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

I don't usually double post, but I noticed something interesting on the JP side of things; namely that a representative from the STF actually responded to a thread bringing up the recent surge of air/wall-walking RMT bots.

...Unfortunately, it does not paint a very good picture of their competence when they claim to have "only recently" noticed this problem. If it takes them so long to pick up even on obvious bots like those it's no wonder the subtler types like the DoL/H bots virtually never get punished.

This whole situation really is not going to improve until SE beefs up the STF with more staff and they realize that how they've going about things isn't working.

When they bot so hard that they don't just noclip through terrain but they decide to become wanderers as well

https://i.imgur.com/xhxVU1i.jpg

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Originally Posted by SomethingCool

Could just go the same route as some other MMOs that essentially allowed it but let you buy/sell currency via them for example in WoW you can buy a token in their store that has a value of gold based on server economy. Post it on the AH and someone will buy it to redeem for their sub. The token costs more than a monthly sub so they technically make more from the rmt

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This is a good idea overall, but I'd be nervous if SE went to implement it. The last thing players need is to be paying a subscription fee to a company that suddenly starts to question whether or not a purely cash shop financial model is more viable. The companies invariably try to squeeze as much money out of both sides as they can, while completely losing focus on actually providing a good game.

Having something that players can buy directly from SE in exchange for currency is not a bad idea, it just would need to be implemented right.

Interestingly, I spent all day Sunday ingame and didn't hear or see any sign of a bot. 1st day in ages where I didn't get spammed by the callers the moment I zoned into a hub city. And unlike recent weeks I didn't see stacks of bots at the aetherites or air walking all over the place. Doing searches I find about 3 silent lvl 1's in each hub city, and maybe 10 across all ARR zones with the notable exception of about 50 lvl 50's churning missions from inside Waking Sands. This on a couple of EU servers and one US server today that I checked.

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Originally Posted by Dagget

Interestingly, I spent all day Sunday ingame and didn't hear or see any sign of a bot. 1st day in ages where I didn't get spammed by the callers the moment I zoned into a hub city. And unlike recent weeks I didn't see stacks of bots at the aetherites or air walking all over the place. Doing searches I find about 3 silent lvl 1's in each hub city, and maybe 10 across all ARR zones with the notable exception of about 50 lvl 50's churning missions from inside Waking Sands. This on a couple of EU servers and one US server today that I checked.

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Sunday is when they typically issue their ban waves so it's fairly normal to not be seeing them.

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Originally Posted by Dagget

Interestingly, I spent all day Sunday ingame and didn't hear or see any sign of a bot. 1st day in ages where I didn't get spammed by the callers the moment I zoned into a hub city. And unlike recent weeks I didn't see stacks of bots at the aetherites or air walking all over the place. Doing searches I find about 3 silent lvl 1's in each hub city, and maybe 10 across all ARR zones with the notable exception of about 50 lvl 50's churning missions from inside Waking Sands. This on a couple of EU servers and one US server today that I checked.

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I'm sure if you checked today (Monday) you'll see a bunch running around Gridana

Goodness gracious. I was out in Central Shroud and seen about at least 20 of them going in some sort of circle which involved running through the ground on Balmung. It made me extremely itchy. Like watching an army of spiders or something.

Just checked Diabolos mid-day, running a player search with no parameters shows 67% (or 2/3rds) of players are bots from a maximum result of 200.

https://i.imgur.com/eA4KbaE.jpg

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

I don't usually double post, but I noticed something interesting on the JP side of things; namely that a representative from the STF actually responded to a thread bringing up the recent surge of air/wall-walking RMT bots.

...Unfortunately, it does not paint a very good picture of their competence when they claim to have "only recently" noticed this problem. If it takes them so long to pick up even on obvious bots like those it's no wonder the subtler types like the DoL/H bots virtually never get punished.

This whole situation really is not going to improve until SE beefs up the STF with more staff and they realize that how they've going about things isn't working.

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uhm... http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-hand.../page8

But yes they need to hire at least an equal english team, or even one for us and for the eu.

Oh and yeah atm Gridania on shiva is full of bard bots >_>

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Originally Posted by Nedkel

Thats why there are bans based on the mac address of the motherboard

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Originally Posted by Nedkel

I asure you there is no escape from ban like that.

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I'm afraid not. Most operating systems, including Windows, will quite happily let you change the MAC address from whatever the default is.

The MAC address that a network card comes with isn't actually unique and the same address will get reused again and again. Because there are so many different MAC addresses even if you buy two network cards from the same manufacturer it's very unlikely you'll ever get two matching MAC addresses, but MAC collisions do happens so there is a necessity to be able to change them.

In more recent years it's also been a privacy concern about users being identified by their MAC address so recent operating systems even randomize the MAC address while looking for wireless networks to join.

Basically the MAC address isn't as fixed as it might appear to be, sorry!

https://i.imgur.com/ZA9qlTN.png

Holy.....

I was in all 4 Major Cities today (Was looking for an Empty House) and lord what did I witness..

In Gridania it must have been around 30-40 Bard Bots...
In Limsa 20?
in Uldah 30+ (They were everywhere around the crystal)
and even in Kugane(!) there were a few.

How can this be? I mean, they dont even try to hide anymore at this point. hssjldhs cöhdah for real? Just straight ban him. They all look the same and have gibberish names.
I even saw a few ,,falling from sky" or ,,dropping straight into hell".
Thats just.. weird.

It seems as though they've taken to banning the bots more then once a week now as all of the BRD bots (On Cactuar at least) were gone when I logged in this morning and they had already been purged earlier on Sunday. I'm not seeing any obvious RMT activity in player search aside from the usual spammers, either.

It's a start, because it does take them some time to go through the whole account creation/leveling process. If they're doing it often enough that they can't even farm gil they might actually start making some headway.

Still about twenty lvl 50 bots on a number of the Aether servers with a bunch of lower level ones making their way up the chain today.

I rarely see bots on Faerie. However, it seems Siren is completely overrun, especially in Gridania.

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Originally Posted by Metallium

I know with popularity, comes bots....

Less popular, less need to actually do bot control. I think it's time for a policy change.
<first post images>

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Bots are never going to become less of a thing until SQE goes after the authors of said bots. While it didn't completely solve the bot problem in WoW; A few years back, Blizzard took legal action against the bot authors themselves rather than choose to simply stop at banning the bots they've found.
Banning an account does nothing after all, all it does is make someone go buy another copy of the game (which is more money in SQE's pocket), more subscription time (which is more money in their pocket). It's sad to say, but since people aren't quitting the game because of bots (or at least making it known that is the reason they're leaving), SQE is perfectly fine to use their band-aid fix of banning the account they find to be bots.

The only one blizzard shut down if I recall correctly was peons4hire and the only reason it worked was because it wasn't a chinese company. Most of these botting/gold selling companies originate in china and they generally don't give a crap about anyones copyright laws outsiders their border so nothing ever happens to them... like in any game. Only way they managed to hit them (and hard) is selling their own gold and while these companies probably sell for cheaper people are generally okay with paying a little more when it's not sketchy and theres no risk of getting banned or hacked.

The most popular botting program (Which is so popular that it regularly shows up without me even having to use keywords directly related to it) is a small-scale project maintained by a group of English players, so I think if SE wanted to axe them, they'd actually have a grounds to do so.

I'm starting to get seriously annoyed by the ever increasing number of DoL/H bots and I don't doubt it's likely tied to the Ishgard Restoration coming up. These guys would be easily controllable with a half-way competent enforcement team, unlike the RMT bots who simply come back too quickly and in numbers too great to realistically be kept in check by manual bans.

I'm curious. Has anyone witnessed the RMT bot hordes within the past few days?

I've been checking Cactuar with player search (With the sprout filter toggled) when I log in and log out, and I haven't seen them for five days now; only the occasional RMT spammer in capital cities. It's honestly almost more unsettling then them actually being here.

I'd like to hope they actually found a lasting method of dealing with them, though I doubt any kind of preventative measure can keep them at bay forever.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

I'm curious. Has anyone witnessed the RMT bot hordes within the past few days?

I've been checking Cactuar with player search (With the sprout filter toggled) when I log in and log out, and I haven't seen them for five days now; only the occasional RMT spammer in capital cities. It's honestly almost more unsettling then them actually being here.

I'd like to hope they actually found a lasting method of dealing with them, though I doubt any kind of preventative measure can keep them at bay forever.

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Keepin an eye on GIL prices might be insightful. If there were effective ways of stopping bots now, they should be skyrocketing.

Well, as of the latest illicit activity report, they're now clarifying that bans of bots related to RMT activity are lumped into the RMT/illicit activity category.

Would be nice if there was a significant improvement in the numbers for the "normal" bots eventually, because it's been consistently low since the day they started tracking it in its own category despite there being considerably more DoH/L bots as of late.

I'm still not seeing any RMT bot hordes on Cactuar for whatever reason, though a couple of those weird cross-world ARC/BRD bots were visiting the other day.

I'm starting to see a lot of bots on Kujata now, something that is quite rare prior to Shadowbringers. Normally they are in the 3 starting cities.

Something happened last week that seemed to have mostly cut off the activity of the gil farming bots, but they seem to have made a full recovery now.

Wonder if it was something on SE's end or if maybe whatever bank they were exploiting for chargebacks got sick of them so they had to find a new one.