Bot Army FC's?

While browsing the lodestone i saw some newly formed FC's pop up and decided to check them out. Judge for yourself, something seriously fishy is going on there.

http://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...645313/member/

http://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...843747/member/

I'm pretty sure there are more, if i found 2 in less than 5 minutes.

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Originally Posted by DukeGr

While browsing the lodestone i saw some newly formed FC's pop up and decided to check them out. Judge for yourself, something seriously fishy is going on there.

http://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...645313/member/

http://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...843747/member/

I'm pretty sure there are more, if i found 2 in less than 5 minutes.

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Sad to say, but nothing new here... There have been these types of FCs from day 1. Welcome to RMTland.

wow, info so easy to find and yet they wont ban the accounts?

Oh, they'll ban them eventually. They just don't auto-ban any account until they're sure they've got the source correct. They usually do a big housecleaning announcement once a month where they list the numbers for all the RMT roaches they've exterminated.

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Originally Posted by Catwho

Oh, they'll ban them eventually. They just don't auto-ban any account until they're sure they've got the source correct. They usually do a big housecleaning announcement once a month where they list the numbers for all the RMT roaches they've exterminated.

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Actually, those reports are issued weekly, and if you total up the number of accounts permanently banned over the life of FFXIV you get hundreds of thousands of accounts. I'm not sure what happens with regard to banned accounts and whether they show up still on Lodestone, but I just wanted to point out that the extermination reports for RMT accounts banned are done weekly. Here are the last two weekly reports, around 10,000 permanently banned accounts in 2 weeks.

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...84867b14e36430

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...3f1db3d06e4874

You can see the past reports here;

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/category/1

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Originally Posted by SinisterJointss

wow, info so easy to find and yet they wont ban the accounts?

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Characters from banned accounts do not disappear from your friends list, nor are they deleted. I'm not sure whether any characters from banned accounts still show up on the Lodestone, but they are not deleted, just permanently locked out of the game.

I think part of the reason that SE bans bots in big group rather than as they are found is to try to avoid bot makers from figuring out exactly what specifically triggers a bot ban (which is likely automated rather than GM determined). At least that's how WoW handles bots (with mixed results).

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Originally Posted by ChandraNoctis

I think part of the reason that SE bans bots in big group rather than as they are found is to try to avoid bot makers from figuring out exactly what specifically triggers a bot ban (which is likely automated rather than GM determined). At least that's how WoW handles bots (with mixed results).

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I believe SE leaves the bots active while they investigate because they can follow the flow of resources being farmed by bots as they are turned into gil via the MB or even vendor sales, and so on That allows the main RMT accounts for a given bot network to be found and eliminate. Once they've investigated and mapped out the accounts involved, they can take action. But if they were to simply ban bots immediately, or automatically, the RMT would simply activate new ones. The more important targets are the main accounts, the Bots are just a nuisance by comparison.