Player Feedback: Gathering Bots

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Originally Posted by Vnolan

We're not talking about one or two. It's dozens. Outright banning the people doing it would be quite the impact.

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Yes we're talking about a positive impact. To be made for the hundreds or thousands of players who left the game, sick of this. If taking this issue had been the priority since the beginning, it's not dozens of players the community would have lost, but so much more it would have kept.

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Originally Posted by Malzian

Snipped for limit

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Bans on the small fry would not put out the big fire, you're right, but it would send a message to players that personal botting is not allowed. I wish you would come see just how many players Gilgamesh has that bot on their main characters. We don't have a surplus of gil sellers, because our server is blocked for creation most of the time, but we do have an amazing amount of personal bots. Going after them would cause quite an impact, just maybe not the nuclear size you think going after the asdkjawi akdhwihados bots will.

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

the bots would fall under "illicit activity". However, as soon as a bunch of bots are banned, more will be created. The stuff they gather is sold on the Market Board and then the gil is prob used to sell to players buying into RMT.

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After observing certain botters on my own server and reading forums where it's talked about freely it seems to me that only the least thoughtful players who fully admit ingame that they bot or buy gil get at most a few days temp ban but usually they aren't touched at all and even the ones who do get temp banned just go straight back to botting after their temp is over. Only the characters belonging to RMT companies who are guaranteed to get new accounts to replace the banned ones are permabanned. The only thing that seems to get real players banned is mean words.

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Originally Posted by Zigabar

Bans on the small fry would not put out the big fire, you're right, but it would send a message to players that personal botting is not allowed. I wish you would come see just how many players Gilgamesh has that bot on their main characters. We don't have a surplus of gil sellers, because our server is blocked for creation most of the time, but we do have an amazing amount of personal bots. Going after them would cause quite an impact, just maybe not the nuclear size you think going after the asdkjawi akdhwihados bots will.

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I suppose this is a Gilgamesh thing then, because while I was on Lamia and now that I'm on Behemoth, the only bots you see are RMT bots. Player bots are a real oddity here so I was mostly speaking in terms of RMT bots. That being said, it's difficult for SE to discern player bots from actual players in this respect. Many of the bot programs that were around during launch were very sophisticated in how they handled things and could replicate player behavior fairly convincingly. I can only imagine they've gotten much more so in the intervening years... Sadly at that level all you can do is report them, but if they're not using the teleport glitches it can be very difficult for SE to suss out which characters are actually botting from those that are potentially botting.

Good luck with that.

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Originally Posted by Malzian

I suppose this is a Gilgamesh thing then

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For sure. This is more prominent in larger servers, as RMT is more in smaller ones. I just trying to clear up, what looked like, a misunderstanding.

Both should be handled and neither should be dismissed.

You know what happens when you remove a bot? They make another one, why? Because you didn't take their gil. It's a basic Sting operation, you allow the drones to do their work til they lead you to the Queen Bee. Once you find the Queen Bee you get this.

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...164944b676725f

However if you just ban bots every time, you know what happens? The ones holding the gil just learn to play it safe, you don't lure them into a false sense of security and it's that false sense of security which allows them to catch nearly 39k accounts/users as noted above.

So ask yourself this, do you honestly think it's productive if the team were to just constantly ban 2-5 bots that most likely come from the same group while never finding the source? Because that's how you cause the issue to continue by going after the small fries.

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Originally Posted by Malzian

I suppose this is a Gilgamesh thing then, because while I was on Lamia and now that I'm on Behemoth, the only bots you see are RMT bots. Player bots are a real oddity here so I was mostly speaking in terms of RMT bots. That being said, it's difficult for SE to discern player bots from actual players in this respect. Many of the bot programs that were around during launch were very sophisticated in how they handled things and could replicate player behavior fairly convincingly. I can only imagine they've gotten much more so in the intervening years... Sadly at that level all you can do is report them, but if they're not using the teleport glitches it can be very difficult for SE to suss out which characters are actually botting from those that are potentially botting.

Good luck with that.

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I gotta say that once a week I get a tell from someone testing me if I'm a bot and half the time I don't respond. They get angry and threaten to report, and because I'mnot here to justify anyone's paranoia of whether I'm a bot or not, I don't care. I'm not teleport glitching. I'm not hurting anyone. Heck, sometimes I don't even see the tell because I'm watching TV or the chat log fills up so fast. This is just a vigilante witch hunt because people are overly-sensitive to a real problem that can only be solved by devs.

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Originally Posted by Malzian

I suppose this is a Gilgamesh thing then

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I was Server hopping pretty much and it's not only Gilgamesh. It's actually even common on EU Servers that you encounter the same kind, in my case the ones that do Aetherial Reduction for Months. Odin, Shiva, Cerberus are the ones I talk about.
I don't wanna imagine how it is like on Balmung but I can imagine the amount is quite even much higher then on Gilgamesh.

It's not hard to find out who is Botting if they all do the same Behaviour as walking, stacking at the same Point, walking again, doing the same stacking, this is very much scripted it seems.
Given the Fact a Bot can only do so much what they're being told speaking of Execution and Commanding, they cannot decide to drift off the same Walkpath for the slightest change.

That's the thing, if 10 Players suddenly Teleport at the same time like 15:40 Eorzean Time, end in the same Zone like they were in Churning Mists and are now in Sea of Clouds, all of these 10 Players..., it's pretty much obvious.
Now see this for 5 Times more and ya, you can tell.

Sure if you just Gather for like 2 Minutes for a Craft or two you will not notice the pattern/behaviour, yet if you do Aetherial Reduction to get Crystals and Clusters or Aethersands for your Raid Pots, then I think, if someone did not fall on their head..., they notice.

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Again I think People misunderstood the Topic here. We are not talking about the RMT Bots that you see Teleporting around and Queue'ing up and doing their Teleport Hacks in Duties, no....

We talk about Real Players having a Real Name who do sometimes play with their Hands, interact with others in the Main Cities and turn on their Bot Program while they sleep or are on Work.
They do it because they're lazy (obviously) and want to make Quick Gil Ingame without a single Effort, hence we Gatherers get upset due of having grinded all those Blue Scrips / Red Scrips with our Hands which took quite some hefty time.

Some of those "Bot Players" have cleared Alexander 12 Savage and even use the Mount so while Botting!

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Originally Posted by Mwynn

I was Server hopping pretty much and it's not only Gilgamesh. It's actually even common on EU Servers that you encounter the same kind, in my case the ones that do Aetherial Reduction for Months. Odin, Shiva, Cerberus are the ones I talk about.
I don't wanna imagine how it is like on Balmung but I can imagine the amount is quite even much higher then on Gilgamesh.

It's not hard to find out who is Botting if they all do the same Behaviour as walking, stacking at the same Point, walking again, doing the same stacking, this is very much scripted it seems.
Given the Fact a Bot can only do so much what they're being told speaking of Execution and Commanding, they cannot decide to drift off the same Walkpath for the slightest change.

That's the thing, if 10 Players suddenly Teleport at the same time like 15:40 Eorzean Time, end in the same Zone like they were in Churning Mists and are now in Sea of Clouds, all of these 10 Players..., it's pretty much obvious.
Now see this for 5 Times more and ya, you can tell.

Sure if you just Gather for like 2 Minutes for a Craft or two you will not notice the pattern/behaviour, yet if you do Aetherial Reduction to get Crystals and Clusters or Aethersands for your Raid Pots, then I think, if someone did not fall on their head..., they notice.

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If they're doing that then it's a good indicator that they're likely botting and I would agree they should be acted upon. However, I can't say that I can speak for SE's internal process on dealing with these things but I know that, whatever the process is, it's a long one. They don't just go out and ban on a report, they actually take time to build a case, much like law enforcement does.

I really don't see this behavior on Behemoth and our MBs don't generally bear forth any evidence that such things are going on, but I suppose it's just like real neighborhoods... some are good where everyone stays within the law, some are mediocre where there's a little crime and some are festering holes where it's common to do illegal things.

As for the programs and walk paths, if there's no deviation then the programs must actually have devolved since launch. I remember there being botting programs that would randomly jump over an obstacle one time, walk around it another time and even had player-avoidance where of you approached they would walk AROUND you instead of through.

I suppose banning bots on populated and difficult to get on servers such as Gilg would have an impact on some players, but then again... These people already know they're breaking the rules, and I don't honestly know how much effect the punishment would have, depending on if it's a character or account ban. A character ban would be a LOT less effective due to alting, but once again I can't speak for SE's policy and internal procedure on the matter.

To me, someone in SE seems to be protecting them to cause issues like this. I been reporting these 3 gather bots since June 2016 and nothing is done.

I gave detailed reports though support desk, though the website, everything imaginable and they still get to bot. I feel it is a great insult considering my friend (who i was with during the incident) was suspended for 9 days for being a victim of harassment just because she logged off and told them to stop harassing her though the novice network. She had to log off because we where in a duty and would not stop when asked by several people.

3-4 people follow each other, stacked on each other, follow the same stiff routes and sometimes end up MPKing people because scripts do not know how to monster dodge some of the nodes. It is very obvious they are bots and one GM told me "Well maybe they found out it was real players and not bots" If that is the case, I say someone is protecting them.