Square-Enix, please, do something about the bots

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Originally Posted by Luna_Ariana

Also may I ask to people who play other MMOs: How do they get rid of them? Speaking of both RMT and Gatherer Bots from actual active people.

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They don't. It's a never ending dance. Bot programmer makes a bot and sells it. Game developers study said bot, determine how to detect it, then ban them. Bot programmers see how they are being detected and make a new bot that won't be and sell it. And so on.

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Originally Posted by Moonlite

Multiple posts over the years have shown SE does not react as if this is a threat to the integrity of the game. While allowing it to grow before getting around to removing it. Here is a little experiment I tried way back in 2.X days. Some of the shard sellers were bots they could not humanly possible provide the amount they had on the AH. So I removed all the wind shards I had onto a retainer. Bought from a "Supposed" bot, put those new shards onto a different retainer and watched the ban waves. Eventually they got removed. The shards I had bought from them did not. So how many billions of shards do you think they put into the game before a timely response happened?

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P2P models rarely act on bots as they're making them money via subs. I dealt with that in WoW for years, they never did anything back then except for spamming which actually hurt the players more than the bots.

It feels like the only bots they regularly take action against are those warp-hacking gil farmers who tend to show up in droves, only to mysteriously vanish some days later and the expendable RMT spammers who are replaced in a matter of minutes.

The more low-key bots that are being used for personal income seem like they're never going to be dealt with, even though they do often impact the game in a negative way on a small scale by giving individual players too much control over the market as well as an excess of income that is often used to horde houses just because.

The most annoying thing about bots for me is the ones that happen to be "playing" the MSQ at the same area where you are, and interrupt a non-cutscene story piece by popping up on top of the NPC you are trying to having a conversation with. It feels.... intrusive? Like someone pushed in front of you in a line and doesn't care. And just messes with my enjoyment of the scene.

There's the quick-report option for RMT, but not for other kinds of issues, so there's no easy way to report them if you encounter them. Or can I report them under that because they're creating gil for the RMT?

There is quite a lot of them on Northen Thanalan right now, teleporting like mad from mob to mob and killing them. I sure hope this doesn't become like what i have seen on some other games, where completing some quests was nearly impossible because the required mobs were all stolen so fast by whole swarms of bots that a human player couldn't hope to compete with them.

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Also may I ask to people who play other MMOs: How do they get rid of them? Speaking of both RMT and Gatherer Bots from actual active people.

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The only efficient way i have seen to achieve that is by having a game so dead and deserted by players that the people behind RMT and bots wouldn't even bother with it, because there is no money to gain at all from a non-existent playerbase :rolleyes:

There was a game...Tera? which made a minor tweak to the UI and exposed a good number of bots (basically making them click on the wrong UI repeatedly).
Ban-hammered them all.

And Balmung in a way is fairly free from bots since once gone, they usually don't come back due to server lock down.