So how long until I know if I'm getting in trouble or not..?

I did a dumb and then did a double dumb and just wondering how screwed I am.

(Wall of text incoming. Skip to end two paragraphs to get to the point.)

Last night my character was running from side to side in a residential district, unsupervised and acting very strangely. Not crafting, gathering or fighting, but just acting very much like a broken bot.

I was not botting.

I had left FFXIV open in the background because I don't like the hassle of digging out my phone for the code and logging in. Unfortunately, I forgot the FFXIV grabs all controller input, because I don't know it with controller and actually completely forgot controller was a thing in this game. It doesn't hijack the imput so the imput does still reach it's intended destination, it just reaches FFXIV too (even when it's not the game in focus).

Last night I decided to boot up an old game of Kingdom Two Crowns for the first time in a while. I do play that with a controller. I was playing that for a few hours.

Unbeknownst to me, my FFXIV character was playing copy cat to my Kingdom character.

That was my first dumb.

Anyone who saw me acting like that in FFXIV must have assumed broken bot. I can't imagine anything else.

My second dumb comes next and it's a doozy...


[To be continued...]

[Continued from previous post and this is the end.]

I reported myself to the cheat reporting services in game for not being a bot.
I know, that was stupid on so many levels. It wastes their time, it relies on them reading the report and not just accepting it as a botting report, there's a chance no one even saw me not-botting in a random residential ward in the middle of the night. I know, believe me, I know.

Let me explain though.

When I came back into FFXIV I'd already been logged back to the start screen for inactivity (I read for a while between games) and I had no idea why I found my character in a different place to where I left her. The last time that happened in any game I got hackedI thought I'd been hacked again, which shot my anxiety through the roof.

I have a pretty crippling anxiety disorder so I don't deal well with surprises and if something bad happens after the surprise, I spiral into negative thoughts and emotionally implode, often resulting in doing something very, very dumb.

So after I thought I'd been hacked, I searched my character for anything different or wrong. She has all her money and items and stuff, everything seemed fine. I started to calm down a little bit.

Then I quickly found out what had happened and my anxiety went back up because I was sure someone had seen my erratic blind running around and reported me for botting.

That resulted in a spiral of thoughts about how half the server must have spontaneously decided to hold a parade through my particular part of my particular residential district and they all saw and they all decided I was a bot and reported me and I was going to lose my almost 12yr old legacy character to false charges.

(Yes, I do realise I'm completely insane.)

To dig myself out of that fantastical hole, I just absolutely HAD to talk to the people who handle the bot reports and explain what really happened and beg for their mercy. So I wrote a bot report saying I wasn't botting and all the rest of it.

It made sense in the moment, I swear it did.

Anyhow, my anxiety is now mostly back under control, but a little bit at the back of my mind is still nagging at me that I'm gonna get in huge trouble for botting or for wasting report a assessor's time, or both.

So, does anyone know how long it takes to get in trouble for such things and when I can know I'm in the clear?

You'll be fine, and there is no need to panic.

The server logs will quite clearly show the random stream of joystick movements.

Worst case, you will take warning for wasting their time, but not really like banning you or something.

This... Has to be a try at trolling doesn't it? :D

False positives, when it comes to being banned for using cheats in games is a very rare occurance.

No amount of running in circles and randomly jumping will ever get ya banned for botting, unless you're using a bit.

You know, a software that moves and does things for you without you having to do things? Wikipedia has a page about bots. Knowledge is power, friend~

Like... how do you think banning works? They'll just randomly look at people jumping and go "Must be a bot! BAN!".

Player reports will never get you banned just like that, there'll always be a human working at SE that looks at you/the reports. Game logs etc. It's a long and tedious process, I bet ^^

Tho did ya know, SE often times even refuses to ban actual spambots and they can spam their RMT messages in Limsa for weeks if not months before something ever happens! If something even happens. So you atleast have a few weeks left :3

Jokes aside tho - I'd say, relax! You're doing just fine :3

Also 8/10 troll post! Pretty good, kid ^^

I don't troll, just have a broken brain that doesn't know how to let go of things and calm down. Thank you though, everyone.

I'm quite a stickler to the rules so I honestly know very little about bots and the whole process about what they do to them so my imagination just ran wild.

I just figured that if someone reported me for botting and a GM tried to contact me to investigate and I didn't respond but still kept running around, on top of the really strange movements, that had to be super incriminating.

with the amount of times actual bots get reported and nothing happens, i doubt anything will happen to you. if it does, however, you can appeal the infraction and explain what happened... but i doubt anything will, you probably don't need to worry at all.