Firmament Botting Out Of Control

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

I won't deny I'm really disappointed that they didn't take any measures to make the Firmament/Diadem experience more interesting/fulfilling.

The FATEs in the former could've been a regular thing and also more a involved process; perhaps allowing you to actually craft things to use for the repairs and gain bonus skyward points as a result.

Diadem could've had collectables/aetherial reduction as an alternative to just brainlessly hitting nodes, and perhaps some "boss" monsters that take a collective effort from the players there to reap a large reward.

As far as the botting goes, almost all of the people from my server I see doing it there have an established history of doing it pretty much any time they're on DoL/H jobs though, so it's not like it pushed them over the edge or anything; they just find gathering/crafting fundamentally uninteresting. There isn't any actual risk to doing it, either, as SE's three strike policy means that unless you had prior offenses, you're just going to get a slap on the wrist if you do somehow get caught.

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My problem with the FATES in the original IshRest is just that they were too few and far between, too short, and involved too many people. You'd need instanced Firmaments to do them right, and that's lunacy. But you're right, I wish there was more to the Firmament beyond just a special place to grind collectibles.

And the botting in the Firmament bothers me a lot less than the general botting in the game, such as the type that takes over the market board and devastates the server's economy.

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Originally Posted by Eriane_Elis

Time for market captcha! lol

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Omg please no. Captchas are either too simple, annoying only legit people while bots are deciphering them without any difficulty. Or way too difficult, like these highly deformed letters which as a human you can not even see the difference between a S and 5 anymore, or these "check all the parts of this photo with a car on them" where you don't know if this include the very tiny little bit of the car going across another part of the picture. I did quit a couple forums because it was so annoying failing these kinds of things 3 or 4 times in a row each time you wanted to post something on them.

Cheaters will cheat no matter how interesting or dull a game is. So making something "fun" or "engaging" won't fix the problem.

We caught a bot constantly trying to re-mount constantly in my instance for about a half hour, they are the number one miner on their respective server. I would certainly hope they get removed in the final tally but I somehow doubt that. I did report it along with half the instance but again I don't think anything will done.

The best one is the person on top of 3 crafter leaderboards. That person is most certainly botting

It has been confirmed with a post on reddit that the person who is TOP 1 in various categories on Lamia's server is using a bot and in Ragnarok I also believe that it has been confirmed that within the top 20 there are at least 3 people using bots.

The problem is that you cannot present any proof that is not direct from the game.

As some kind of stupid joke, one of the top rankers on my server who's a rather notorious bot farmer is also cheating his alt accounts he does the farming with into the rankings.

One of them jumped into top 12 after being unranked up until the most recent ranking update, and I'm honestly really afraid of how many others are potentially sandbagging like that.

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Originally Posted by Ashiee

Point being, just don't flat out accuse people purely based on points unless the point gain is just impossible to do at any human pace.

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Agree on that. Not all bots are going to rack up ridiculously unrealistic scores anyway, that just highlights them as a potential bot. A lot of them are just going to sit around midway between 1st-12th place.

What we need to be looking at more is simply the fact bots do exist. We know botting programs are real and in use, there are discords, forums and websites for them that are public and easy to find with plenty of players admitting to having used one.

What surprises me most is the fact that Enix went ahead with the firmament in its current form anyway. They can't be blind to the fact bots exist, they know their team doesn't have the tools to handle individual player botting, yet they released what amounts to a bot heaven. Crafting and Gathering is in a similar spot ever since the changes, it couldn't be a better set up for bots with easy to level DoL/H, easy to obtain mats and gear and easy to macro recipes all from the safety of your private house where you're undetectable. Sometimes I wonder if they've just given up and are trying to accommodate bots as customers, providing they keep it quiet.

Proving they are bots is as hard as proving they really expend 18 to 20 hours straight crafting, don't they have a life!?.


It's too fishy that some players can add + 300,000 points in a single day without cheating, they'd need to craft like 14 hours at 1 craft/3 minutes maximizing the collectability in order to make that much, definitely not achievable by a human player.


There are bots most likely and SE does nothing about it.

I think my biggest issue as someone who elected to compete this go, why hold a competition if you are not going to oversee it for cheating? In my instances we find at least 1-5 broken bots in our lockouts who got stuck on terrain(going back and forth over a node)or have an error and are stuck constantly repeating a motion (mounting, class switching).

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Originally Posted by SigmaOZ

Proving they are bots is as hard as proving they really expend 18 to 20 hours straight crafting, don't they have a life!?.


It's too fishy that some players can add + 300,000 points in a single day without cheating, they'd need to craft like 14 hours at 1 craft/3 minutes maximizing the collectability in order to make that much, definitely not achievable by a human player.


There are bots most likely and SE does nothing about it.

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After crunching the numbers, you'd actually only need to have been pulling 9K points per hour since the rankings started to have over 2 million points, and considering that you can get over 20K points per hour ideally, the number is not nearly as unreasonable as I had initially thought.

That said, identifying who is/isn't cheating is a much dicier proposition then I had initially thought.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

After crunching the numbers, you'd actually only need to have been pulling 9K points per hour since the rankings started to have over 2 million points, and considering that you can get over 20K points per hour ideally, the number is not nearly as unreasonable as I had initially thought.

That said, identifying who is/isn't cheating is a much dicier proposition then I had initially thought.

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2,000,000 points at 9,000/hour would mean crafting around 22 hours per day for a total of ~222 hours in 10 days.
2,000,000 points at 20,000/hour would mean crafting about 10 hours per day for a total of ~100 hours in 10 days.


What you're not taking into account is the RNG factor and that not every craft will yield a perfect collectability, that definitely adds many hours of unsuccessful attempts with failed crafts, I'm pretty sure only bots are able to think that fast and not get tired.

No idea what you guys are going on about, exactly 1,5 Million points while not active for a few days now with place 2 so far behind is not suspicious at all.

https://abload.de/img/20200918_084608hijut.jpg

Yo somebody defend him and say all people did it legit.
https://i.imgur.com/4OVu1Aj.png

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Originally Posted by RicaRuin

No idea what you guys are going on about, exactly 1,5 Million points while not active for a few days now with place 2 so far behind is not suspicious at all.

https://abload.de/img/20200918_084608hijut.jpg

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Update: Number 1 did about half a million more points in less than 24h. I do not craft to that extend, and I do know some people put a lot of time in, but I doubt that such numbers in such a time are legit.

The botter I caught previously with the constant re-mounting in one spot when it broke took the number 1 spot for their server on miner. Why am I not surprised they didn't bother checking the reports first?

Strangely, a cheater in my server's DoL rankings did get removed, so whatever standards they're using to determine who they should/shouldn't get rid of seem very arbitrary.

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Originally Posted by RicaRuin

Update: Number 1 did about half a million more points in less than 24h. I do not craft to that extend, and I do know some people put a lot of time in, but I doubt that such numbers in such a time are legit.

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Someone on my server saved all his turn ins for the last 24 hours to shake things up. He ofc is at the top but some people just like to have that gotcha moment and he was one of these.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

Strangely, a cheater in my server's DoL rankings did get removed, so whatever standards they're using to determine who they should/shouldn't get rid of seem very arbitrary.

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ya, our prev #1 btn was found blatantly botting ytdy in instance, summarily reported, but i'm still a bit surprised they were removed from the rankings given SE's usual lackadaisical approach to the issue. Better than not at least.

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Originally Posted by Commander_Justitia

Yo somebody defend him and say all people did it legit.

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well, i ended up with 1.5x m... so it's plausible, given i took a 2 day break + my lax play schedule.
it's not that all player are legit, simply that if it's within realm of plausibility, shouldn't automatically be regarded as bot.
if he stopped turnin, then spike 500k, it likely that it was being hoarded.
skepticism healthy, but I think many skeptical ppl just prefer write off their lack of success due to "bots" rather than consider the effort + lengths ppl are going to.
The DoH boards were, for the most part, reasonable to attain a slot on given only 1-2h of crafting a day.

Remember the good old days when GMs used to randomly check for bots in game. Nothing like seeing a row of fishers getting yanked away from fishing to see if they recast or move back.



Not that this competition is super important. But a small wait and SE checking logs, for even just the top 12 for anything they feel was cheating would be nice.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

Strangely, a cheater in my server's DoL rankings did get removed, so whatever standards they're using to determine who they should/shouldn't get rid of seem very arbitrary.

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I was surprised when I found out that the number 1 miner on Ragnarok got removed too.

Congrats to all the bots on Lamia who made the rankings and didn't get removed, which is apparently all of them because our rankings are still dominated by bots.