Reporting cheaters and the STF: Where's the consistency?

From doing some digging around, I've seen multiple instances of people whining about getting temp banned for using certain mainstream botting programs and the weekly illicit activity reports also suggest that people are indeed being punished for this behavior.

The thing is, I've been reporting the same persistent botters who operate almost 24/7 for over a year now (Though at staggered intervals of about a month or so), yet every last one of them is still here despite demonstrating what should be overwhelming amounts of evidence against them from their activity times/patterns.

I don't know if they're doing something special to avoid detection from whatever methods are being used or what, but I'm getting really sick of these players constantly dominating the market board with their automated farming and do NOT look forward to this continuing into Shadowbringers because it's gotten significantly worse since I first started playing.

I feel like they need to start getting the GMs on their case as well, because whatever the STF is doing clearly isn't working.

...I think I actually found out how these players are slipping under the radar, though I feel reluctant to say what as it might end up benefiting the ones who aren't in the know.

Unfortunately, I seriously doubt that mentioning such in my reports will actually accomplish anything, since that would require the STF to actually acknowledge that their current screening process is flawed.

I'll just say that from stories of people who actually got banned, they were never contacted by the STF or GMs prior. They got slapped with a ban out of the blue meaning there are very specific things they look for to determine if someone is/isn't botting as opposed to using the tried and true method of simply contacting a suspicious player and banning them if they fail to offer a response and continue going about their business. Though I'm getting the impression they're being way too specific for reporting to be as largely ineffective as it is.

There needs to be a faster way to report cheaters/bot users like you can report with RMT.

Most cheaters/bot users seem to have really random letters in there names, and move around a zone from mob to mob way to quick or in and out of the ground over and over once I've seen like 5+ Lv50 BLMs same armor with really random letters in there names all doing MSQ and all always standing in the same spots when they appear out of the ground! and going in and out the ground over and over! and turn the same way to take to NPC's

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Originally Posted by gtasthehunter

There needs to be a faster way to report cheaters/bot users like you can report with RMT.

Most cheaters/bot users seem to have really random letters in there names, and move around a zone from mob to mob way to quick or in and out of the ground over and over once I've seen like 5+ Lv50 BLMs same armor with really random letters in there names all doing MSQ and all always standing in the same spots when they appear out of the ground! and going in and out the ground over and over! and turn the same way to take to NPC's

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Those guys (Who are the ones gathering gil for the RMT spammers) are an entirely different problem because the STF already bans them on a weekly basis, but they come back so quickly that it doesn't even matter. They need to combat their methods not the bots themselves if they want to actually make any headway in stopping RMT.

The DoL/H bots tend to just not get banned period and they're actively harmful to the play environment in that they pressure legitimate gatherers/crafters out of the market by tanking prices to the point where it's scarcely worth the effort (It is not worth crafting for gil when activities like treasure maps, Eureka, etc start yielding nearly as much for the amount of time spent). They mostly care about how fast their stuff sells because they're not having to actually invest any time or effort into the process.

A proper economy should not be ruled by a select few individuals, but that's basically what's been going on on my end for the past several months because the bot farmers have a constant stock of crafted gear/consumables they're willing to sell far cheaper then anyone else and not even the most dedicated of the legitimate gatherers/crafters can keep up with them, nor do they feel inclined to bother when they're practically having to sell at a loss. World Travel is likely going to cause a "normalization" of prices to the lows dictated by the bot farmers, which is not going to be fun to deal with at all from the perspective of a producer.

Regardless, there does need to be an easier way to report cheaters if getting them banned is so ridiculously hit or miss.

It just takes too long to get their names and name of the server, zone location time and date, and stuff to report by the time report is done they most likely move on!

Need to be able to target them and report them that way, they won't likely use chat!

I've also made multiple reports against 24/7 gathering bots gathering high end materials on pixel-perfect paths. Not to mention housing bots who keep clicking placards to try to buy houses for hours after the house has been sold. And the characters are still active. I really hope SE and the STF can get a handle on the massive botting/cheating issue soon, because it's only hurting the community of honest players.

The unfortunate thing is that crafters only comprise a minority in the community and the bulk of the players are strictly consumers who welcome the unreasonably low prices the bot farmers enforce.

That said, it's unlikely this issue is ever going to have much of a voice behind it; certainly not enough to get SE to seriously reconsider their methods. Considering that they acknowledged the problem then utterly failed to actually change anything after we specifically raised the question to the guy running the STF, I feel like they really are failing to grasp just how bad the issue is. It's not even a matter of it not being a thing on JP servers as simply looking at the top FCs on their data centers reveals a lot of suspicious ones that consist mostly/entirely of DoL/H players who've scarcely touched anything other then those classes.

I mostly made this topic out of frustration because I used to enjoy selling gathered/crafted items, but now it's seriously become a case of "why bother" when I can make just as much gil doing things that are more interesting like Eureka or treasure maps.

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Originally Posted by gtasthehunter

Need to be able to target them and report them that way, they won't likely use chat!

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Just use /e <t>

As of my latest count, Cactuar has three omnicrafter bots, one infusion spammer (Who gets occasional competition from the omnicrafters), and a trio of scrip farmers who go at it basically 24/7 (That's just the persistent ones who are active every day, as there's several lesser individuals who aren't "dedicated").

One of said omnicrafters is also currently leveling a second omnicrafter alt (Judging from the gear said individual is wearing and similar naming theme...), though I'm not even sure why they're bothering to do so in the current state of the things...

Doesn't sound like much, but it doesn't take much to control the economy, particularly when some of them use undercut bots to further push sales. The legitimate crafters are just left to languish in this price war because everything has tanked so hard that it's simply not worth the time/effort to craft for profit and things will likely remain that way until Shadowbringers starts opening brief windows of opportunity for sales again whenever the botting scripts are broken after major patches. It's a vicious cycle that's going to repeat itself here and on every other server until the game shuts down unless something changes.

I thought Cactuar had it bad, but doing some server hopping has made it apparent that you're exceptionally lucky if your server doesn't have a persistent infusion bot flooding the market and making it extremely difficult to push any sales.

Unfortunately the average player is only going to care about the fact that they can get everything for dirt cheap now and not where said items are coming from.