Do anti-bot applications work for other online games? If so, why not FF14?

Like the title states, I've played many mmos that have integrated or side-apps that run to check for cheating/botting. Are those still relevant and if so, why hasn't SE adopted this? I ask this because we're now faced with more than just gil sellers and market bots, but a fleet of them causing DDoS (allegedly) and it's quite annoying :P

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Originally Posted by Eriane_Elis

Like the title states, I've played many mmos that have integrated or side-apps that run to check for cheating/botting. Are those still relevant and if so, why hasn't SE adopted this? I ask this because we're now faced with more than just gil sellers and market bots, but a fleet of them causing DDoS (allegedly) and it's quite annoying :P

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Depends what you mean by "work". WoW has Warden, but they do mass ban waves rather than one here one there, etc as caught (same as FFXIV does for RMT). It wouldn't help the DDOS though, since that happens because they are banned. Whether they are banned today or 2 months from now... they are still banned and will still cause issues if they are inclined to do so.

edit: It would probably catch more if they ran something like Warden that WoW uses, but again.... that wouldn't improve the DDOS situation at all.

That's actually a great question, and would probably help quite a bit if they did. AFAIK, they don't even run anti-cheat software like other MMOs have....and they probably should.

Anti-cheat softwares tend to be extremely easy to work around (WoW still has had constant botting issues despite their security measures, and it's mostly their active enforcement teams that scare most players into not doing it).

They also tend to involve invasive programs which I doubt SE would be willing to take up given their strict privacy policies.

All mmos have bots the anti cheat programs are just speed bumps to botters

I know that WoW had addons like spam-me-not or others that recognised and blocked out certain messages that triggered numerous keywords and certain website names in them. The trouble with FFXIV is that it's not using standard ASCII but everything from unicode to symbols to html entities, and there's so many hundreds of them it's impossible to filter out every single possible variation of spam messages.

As for anti-botting measures I don't think any MMO had any that were successful at removing them permanently, because as soon as you had one group of accounts banned for botting another group would take their place, so it became pointless constantly banning them unless they were being too aggressive and actively hacking the game. Instead a game alarm bot would flag players who were constantly doing activities that triggered the alarm, then every once in a while actions would be taken into mass purging the flagged players. Some MMOs opted to block out certain countries like China and other problematic regions where rmt activities were at their highest.

Cant recall any anti-bot that truly worked tbh, but having one is better than none.
If i could pick an anti-bot/cheat i'd love to have VAC but problem is that they would have to make the game available only through steam on PC at least.

So yeah, as i said in another thread i don't have high expectations.
If anything i hope that in the future they'll add a basic anti-bot and maybe region lock a couple of countries that are responsible for a huge amount of cheaters/botters/RMT in every single MMO.
Obviously neither anti-bot/region lock will not stop them, but it'll hopefully lower the numbers a bit to make the problem more manageable.

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Originally Posted by Saintly

Cant recall any anti-bot that truly worked tbh, but having one is better than none.
If i could pick an anti-bot/cheat i'd love to have VAC but problem is that they would have to make the game available only through steam on PC at least.

So yeah, as i said in another thread i don't have high expectations.
If anything i hope that in the future they'll add a basic anti-bot and maybe region lock a couple of countries that are responsible for a huge amount of cheaters/botters/RMT in every single MMO.
Obviously neither anti-bot/region lock will not stop them, but it'll hopefully lower the numbers a bit to make the problem more manageable.

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Region-locking is pointless unless they're also going to block all the VPNs out there (and if they do that, that negatively affects people who aren't botting, such as myself).

Ya my only issue with anti cheat as someone said theyre very privacy invasive too, may run without the game even up, etc etc etc.

Think win 10 initial version of the creators update, NO thanks lol

And region locking ya, may work for ps4 users but what point would that be. Even something like 6 out of 10 american / euro players have a VPN these days, usa more thanks to that stupid invasive internet privacy act they passed giving ISPs too much user insight.

I don't think those anti cheat things actually work.

However the case with xiv is that they actually aren't able to detect the bot program. Then when they do, they do stupid stuff like block the IP and not the account.

An old friend of my used to bot, he actually got caught cause he was running 4 accounts at once. They IP blocked him and he just went around with a VPN.