest just to find different bots afterwards not to mention if its even possible with their game code. The fight against bots from professionals is not the one that they could win.

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Originally Posted by Ilan

Do you really think that just these stupid bots exist that we have? There are enough advanced bots out there to avoid even that not to mention how much money SE would have to invest just to find different bots afterwards not to mention if its even possible with their game code. The fight against bots from professionals is not the one that they could win.

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Is it that horrible though for Square to trust its own report feature a little bit?

When I see a specific botter for over a year, it's annoying. They show the obvious signs, I am not the only person reporting them, yet nothing is done. Just stick a gm on the person for 5 minutes when they start going around and boom, they can see it (In this case, the short teleport they looooove to do).

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

It's kind of pointless to even try to disrupt them as they mostly have fail-safes enabled that will ensure their scripts start working properly the moment they're left alone.

Some people really don't have any idea how to properly identify bots and might just use faulty methods such as "Selling too much stuff on the marketboard" as a reason to be suspicious of somebody.

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You're very right, but I do have a big problem with people that trample over normal players because they think they've found a bot (and, obviously, are wrong).

It's also why trusting reports too much would lead to false positives.

I think there is some merit to "let a GM observe this person teleporting for 5 minutes" after enough reports. But if they start disguising their behavior well enough... anticheat software is, in the long run, the only way SE might make a real dent in it.

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Originally Posted by Jijifli

Is it that horrible though for Square to trust its own report feature a little bit?

When I see a specific botter for over a year, it's annoying. They show the obvious signs, I am not the only person reporting them, yet nothing is done. Just stick a gm on the person for 5 minutes when they start going around and boom, they can see it (In this case, the short teleport they looooove to do).

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Oh i did not say that. I was also not happy how SE handled things with a botter i reported, but i honestly stopped to care since they obviously ignored my report and everyone who has two eyes could see it was a bot who was mining there. :shrug:

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Originally Posted by Ilan

Do you really think that just these stupid bots exist that we have? There are enough advanced bots out there to avoid even that not to mention how much money SE would have to invest just to find different bots afterwards not to mention if its even possible with their game code. The fight against bots from professionals is not the one that they could win.

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The most "advanced" things I've seen bots do is move out of AoEs and run away from something if they get low on HP. They're still obvious as all heck by their movement patterns, though.

But as far as gil farmers go, I seriously doubt they would be able to farm effectively if they couldn't position hack to warp to their destinations and hide in the air/ground so enemies can't hit them as there's too many random variables present in some quest duties/boss fights for a bot to actually account for. XIV's heavily client-sided nature basically excludes trying to fix their hacking, but it could still be circumvented by making all enemy AI able to detect when a player is at an unreachable location and reset, because they already do this in HW/SB zones if you try to attack them from a location they can't find a valid path to.

Some people have actually gotten matched with gil farmers for Cape Westwind via roulette and the bots will just float in the air and nuke Rhitatyn while he stands there doing nothing.

The only option Square has at its disposal is to compete with the botters where it counts: gil. Either they offer an officially-sanctioned method of obtaining gil for cash, or the botters continue to provide a service some people pay for.

The only reason bots exist now is there are enough people willing to purchase gil, no matter what the consequences may be to their accounts.

Square meets that need itself, or the "black market" does. There is no third option.

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Originally Posted by van_arn

The only option Square has at its disposal is to compete with the botters where it counts: gil. Either they offer an officially-sanctioned method of obtaining gil for cash, or the botters continue to provide a service some people pay for.

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Could do the WoW taken system. Make it an item people can buy, then you put it on the MB at a fixed price. Then players hand in the item for Crysta, so they can buy a subscription or mog station items with it.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

The most "advanced" things I've seen bots do is move out of AoEs and run away from something if they get low on HP. They're still obvious as all heck by their movement patterns, though.

But as far as gil farmers go, I seriously doubt they would be able to farm effectively if they couldn't position hack to warp to their destinations and hide in the air/ground so enemies can't hit them as there's too many random variables present in some quest duties/boss fights for a bot to actually account for. XIV's heavily client-sided nature basically excludes trying to fix their hacking, but it could still be circumvented by making all enemy AI able to detect when a player is at an unreachable location and reset, because they already do this in HW/SB zones if you try to attack them from a location they can't find a valid path to.

Some people have actually gotten matched with gil farmers for Cape Westwind via roulette and the bots will just float in the air and nuke Rhitatyn while he stands there doing nothing.

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Just because you've seen only this doesn't mean the other stuff isn't there. The point is that SE won't change their stuff anyway because it costs money. Sure they could just put up a game guard or some other crap, which would just agonize the normal players while bots will still run because they work around it anyway.

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Originally Posted by Ilan

Just because you've seen only this doesn't mean the other stuff isn't there. The point is that SE won't change their stuff anyway because it costs money. Sure they could just put up a game guard or some other crap, which would just agonize the normal players while bots will still run because they work around it anyway.

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The silly thing is that they've already tried to take measures against them in the past, with one update mentioning that "Items in certain dungeons have been relocated to discourage illicit activity"...except I'm not sure how that would help at all when the bots can just teleport wherever they want.

Like I said, all they'd actually have to do discourage the gil farmers is update the dungeon/trial enemy AI to have the "reset if cannot reach target" function on them. The AI routines already exist on overworld enemies, so they'd just need to port them over, basically. The only way the bots would be able to counter that is by creating scripts that can fight bosses normally as they wouldn't be able to go out of bounds without causing them to reset, which would force them to be subjected to their attacks and there's no way THMs/BLMs can face tank dungeon enemies/bosses past the first few.

I'm guessing that Square-Enix enjoys all the money the get from botting. I remember a few months ago they had a live-letter where they listed the type of infractions and how servere they were with a chart--and botting didn't even make the top 5 list. god, I wish I had a link to that live letter anytime mentions botting. Square-Enix don't care.

I feel like they deliberately excluded whatever offense the gil farmers were being punished for from that chart because they'd easily have been at the top otherwise.

But yeah, I'm getting the impression they wouldn't do anything about the matter even if people complained about it as much as the whole housing issue.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

I feel like they deliberately excluded whatever offense the gil farmers were being punished for from that chart because they'd easily have been at the top otherwise.

But yeah, I'm getting the impression they wouldn't do anything about the matter even if people complained about it as much as the whole housing issue.

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Nah,

I've basically ranked bots like this:

A) Macro bots - Spammers, basically the only thing we can report. These require little more than open source macro tools to just paste things repeatedly. Downside, the only thing we can report.

B) Script kiddie bots (ones you buy), these ones are obvious because they all behave the same way, these are the rmt bots (not the spammers), and the auto-gathering bots, and the people selling them aren't even trying to hide the fact. They also sell the same bots for every MMO that is profitable, and are responsible for killing MMO's. Most of the hack-moving bots are these.

C) the "fake player" bot, I've seen less of these, but the give away is that they react before the thing they are supposed to be reacting to, so you're more likely to see them fate-farming, or being used in a dungeon/raid for whatever reasons. This could be considered the "expert parser" bot, as they are programmed to recognize packets and manipulate the client's internal API so the server only sees a player. The downside is that even if these could be reported, chances are it's someone's multibox and they could actually react to a GM. And since there's no client protection, someone has to be caught red handed (eg running several of them together.)

D) The hardest thing to detect are custom utilities/scripts written and used by a single player for any purpose. Unlike the others, these are specifically meant to do something (eg manipulate the market) that the player has an interest in doing, and likely won't be caught unless they accidentally show their cards (Eg streaming, sharing with a FC or Discord), and it leaks.

The stuff that is the easiest to report is A and B, because they're exactly the same on every server. Button mash names, hiding under floors and behind walls. All it takes is using search button in the game to find ONE of them, and you find all of them in the lodestone.

Go to the Community Wall: https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/community/ ( use this link, to search by most recently created FC )

Use the find tool to find the name of the button mash bot, or their FC, and you will get all the bots in the FC. Narrow it down by server. Then they can be reported without having to transcribe them directly from the game client.

I locate the button-mash name gil farmers by just restricting my player search results to sprouts.

I don't even bother reporting them anymore, though, because while they get purged regularly it only takes them about a day to come back afterward. They'd need to purge them literally every day and prevent them from ever reaching the point where they can create a FC if they wanted to make any meaningful headway in preventing RMT without resorting to a more permanent fix, as they store their gil in the FC chest prior to making transactions. They don't care if they get banned since if they manage to go even a day at 50 they'll already have plenty enough gil to make a sizable transaction.

I really doubt they actually care about the RMT and just ban to save face at this point because refusing to pursue a lasting solution despite years of this going on using almost the exact same methods just doesn't make any sense.

I had an encounter with a human player using a botting program in Kugane near the Eureka NPC, when there were dozens and dozens of players next to it. I would change class from DoH to DoM and I would be instantly targeted and cured. I changed classes a few more times, and I even left and came back to check. I was instantaneously cured every single time with zero delay and I concluded that no human could have those reaction times.

I guess the player realised their character was making a lot of noise in a town because after a few moments they started moving around and stopped curing me (I was standing right beside them). The player had all lvl 70 jobs and I reported them to the STF.

Not sure if the player was banned or even punished. It was just interesting to note that this was an actual player, not one of these auto generated, random name bots. I guess if you are going to risk your account being permanently banned and losing everything by using one of these "undetectable" programs that is up to you. They are not undetectable and you are cheating to gain an edge.

Eureka bots aren't that uncommon and are generally used to farm the crystals from NMs (I've been able to pick some of them out by simply observing which people are perpetually staying at the top of the mentor list for Novice Network). It's typical of them to be on a healer class as they have an easy time getting full credit from NMs by spamming heals on people and it's unlikely they won't be revived in such a crowded place should they die. They're usually seen in the lower level areas where they have no risk of getting proximity aggro from mobs and dying in places where they won't be seen easily.

I've seen some more sophisticated stuff like an entire party of players from my server botting (Who unsurprisingly, can regularly be seen gather/craft botting as well) on week one of Pagos to level off of weak enemies they had no risk of dying from. I have zero doubt they'll be pulling the same stunt when Pyros comes out, too.

But overall, there are a lot more "normal" looking bots around then people are likely aware of. It's simply a matter of recognizing the signs (One of the most obvious being the "Jump in place, then suddenly turn and fly" behavior gather/FATE bots use every time they move to a new spot with a flying mount).

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Originally Posted by MrMagic

I had an encounter with a human player using a botting program in Kugane near the Eureka NPC, when there were dozens and dozens of players next to it. I would change class from DoH to DoM and I would be instantly targeted and cured. I changed classes a few more times, and I even left and came back to check. I was instantaneously cured every single time with zero delay and I concluded that no human could have those reaction times.

I guess the player realised their character was making a lot of noise in a town because after a few moments they started moving around and stopped curing me (I was standing right beside them). The player had all lvl 70 jobs and I reported them to the STF.

Not sure if the player was banned or even punished. It was just interesting to note that this was an actual player, not one of these auto generated, random name bots. I guess if you are going to risk your account being permanently banned and losing everything by using one of these "undetectable" programs that is up to you. They are not undetectable and you are cheating to gain an edge.

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That would be a Eureka bot. The ones I saw were a healer paired with a tank. They automatically cast heals on any low health players within range and they automatically cast raise on any players at 0% health. The raise really gave it away in Anemos, because when releasing to the aetheryte a player is at 0% health for a second or two while in the raise animation, so you would see the bots at camp immediately target and cast raise on someone as their body entered camp.

Player bots are rather common, and the STF rarely takes action against them. The first-time penalty for botting is a 72 hour temp ban, by the way. To give you an idea of how ineffective the STF is, there has been someone running a gathering bot while advertising RMT sales across the data center. A quick search of the info provided in the ad shows they also sell PVP wins for money. To top it off, this is not recent, and the STF knows about it.

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Originally Posted by MrMagic

I guess if you are going to risk your account being permanently banned

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You would have to do something really bad to get permabanned for a first-time offense. It's a part of why so many players utilize cheats for a personal edge or for money. The STF likely won't catch them, and if they do, they won't receive a permanent ban.

I had a thought that it's possible that some bots might actually have some kind of countermeasure in their script that triggers if someone on the STF/GM team contacts or approaches them, since I've seen it done in other MMOs where the staff were more...active in trying to punish cheaters. All it would take is one person getting caught by them to gather the data necessary to do so.

While GMs and other staff members can make themselves invisible, they still exist in the game's world and thus would still register in the game's memory and the bots in some games would actually DC or log off if they approached them due to them having a unique memory signature they could be scripted to detect. They can be also be scripted to offer a canned response to specifically named individuals, IE, anyone with the word "GM" at the start of their name, which would protect them from getting purged if the ones contacting them aren't smart enough to do more then simply ask if they're a bot.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

While GMs and other staff members can make themselves invisible, they still exist in the game's world and thus would still register in the game's memory and the bots in some games would actually DC or log off if they approached them due to them having a unique memory signature they could be scripted to detect.

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That sounds like bad programming from companies in those situations. There shouldn't be anything sent/accessible client-side to notify someone of their existence when a gm is set to 'invisible'.

XIV is like an open book to cheaters because of how heavily client-sided it is on top of having seemingly no encryption/protection on data being received from the server, so I'd be surprised if they actually took measures to make it so players can't know if a GM is stalking them or some such.

Unfortunately, with how dated the server structure is they're probably legitimately incapable of increasing the security without impacting performance negatively somehow.

As a newly leveled BTN/MIN on Balmung, seeing gathering bots from large FCs/well-known crafters is utterly demoralizing.

For the most part, I've given up on trying to make gil through direct gathering activites. Because even when you find a niche, those who bot will drive the price so low, it's not worth it for anyone who legit does DOL.

I second the notion that others have stated: Go after the coders/sites behind these bots.

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Originally Posted by TwistedTea

I second the notion that others have stated: Go after the coders/sites behind these bots.

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Careful what you ask for. The reason why most of these bots are created outside the US is because they don't see these things as copyright violations. In the US... well take this recent one as an example:

Look up "epic games lawsuit"

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7. Defendants’ cheating and (name removed)’ inducing and enabling of others to cheat ruin the
game playing experience of players who do not cheat because they create an uneven playing
field, violate universally understood notions of fair play, and diminish the integrity of the game.

8. The software Defendants are using to cheat infringes Epic's copyrights in the
game and breaches the terms of the agreements to which Defendants agreed in order to have
access to the game. The same is true for Defendants' unauthorized public performances and
displays of unlawfully modified versions of Fortnite on YouTube.

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Take note that using a parser would also be lawsuit material. While Square Enix has generally looked the other way for some of this, it is not a sanctioned thing, and if they really want to sue someone, they can.

I feel like the community is going to face a reckoning if they keep pushing to curb third-party applications.

Bots are obviously the most 'devious' example, but look at all the people who mod their characters to be naked, and then all the people who use ACT to handle mechanic call-outs and damage meters. The issue is that 'all' of these things fall under the exact same umbrella as third-party application use that violates the ToS. And given just how large the modding/ACT community is, I can't imagine Square-Enix effectively going after bots without catching a lot of non-botters (but equally guilty) abusers in the cross-fire. And I honestly don't think those nude-mod dudes and dudettes are going to forfeit their mods on the principle of getting rid of bots. They'll get angry, and the community will suffer for it.

It's one of those situations where Square-Enix should have nipped modding and damage meters early on, and kept a firm stance on the matter, because as time goes on--people will test and push those boundaries until either the community as a whole comes to accept that Square-Enix doesn't care (which is what is happening now), or Square-Enix will go through some massive purges to reassert dominance of their own game, of which would decimate half the community. I'd be willing to be that if you combined the modders, parsers, and botters into one group--they're probably 20-30% of the community.

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Originally Posted by JackHatchet

I'd be willing to be that if you combined the modders, parsers, and botters into one group--they're probably 20-30% of the community.

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I'm going with something like 80% or more of PC players.
And that's just a guess on parsers. I don't even consider botters real people/players.

The GMs are active enough in taking action for non-cheating offenses such that they could easily keep the non-RMT bots under control if they were given the authority to enforce them (They apparently can only forward claims to the STF, judging from the past several times I've gotten in touch with them).

As for the RMT bots, they could probably nip them in the bud by simply removing gil drops from ARR dungeons (Like they've already done for every HW/SB dungeon to my knowledge), because they get the vast majority of it by farming the NPCs/chests in Amdapor Keep. No instanced methods of farming would heavily limit how much gil they're capable of generating in a given amount of time, though there is a risk that it could push them to resort to methods that are more intrusive to other players...

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

The GMs are active enough in taking action for non-cheating offenses such that they could easily keep the non-RMT bots under control if they were given the authority to enforce them (They apparently can only forward claims to the STF, judging from the past several times I've gotten in touch with them).

As for the RMT bots, they could probably nip them in the bud by simply removing gil drops from ARR dungeons (Like they've already done for every HW/SB dungeon to my knowledge), because they get the vast majority of it by farming the NPCs/chests in Amdapor Keep. No instanced methods of farming would heavily limit how much gil they're capable of generating in a given amount of time, though there is a risk that it could push them to resort to methods that are more intrusive to other players...

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Bending the game around bot behaviour doesn't work. It never has in any game. They just find another way until your players are left with nothing. Bots don't fatigue or care about what they are doing unlike players.

It's not as though anyone would actually miss the piddly amounts of gil you get from doing the ARR dungeons (You can make more gil with the few company seals you can get from a single piece of gear then you would from all the gil drops in an ARR dungeon) and they already realized how pointless it was since gil drops don't even exist in the HW/SB dungeons. The only reason their method of farmining is even practical is because they do it with several dozen parties of bots simultaneously and warp hack to skip straight to all the parts of the dungeon that matter.

While it is true they'd likely just try to find an alternative method, it would at least get them to buzz off until they find it. They really need to implement some kind of countermeasure for the basic forms of hacking they abuse, though.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

I mean, I think it would still be better then letting them continue have their way.

It's not as though anyone would actually miss the piddly amounts of gil you get from doing the ARR dungeons and they already realized how pointless it was since direct gil drops don't even exist in the HW/SB dungeons.

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It's still basically doing nothing in the grand scheme of things. Much like their text filter that was broken by changing a single character at end of a message. They are constantly cycling new characters through the story which is already going to pile up the gil.

The gil they make from farming Amdapor Keep is much more then they get from the ARR MSQ for the time investment, but the amount from the latter definitely isn't negligible (It's close to 500K if I recall correctly?). I guess even if they did axe the gil drops, they might just decide to switch to running the MSQ full time to make gil and possibly produce even more bots to compensate for the slower gains.

They're definitely a tougher nut to crack then the "real" bots owned by players for gatherng, crafting, etc.

As as aside, I'd really love to know what's going through the heads of these players who are so obsessed with making gil through less then legit means in the first place. I feel like they have a problem for some of them to be buying additional retainers/accounts just so they can store more gil and/or run more bots (Though if they were secretly running a RMT business on the side then that would explain it). I guess if I look at it that way, they seem more sad and pathetic then anything else, because they're basically ruining the economy just for the sake of sating a silly obsession that's also costing them extra money out of their wallets.