Bot issues

So, I know this topic has somewhat derailed but I was wondering if anyone knew or not; is there a way to report what you suspect is a crafting bot (those 1 Gil undercutters for example). I have a lot of circumstantial evidence, but nothing to 100% concrete, I just wasn’t sure how to report them or if it was even worth it. I also heard people can get in trouble for falsely reporting someone, so I don’t want to get myself into trouble either.

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Originally Posted by LunaJoy

So, I know this topic has somewhat derailed but I was wondering if anyone knew or not; is there a way to report what you suspect is a crafting bot (those 1 Gil undercutters for example). I have a lot of circumstantial evidence, but nothing to 100% concrete, I just wasn’t sure how to report them or if it was even worth it. I also heard people can get in trouble for falsely reporting someone, so I don’t want to get myself into trouble either.

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Wouldn't go reporting 1 gil undercutters, since they may very well be an actual person. I do it myself. Some days I just run an instance, finish the instance, and as I wait for next instance to pop, I check my listings and adjust prices if I need to.

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Originally Posted by LunaJoy

So, I know this topic has somewhat derailed but I was wondering if anyone knew or not; is there a way to report what you suspect is a crafting bot (those 1 Gil undercutters for example). I have a lot of circumstantial evidence, but nothing to 100% concrete, I just wasn’t sure how to report them or if it was even worth it. I also heard people can get in trouble for falsely reporting someone, so I don’t want to get myself into trouble either.

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Support Desk - Contact Us - Report Cheating
Just suspecting someone might be a bot because they undercut by a gil isn't worth reporting because it's not something only bots do. You'd need to have some fairly specific detail on what you personally observed that makes you believe it's a bot (such as witnessing the flying hack that the RMT farming bots were using at the start of the expansion).

Players can get in trouble for a false report but GMs aren't likely to do anything if your report appears to be getting made in good faith. They're going to punish the reporting players who are trying to make trouble for the other player because they didn't like something that was done (like undercut by 1 gil).

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Originally Posted by Lonkkis

Wouldn't go reporting 1 gil undercutters, since they may very well be an actual person. I do it myself. Some days I just run an instance, finish the instance, and as I wait for next instance to pop, I check my listings and adjust prices if I need to.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

Support Desk - Contact Us - Report Cheating
Just suspecting someone might be a bot because they undercut by a gil isn't worth reporting because it's not something only bots do. You'd need to have some fairly specific detail on what you personally observed that makes you believe it's a bot (such as witnessing the flying hack that the RMT farming bots were using at the start of the expansion).

Players can get in trouble for a false report but GMs aren't likely to do anything if your report appears to be getting made in good faith. They're going to punish the reporting players who are trying to make trouble for the other player because they didn't like something that was done (like undercut by 1 gil).

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Let me clarify. I said, “for example”. I’m not making trouble because someone is undercutting by 1 Gil. I undercut by 1 Gil. I should’ve said the crafter bot or something else. Clearly. I don’t know what they’re usually called. This is the first time I’ve witnessed anything besides the gathering or flying bots doing MSQ.

I have quite a bit of other “evidence” that is purely circumstantial. I just thought I should at least alert the GMs to this person. I just didn’t want to get in trouble myself, lol.

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Originally Posted by TitaniumVulpes

I didn't see a single consumer rights law cited in this reply. That's a shame, I'd half hoped to learn more about them, but for now I'll just believe the guy with a degree and my own research over the guy a bit too keen on the thought of putting slavery in contracts.

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I've cited theft, which is something all consumers have implicit protection from in service contracts and in any other transaction. Slavery is just another example of a right, this time a basic human one in freedom, that can't be made null by a contract clause.

So, to reiterate; SE can't just do whatever they want simply because you clicked agree on something that says they can. SE is still bound by contract and constitutional law.

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Originally Posted by Ceridwenae

The ToS explicitly says your consumer rights are not forfeit even if they ban you for breaking the terms. So you can do something about it, if you felt you were unfairly banned. So... yeah. They can ban you if they think you've screwed over your agreement with them and in return, if you felt they'd screwed you over by banning you, you're not without recourse. This circular argument carrying on is technically already detailed in the ToS already.

So, if they ban you without reason, you'd have to be spectacularly unlucky. Not to say it doesn't happen, but it doesn't violate your consumer rights if they do so. You still have those, which is how you can challenge a ban. So let's hop off this, and move on to the real issue.

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I've specifically stated in this thread multiple times that SE wouldn't be dumb enough to ban people without an actual reason; it's why they actually gather and audit evidence before banning bots instead of just sitting in a hub banning everyone that looks weird. I'm mainly just correcting people who seem to believe that SE can do whatever they want to their customers, including stealing from them, as long as it's written in a ToS and you click agree. That's not how any contract works.

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Originally Posted by LunaJoy

Let me clarify. I said, “for example”. I’m not making trouble because someone is undercutting by 1 Gil. I undercut by 1 Gil. I should’ve said the crafter bot or something else. Clearly. I don’t know what they’re usually called. This is the first time I’ve witnessed anything besides the gathering or flying bots doing MSQ.

I have quite a bit of other “evidence” that is purely circumstantial. I just thought I should at least alert the GMs to this person. I just didn’t want to get in trouble myself, lol.

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Right now I think it's almost impossible to actually get someone banned even if you have clear evidence of them botting. I have previously submitted a report of a fishing bot that is clearly glitching out with a video evidence and the bot is still fishing up till now.

Heck me and my friend also have experimented a bit with FF14 Cheating report, testing if they actually read our reports or not. Everyday my friend would submit a cheating report that absolutely have nothing to do with cheating or botting, but instead he submitted the entire bee movie script to the STF team through multiple "cheating" report. Lo and behold he still didn't get a ban or even a warning.

So yeah right now even if you report the suspect your report would get drowned by the bee movie script anyway.

Square ain't gonna do anything about the gathering bots, from my experience. There's a few I've been tracking that honestly have been going for years (one even back in ARR), but I can probably make a guess to why.

The BLM/BRD/WHM bots you see that just get to 50 and spam rush gil before they get banned are (usually) going to be made with false money, things like stolen cards. It's to reduce their investment (as runign 50+ bots at once means, in month 1, they paid $1750, and need to make an investment asking for that back within 2 weeks. I think each bot might need to farm 50+ mil each in arr content, good luck.)

The gatherer bots however you see that're level 80, because they usually aren't involved in mass rmt (note mass, they still probably sell gil on the side), are paid with legit money. Square wouldn't have to deal with chargebacks in these cases, but there's another factor here too. There's a good chance if you ban these bots, which're used with legit money, the person might not come back, and that'll actually cost Square money. So, if Square doesn't think the gatherer bot situation hurts the game, then they aren't going to throw money away.

Bugs me to no end, but... I can't think of any other excuse honestly. It's not like these ones are even good at hiding it (if you manage to break their scrip, some will legit forget where they were and start running into walls for a while. Or in one's case, their scrip will make them flee from battle and run into another mob straight on to die, rather than change course.)

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Originally Posted by esra01

Heck me and my friend also have experimented a bit with FF14 Cheating report, testing if they actually read our reports or not. Everyday my friend would submit a cheating report that absolutely have nothing to do with cheating or botting, but instead he submitted the entire bee movie script to the STF team through multiple "cheating" report. Lo and behold he still didn't get a ban or even a warning.

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I will say, please be mindful to not do this though. I mean, I doubt they're reading them anyways, but if they are, that's a good way for your friend's tickets to actually go on the backburner and ignored.

Hoo boy.

Now the RMT spammers have returned to using their obnoxious tactic of begging for NN invites in horrible English, then spamming the chat once someone invites them.

I'd like to think it's a desperation tactic due to lack of sales, but unfortunately, some mentors are extremely dense and never seem to learn that genuinely new players pretty much never ask for NN invites due to generally being unaware that it even exists until the higher levels where it's mentioned by the Hall of the Novice NPCs.

They announced something during the live letter just now that warrants discussion, namely, the decision to expand both the free trial and starter edition to include all HW content.

This is great for everyone who's on the fence about the game, and liable to get many properly hooked when they have the ability to get into the better part of the game's story.

However, it's also opening countless new avenues of potential exploitation for the RMTers to take advantage of. The main thing I'm concerned about is them potentially settling on a MSQ-required dungeon as their new farming spot, as it's already a known issue that they can occasionally lock people out of Amdapor Keep and other instances at times by flooding the queues with their armies of bots.

I'm still hoping they decide to just axe the raw gil drops from dungeons to force the gil farmers out of instanced content in order to reduce the strain on the servers.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

Support Desk - Contact Us - Report Cheating
Just suspecting someone might be a bot because they undercut by a gil isn't worth reporting because it's not something only bots do. You'd need to have some fairly specific detail on what you personally observed that makes you believe it's a bot (such as witnessing the flying hack that the RMT farming bots were using at the start of the expansion).

Players can get in trouble for a false report but GMs aren't likely to do anything if your report appears to be getting made in good faith. They're going to punish the reporting players who are trying to make trouble for the other player because they didn't like something that was done (like undercut by 1 gil).

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its not just the 1 gil undercutting, its the behaviour. cycling through multiple characters and changing prices on all minions faster than a human can, thats the observed behaviour. 1gil chippers are easily handled. but once you have them on 24/7 cycling using a predictable time interval, thats not a human. if it is a person doing it I can care less, they sleep, they eat, sometimes they even leave the house.. the bots.. do not.