Okay now the botting is getting a little out of hand...

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Originally Posted by Emerald_Swords

I'm generally surprised no interviewer has covered this towards the launch of Shadowbringers.

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I believe all questions are pre-approved and anytime ppl have asked anything difficult, they have gone rogue, which is why you can see the irritation of Yoshida's face when it happens.

Or they are just interviews from ppl that they know would never question their greatness and take the chance of loosing their approved status and any future access.

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Originally Posted by SamSmoot

Any time a player comes into a large amount of gil, or an expensive item to sell that he didn't pay for, ban that player permanently.

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Cool, so if I dislike someone I can just send them 10 mil gil or an expensive item and get their account terminated :D

And see the boys that fly through the air in areas where there is a no fly zone activated like in Thanalan and such.

*puts on tinfoil hat*

... okay, okay. Listen.

What if... this is just some genius marketing ploy for the upcomming Nier alliance raid? The Copied Factory.

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Originally Posted by RoyalBeef

Cool, so if I dislike someone I can just send them 10 mil gil or an expensive item and get their account terminated :D

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That actually was a problem in some MMOs with stricter policies.

People would buy currency from a RMT website with their own money but have it be sent to the character of someone they didn't like so they'd get punished when they eventually investigated the RMT account to see who it was sending money to.

It does make the concept of punishing gil buyers a lot dicier if it can be abused in such a manner, though the fact you need to be friends with someone to send them mail makes it much less likely to happen then in MMOs where mail can be sent freely as it would mean blindly accepting friend requests from gibberish-named randoms.

I seen a bunch running around in mid air yesterday in Gridania. It was as i was teleporting out and had to give it a 2nd look
What a plague they are and those that support them really

Famfrit server was so bad yesterday that New Gridania could barely load for PS4 players. There were HUNDREDS of them flying through the air walking through walls it was insane.
Something needs to be done. The bots are making the login queues stay.

Bot numbers have grown since Shadowbringers launch, yes. But what was going on more recently, and especially yesterday was markedly different. Far more bots visibly moving rather than insta-teleporting, and then last night multiple servers had crowds of bots immobile around the Aetherites and elsewhere. Some would get manually moved one at a time. I suspect either the botters scripts broke, or maybe(hopefully) SE finally managing some effective countermeasures

I saw a whole line of them running through the sky at Horizon last night. Freaked me the heck out. I don't remember it ever being this horrible before.

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Originally Posted by Dagget

Bot numbers have grown since Shadowbringers launch, yes. But what was going on more recently, and especially yesterday was markedly different. Far more bots visibly moving rather than insta-teleporting, and then last night multiple servers had crowds of bots immobile around the Aetherites and elsewhere. Some would get manually moved one at a time. I suspect either the botters scripts broke, or maybe(hopefully) SE finally managing some effective countermeasures

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My friend logged in this morning. They are still in Famfrit in massive numbers just standing around.

Odd, I have yet to see more than two bots at a time and I'm on Light DC.

Maybe it's because I don't get on until around 11 PM for you guys (NA player).

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Originally Posted by Akamukai

Odd, I have yet to see more than two bots at a time and I'm on Light DC.

Maybe it's because I don't get on until around 11 PM for you guys (NA player).

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I was on between 7:00pm central and 11:30pm central
It was bad. I spent over an hour sending reports.

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Originally Posted by Saintly

https://i.imgur.com/8P4krJy.gif

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I have laughed so hard at this, I'm in tears haha!

Make Gil not trade-able. Or, you know, have the server check if the client is in an area it's not supposed to be able to be in and ban them. It boggles my mind that the bots client is like.. hey server I'm moonwalking up in the clouds here and clipping through all the things and the server is just like.. Okay cool have fun!.

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Originally Posted by Sunarine

Make Gil not trade-able. Or, you know, have the server check if the client is in an area it's not supposed to be able to be in and ban them. It boggles my mind that the bots client is like.. hey server I'm moonwalking up in the clouds here and clipping through all the things and the server is just like.. Okay cool have fun!.

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That would kill crafting commissions. Gil needs to be tradable.
What needs to be done is server checks for things like physics anomalies such as flying in a no flying zone or under the map, etc. or maybe just have an actual GM staff that’s logged into the game checking zones for that crap instead of GMs that only show up if a harassment report is made.

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Originally Posted by TheMightyMollusk

RMT bots do use full accounts. Otherwise they couldn't actually give their gil to the buyer. They're usually bought with stolen credit info or fraudulent cards, but that doesn't really help us.

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I know that this one alone is no solution, but together with tye other things it makes botting n rmt spamming alot mor difficult to impossible and massively less attractive.
Yes, that one thing can be circumvented, but also only with criminal energy of making no stop at even crossing the jail line of fraud or even stealing

The point is, rmt spammers n cheat botters won't be stoppable only nwith 1 or 2 partwise to fully circumventable solutions and just only banning trial accounts and stolen accounts, thats like scratching on the tip of n iceberg and wondering yourself, why the ice doesn't get lesser, when the ice practically regrows back xxx times faster, than you can remove it or stop it from regrowing.

You can stop it only, if you destroy the issue immediately at its root by a multitude of player and accountbased measuments against rmt n cheating, that help in detecting rule violating accounts faster and help players to totally isolate themself out of reach from rmt spammers, because thats the sole purpose why they exist - the user of the bot wants to make only cheap advertising, that many people ingame get to see this spam crap.

So what happens, if you take away from a flame (Spammer) the access to oxygen (Players they want to advertise)? Right, the flame will stop to exist, because wheres no oxygen, can exist also no flame, spammers will lose their interest in FF14, if they absolutely can't reach anymore any players with their garbage, because players got powerful tools to their hands to decide over it who can even chat to them.

If those spammers are whether my friend, my guildie or in my group, alone such a strong chat filter will cut down rmt spammers by approximately 90%, which will instantly not be able to spam theit shit anymore because they will basically spam only with themself, as nobody else will see what those bots have spammed, it gets just filtered out due to not fulfilling the requirements to ignore your personal chat settings, if you decide for youself, that only your friends for example should be able to chat with you.
Could be only circumvented by stealing an account of a friend of yours.

Is it an extreme radical solution? Yes, is it effective? YES! Deserve players to be fully able to decide over it who can chat with them? HELL YEEEES!!!

PS: these options are naturally the most powerful filters possible, players should naturally know too as well, that such powerful filters have naturally also their own disadvantage of making the game instantly extreme silent for you too by their counterside of forcing you first to enable manually each player first to become able to chat with you, for example by forming a group, or by making a player temporarely your friend ;)
Such tools mean more personal constant chat organization for those who want to have everywhere in the game anytime guaranteed silence from rmt spammers.

Right now the bots are so bad that they can actually hold Squenix hostage. They can occupy a zone so fully, with so many people, that nobody else can get in. They can own this spot until they are tired of it or square gives in to the demands and they leave by themselves.

It only takes 300 bots to close a zone. I've seen it done twice now. They are completely helpless. GM's arn't allowed to do anything, and the task force can't respond in less then a week.

By only doing ban waves, they've become helpless.

do you have any actual proof to this? Or are you just making stuff up?

This is totally unnaceptable and ruining the experience for everyone.
Lately it has been such an amazing amount of bots everywhere, that completely kills the immersion of playing this game.
This seems more like a F2P game than a subscription one.
They appear in the hundreds at a time, going through walls, the floors, teleporting in the air, etc...
SE needs to do something about this FAST!

How is this accepted by SE?

https://i.imgur.com/1FjYtvb.png
https://i.imgur.com/lzGeJv3.png

Honestly, when all is said and done, SE does not care.

People can argue that bots are in all MMORPGs. They sure are. Or that the RMT bots are "harmless" because they make things cheaper on the market. That they do.

In the end, not all of us play this game for numbers. A lot of us play for immersion... to feel a part of a world, not even hardcore RP, but just that general feeling that drives all towards any sort of high fantasy setting.

When I log in and see 100s of bots everywhere, many maxed at level 50, running the MSQ, killing mobs, overloading instances, obliterating the market, that immersion goes to hell. And that makes the game not fun. I'm taking a long break. Not rage quitting... just tired. There are other games with fewer bots and greater immersion.

I think at the end of the day, we can see that SE doesn't care. They have absolutely no cheat detection client or server side (and yes, I know client side can be terrible). Players with crowns run gathering bots with impunity and brag about it in their FCs. Players use a certain third party add on to read system memory, grabbing numbers that get posted to a site without a player's permission, set triggers for call outs in discord before a mob even even occurs, locate hunt targets automatically without having to move at all. Gathering bots, PvP bots, FATE bots. It is cheating. I'm sorry, flame me. But it is cheating by definition of the word. (Yes, I truly understand that it is absurd this game doesn't have a proper API for legit add ons like general parsers and the such, let's not go down this rabbit hole, just pointing out the obvious... cheating is when you break the rules of a game even if those rules are absurdly restrictive).

Why do they allow this? My guess is money. It costs money to enforce rules and hire staff. They lose money by getting rid of the 1000's of bot accounts. 90% of the player base would revolt and rage quit if they took away the add ons. By doing nothing, this is the new normal.

In the end... seriously, it is fine. It is a game. And everyone is different. For some, the means don't matter, just the end. And if hacking the game gets you to that end, so be it. But for others, it just trashes what is really a beautiful game. I'm so tired of it. The bots are out of control because SE lets them be out of control. There is nothing we, as a player base can do to fix the situation. Reporting is a joke. Report a real player for botting... 2 years later, they'll still be botting. Entire FCs bot. All of those hours you put into grinding crafting and gathering... a joke compared to the bot driven market. We can say, "well if people stopped buying Gil (which is mostly pointless anyway), the bots will go away. Won't happen. Only SE can do something, and year after year passes, and they don't.

In a sad way, I hope the botting gets worse and worse until the game is so adversely affected that people start leaving and new players are turned off. Perhaps they'll wake up then.

The comment about the script being broken is interesting. In the past at the Flames turn in they always teleported from spot to spot. But I got the pleasure of seeing feet run across the top of the screen today while doing a turn in. Look up and see a stream of feet running across the roof.



Might be related or maybe not. But I had never seen notification from other players in the squadron area before. Recently I have been seeing stuff pop up like another player is in the room or on the other side of the wall. I thought it was an instanced area though.


To the people upset about the bot situation or offering suggestions. This has been a problem since 2.0. They aren't really going to fix it. A large percentage of the player base will forgive almost anything as long as the lore is preserved for them. So if bots are a deal breaker don't stick around. If it is something you can live with its probably best to give up. This is from the sept 12 ban. If that doesn't dampen your enthusiasm, good luck.



Participation in RMT/prohibited activities
　・Accounts terminated: 8,763
　・Accounts temporarily suspended: 24


Botting activity (Using any number of third party tools that allow for automation)
　・Accounts terminated: 1
　・Accounts temporarily suspended: 23

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Originally Posted by SamSmoot

What are all the ones around the Aetherite doing? Just spamming RMT services?

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Nope. Those bots will run through the entire MSQ 1-50, dungeons and all. And then farm. You'll see them all over the open world in ARR, flying overhead, rising from the ground, killing mobs from inside a stone wall, all in the wide open without a care in the world. Because SE doesn't care.

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Originally Posted by AngeliouxRein

This is the worst I have ever seen a bot infestation. It's WAY worst than any F2P game at that. Before I would usually see them just appearing in front of npc or dungeon and then disappear into the ground. This is the first time that I would see soo many of them moving like an army through the air, ground, warping, etc. It's like someone found a way to upgrade them or something. The other day I saw a train of them in upper deck of Lominsa just coming from the ocean to an entrance to Bismark. It was freaky.

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The bot infestation has always been bad. It's just a lot more visible now that SE changed something that forced the bot programmers to change the bot pathing from underground where we couldn't see them to pathing above ground where they're effectively flaunting their existence.

But as long as there are players who are willing to cheat to get what they want (even if it means paying real money) instead of earning it through their own effort, bots will always be a problem.

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Originally Posted by null4646

Nope. Those bots will run through the entire MSQ 1-50, dungeons and all. And then farm. You'll see them all over the open world in ARR, flying overhead, rising from the ground, killing mobs from inside a stone wall, all in the wide open without a care in the world. Because SE doesn't care.

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I think they care, or they wouldn't have sent ban waves. But it is obviously a futile effort. They need to sort the problem on their back end so it can't get exploited.

Lets see if they can be dared to talk about it in the next Q&A.

wow that first picture sure is scary with all those bots. Sounds like SE needs to open up bot hunting for everyone. To stop the breeding of bots. There population is getting way out of hand. Only other time seen that many bots at once was on Blade and Soul where I would see a train of 60 of them killing everything in sight.

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Originally Posted by null4646

In the end, not all of us play this game for numbers. A lot of us play for immersion... to feel a part of a world, not even hardcore RP, but just that general feeling that drives all towards any sort of high fantasy setting.

When I log in and see 100s of bots everywhere, many maxed at level 50, running the MSQ, killing mobs, overloading instances, obliterating the market, that immersion goes to hell. And that makes the game not fun. I'm taking a long break. Not rage quitting... just tired. There are other games with fewer bots and greater immersion.

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This honestly is probably the biggest reason why they bother me.

Early ShB felt good when all of the people showing up at nodes with me or doing FATEs were actual people.

Now it tends to be mostly bots (Especially because my timezone difference means I'm oft playing while most people are asleep) and it bugs me enough that I try to find empty instances where I can gather/grind without having to be around them.

This honestly is infuriating. There has got to be a damn change to this. I can take seeing a few, but this is just freaking wrong. There has got to be active GMs in-game taking care of bots like this. Open a new Task Force that actually is notably active!

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Originally Posted by Zanmato

There has got to be active GMs in-game taking care of bots like this. Open a new Task Force that actually is notably active!

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They cannot do anything. It would be pointless to try to go one by one.

The GMs could at least keep the RMT spammers and other small-scale operations like the myriad DoL/H bots under control.

I aw 8 bots on Moogle yesterday. They are multiplying. This is a problem.

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Originally Posted by Schan

I aw 8 bots on Moogle yesterday. They are multiplying. This is a problem.

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Only 8? XD That's nothing :D

I'm not sure why I never noticed it sooner, but all this time I assumed the shard farming bots people mentioned would be on DoL classes.

The way they actually do it is they create a quartet of GLD bots who automate the MSQ to level 15, then level every DoH class to level 10, then complete all of the DoH quests in that level range for the mountain of shards they give you as a starting point. They then park themselves by the closest FC chest and wait to be invited to a bank FC so they can deposit their shards, afterwhich they log off, delete their characters, then repeat the process.

I've been seeing this happening on every server of the Aether DC for quite a while now, but only today actually pinned down what the bots were trying to accomplish.

Wanna know smt funny? We get dead silence here... but:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post5162465

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...8F%BE%E7%8A%B6

So why are our threads just moved without any word but the JP players at least get anything...?

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Originally Posted by Kuroka

Wanna know smt funny? We get dead silence here... but:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post5162465

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...8F%BE%E7%8A%B6

So why are our threads just moved without any word but the JP players at least get anything...?

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Here's a translation for you.


"Hello.

Thank you for your report.

We are concerned about the characters that are illegally moved.
The STF (Special Task Force) deals with these misconducts as needed.
There are comments from the STF regarding the response status and reports, so I would appreciate it if you could also check with them.

Thank you for your cooperation in eliminating fraud."

Not much better than no response at all.

I used google to get an idea already, but still, its not dead silence or even worse, moving threads but totaly ignore em...


And the other thread has the first post of the tanksforce itself lol

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Originally Posted by Kuroka

Wanna know smt funny? We get dead silence here... but:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post5162465

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...8F%BE%E7%8A%B6

So why are our threads just moved without any word but the JP players at least get anything...?

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Probably because they can easily understand the reports sent in by the JP player base whereas they would likely need to have other languages translated. The last staff member to introduce themselves does/did exactly that. Imagine the report backlog when all the cheat/hack/bot reports have to be manually translated because region based teams are not allowed to deal with these issues.

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Originally Posted by Kuroka

I used google to get an idea already, but still, its not dead silence or even worse, moving threads but totaly ignore em...

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The one from STF is more promising.

"Hello. Special Task Force (STF).

Thank you for your report.

Recently, I'm worried because I've noticed some illegal characters that I didn't see before. These fraudulent acts are investigated by combining information from you and STF's original information sources to suspend accounts. Although there will be a time lag from when you are active in the game until your account is suspended, please be assured. You may witness a similar character on a different day, but it is mostly a newly created different character.

The reports from you are very useful information for quickly grasping fraudulent behavior that changes one after another.
Even if some information, such as the spelling of the character name, is not accurate, there is no problem.
If you continue to see suspicious activity, please contact the STF reporting desk. I am sorry that the reporting procedure is annoying, but I would like to consider the window so that it is easy to report. We will revisit the reception desk for opinions and requests regarding BOT act, RMT act, and control response. The reports from these counters are directly confirmed by STF staff for reference.

Report from within the game

Please report from the main command "System"-> "Support Desk Menu"-> "Report"-> "Report Abuse".
Report from support center (outside game, web page)

Report to Special Task Force
Please report by selecting the appropriate category from the drop-down of [Report to Special Task Force:].


We will do our best to eliminate cheating so that we can provide you with a comfortable playing environment."

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Originally Posted by Dustytome

Probably because they can easily understand the reports sent in by the JP player base whereas they would likely need to have other languages translated. The last staff member to introduce themselves does/did exactly that. Imagine the report backlog when all the cheat/hack/bot reports have to be manually translated because region based teams are not allowed to deal with these issues.

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Or, since the NA and English speaking playerbase is vastly larger than the the Japanese speaking playerbase, they could hire some English speaking STF staff to communicate with us and keep the dialog open so we are just sitting here throwing our hands up and constantly asking them what the hell is going on? They drop the ball very badly on communication with their largest playerbase for reasons that are purely superficial. We don't even really hear from the English community team anymore either, when from what I have seen, the JP are very active in the community.

I think hiring English speakers, even on this side of the pond would likely be the best solution, because idk if its a cultural thing or not but SE has always been very hands off the largest audience and using language barriers and the reason when the solution is simple.

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Originally Posted by AnimaAnimus

I think hiring English speakers, even on this side of the pond would likely be the best solution, because idk if its a cultural thing or not but SE has always been very hands off the largest audience and using language barriers and the reason when the solution is simple.

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Yes, it cant be asked too much go get a 3-4 ppl team for EU/US and all other players that play english...

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Originally Posted by Machi_Machiavelli

The one from STF is more promising.

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Thank you for that, that was interresting^^

Yeah it does sound like smt, like care, at least... but still we dont get that on other languages, sadly.

Hey whatever happened to those two new Mods that we were blindly congratulating a month or two back?? Oh right, they're gone already. Maybe they can relay our concerns to the dev team since English seems non-existent on their end. But that's just me reaching. Carry on.