SE losing war versus Bots and RMTs

So they banned bunch of accounts, but just outside Ulda'h in Central Thanalan, there is like 5-6 bots mining 24/7.
Some are teleporting into mountains, some are running in scripted paths, some are naked - obvious bots.
City states are full of RMT shouts, I did not feel any change after the ban hammer.

Video - http://youtu.be/0oeYAiN5YFo
I seriously think SE won't be able to resolve this by bans only, people will get hacked all the time, so there is no limit to how many accounts botters will have.

They need to implement some system that bans them automatically, or this will never end.

Because I always get dressed to go out and mine.

There working on it.

If it bans automatically, and bans one person by mistake, there will be an uproar. Quit complaining and play the game. Or wait, did you rush to 50 and are now bored?

Please try to be over dramatic.................stop, enough.

It's not like SE is unexperienced in handling RMT. Yes they will get rid of them as every publisher get's rid of them after a certain amount of time.
And btw. you should be more worried about the gil buyers, because if not too many players would buy the gil, the sellers wouldn't bother flooding the game.
So maybe we should get rid of gil-buyers eh?

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Originally Posted by complexxL9

They need to implement some system that bans them automatically, or this will never end.

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This is in the camp of shi-fi, there's no way an automated banhammer could not ban many legit account

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Originally Posted by complexxL9

stuff

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people are gonna cheat, that's the reality. if you ban all the accounts, odds are most of them are going to return. if they have nothing better to do but buy game copies only to get banned a few days later, then let them. it just supports SE more.

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Originally Posted by complexxL9

So they banned bunch of accounts, but just outside Ulda'h in Central Thanalan, there is like 5-6 bots mining 24/7.
Some are teleporting into mountains, some are running in scripted paths, some are naked - obvious bots.
City states are full of RMT shouts, I did not feel any change after the ban hammer.
Video - http://youtu.be/0oeYAiN5YFo (currently uploading...)
They need to implement some system that bans them automatically, or this will never end.

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They can end all hacks if they put in the cell phone system, When someone logs into your character on different isp , you get a text message with a code that need to be put in before logging in and if they log in can use that code to dc a person that log into your account in a 15 minute window. if want to change any information get a code sent to your cellphone. If got a token then can change your cell phone number. If got a new one and add 5 or more security q's.

The problem with RMT spam is that these days RMT is typically about stolen accounts, not "gold farmers" or whatever old notions are still left. They obviously need to fix their filters to actually temp mute people who spam like that, but you can never truly get rid of them, because there's always another person who will make some poor decisions with their account info and lose it.

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Originally Posted by Morthis

The problem with RMT spam is that these days RMT is typically about stolen accounts, not "gold farmers" or whatever old notions are still left. They obviously need to fix their filters to actually temp mute people who spam like that, but you can never truly get rid of them, because there's always another person who will make some poor decisions with their account info and lose it.

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That might be true for RMT, but for botting there must be a solution, either make a system to scan for client computer and identify bot processes or sit there and catch them manually, wow has it's mining bots also, but amount of bots in ARR is ridiculous.

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Originally Posted by Kobolt

people are gonna cheat, that's the reality. if you ban all the accounts, odds are most of them are going to return. if they have nothing better to do but buy game copies only to get banned a few days later, then let them. it just supports SE more.

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The thing is they are not buying the game most of the time there using hacked accounts, and there getting the copies for free from the torrent sites. So square losing money not including the people see the spams and are one that would pay the subs, Just like wtf and leave the game. Even if they lost there 29$ bucks, most people in NA , if product sucks try get $ back if not, Quit.

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Originally Posted by KiraJ

Please try to be over dramatic.................stop, enough.

It's not like SE is unexperienced in handling RMT. Yes they will get rid of them as every publisher get's rid of them after a certain amount of time.

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Funny you mention that, because I heard XI never got it resolved?

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Originally Posted by complexxL9

make a system to scan for client computer and identify bot processes

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They had this for lineage 2 and a few other korean MMO's didn't stop the botters from making programs to bypass this so no it won't work, it's just a short term solution that will get bypassed just like any "new" copy protection that got put on old games when they were released, stop people copying them for a short space of time till people found a way around it.

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Originally Posted by complexxL9

That might be true for RMT, but for botting there must be a solution, either make a system to scan for client computer and identify bot processes or sit there and catch them manually, wow has it's mining bots also, but amount of bots in ARR is ridiculous.

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They probably are fighting against botting, but it's an unwinnable fight, all you can do is mitigate it. If there were some perfect solution that catches all botters without false positives or being an inconvenience to the user base, they would have done it by now.

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Originally Posted by Rillifane

They had this for lineage 2 and a few other korean MMO's didn't stop the botters from making programs to bypass this so no it won't work, it's just a short term solution that will get bypassed just like any "new" copy protection that got put on old games when they were released, stop people copying them for a short space of time till people found a way around it.

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I don't really care how they do this, but they should do better then now, ask blizzard for advice if you need, because you rarely run into bots there. And in arr just step outside the city and there are armies of bots gathering.

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Originally Posted by complexxL9

I don't really care how they do this, but they should do better then now, ask blizzard for advice if you need, because you rarely run into bots there. And in arr just step outside the city and there are armies of bots gathering.

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Rarely run in to bots in WoW? Do you go around with your eyes closed or something? WoW has a bot problem too, you never seen all the "invisible miners" or the ones that go under the world to mine the nodes?

Banning alone has never worked. This "special task force" is useless until they do to real preventative measures. SE, most of your customers are incredibly stupid. They make my PC illiterate parents look like software engineers. A million potential idiots not having the security token and/or freely browsing the net with no concern for security measures ... its just impossible to fight directly.

Take a note from Trion (and I believe Blizzard does this as well) have a system that locks account when the users IP changes or shows up at a remote location far from where it was before. Trion called it "Coin Lock" where your account characters would not be able to use a ton of the games features until they verified who they were through email or otherwise. Blizzard, IIRC, just completely locks you and and requires you to call. Its simple as that. Sure ... youll still have idiots who lose even their email accounts but it helps tremendously. Have this lockout occur only with accounts that do not have the security app/token applied to their account. No point in further inconveniencing those who have already taken measures to protect their account.

Rarely run into bots with blizzard? People are hacking their flying mounts in panda land and running in air to mine their way to 90. You just don't see it because of flying mounts and all the nodes not being clustered into one area.


Edit: And dont even get me started on the damn arch bots. Let alone the Auction House bots. Half of my damn guild botted and when they were reported blizzard slapped them on their wrist with a 72 hour ban, and they just went right back to it.

You need to stop acting like the grass is greener on the other side, because it honestly isnt.


Edit 2: You think square doesn't take notice to some random retainer having over 7k+ shards on the market board at one time? They are just not vocal about what they do so gil can't be shuffled, and their measures can't be avoided.

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Originally Posted by complexxL9

Funny you mention that, because I heard XI never got it resolved?

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Funny, the only issue with XI is LEGIT players using bots and hacks, RMT hasn't been a problem especially of this magnitude since 2005.

If a character has a sudden change of (x,y) location of any high enough degree = auto ban

if a character is moving above normal posted speed = auto ban

if a character is shouting more then 3 times per 30 secs = global chat mute

if a character is being blacklisted by more then 10 people an hour = auto flag for GM's

It really doesn't seem that hard to be honest, the hard part is they're trying to be all police like sting operation. Get over it and just start banning people.

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Originally Posted by complexxL9

They need to implement some system that bans them automatically, or this will never end.

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lol

As long as there is money to be made of course it won't end. It's not a project with some end date. It'll last as long as this game stays online.

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Originally Posted by Zer0

If a character has a sudden change of (x,y) location of any high enough degree = auto ban
DRG, BLM and MNK have relocation skills that happen as fast as bots do, you'll be autobanning anyone that plays these.

if a character is being blacklisted by more then 10 people an hour = auto flag for GM's
Sometimes you have LS/FC blacklisting competition just because.

It really doesn't seem that hard to be honest

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It "doesn't seem hard" yet every company that's been in the business of doing MMOs doesn't seem to do it - why? Because it's not a question of difficulty, it's practicality. They can't just toss things in that will be more of a hindrance than help, I mean even Yoshi stated they went a bit overboard trying to combat RMT before the game went off by making selling stuff to NPCs almost worthless, something you can do perfectly fine in every other MMORPG.

It is a difficult process weeding out RMTs especially in a new MMO and even more so with one that has been hyped up for release. I think they could be doing a better job but knowing SE they are working on it. One thing I do know is after this most recent series of bans and gil freezing the spammers on my servers advertised prices increased by nearly 400%. I see this as pretty successful, as if SE continues with their no tolerance policies the RMTs would have to eventually charge so much nobody would be interested in buying from them and they would move on to a more wiling community.

One thing that really upsets me though is people come into the forums and complain about it insulting the company for not preventing RMTs. You need to remember, this isn't SEs fault this is OUR fault. If people never bought gil then RMTs wouldn't be here because their wouldn't be a market for them. RMTs ruin the in-game economy, hack accounts, control prices on the markets and spam our chat systems. I see them as the scum of the earth and the governments of these people, specifically china actually support these forms of virtual crime. Yet we turn a blind eye and just blame the companies that spend their lives actually legitimately creating something that we love.

SE is pretty strict with their no tolerance policies with RMT so I would say sit tight and wait for them to smoke them out and ban them from our community. There is no 100% effective way of locating and removing all RMTs from a game but SE in the past has done pretty well with making it less worth while for them to plague their communities. However there is a sure fire way to make it not worth their time bothering us, and that is to never buy in game currency with real money, we only have ourselves to blame and SE is trying to make our in game experience better in spite of that, so give them a break and do what you can to help them help us.

I wouldn't say they're 'losing' the war. They just started taking action very recently. Things won't be perfect overnight. But they are getting better already.

Good or bad, this is just the way the STF works. They focus on the product rather than the client or the suppliers. From the STF's perspective, the 367,700 million gil taken out of circulation was much more important than the 6,154 accounts banned for solicitation. If they make it so that gil is prohibitively hazardous to sell, the prices will rise to the point that no one will buy gil, eliminating the clientele. Once that happens, prices will have to rise more to make up for the lack of demand, further driving gil buying into a niche.

On the other hand, with botting, they seem to prefer a silent tug of war between their programmers and bot programmers. This is a fairly classical approach in computer security. Bot creators are just as clever as the original programmers, and they have the advantage of numbers. There is no such thing as an air tight solution (at least until black-box encryption hits its stride), every program has predictable memory behaviors, and those behaviors can be exploited.

Let's look at the solution proposed for teleport bots. This solution says that there is some distance over time ratio that is deemed unacceptable by the server and slaps the user with a ban. Such a solution would have to take into account lag, so the ratio would have to be fitted with enough slack to give some wiggle room for users with a slow connection. Lag spikes can still go anywhere between 0.3 to 3 seconds, depending on the user's connection (some may go even higher, but I'll limit this to users with at least urban level Cable connections). From the server's perspective, the aforementioned user suddenly jumped from point x to a point 3.0(v) + x away, where v is the average running velocity of a player. Here's the kicker though, it did it in a single packet exchange. That means any teleportation banning program would have to allow for sudden jumps of space 3 seconds of regular movement apart. If you extrapolate that concept, teleportation bots could easily determine the period of detection (probably 0.3 seconds, since that is how often movement is measured), and limit itself to the tolerance of the teleportation banning program. That would still allow 9 seconds of travel in 1 second of time.

The constant and un-winnable battle with RMT is present in every single MMO period. It's impossible to fully eradicate the problem and unfair on Square to expect a bot or RMT free online game.

If they aren't banned yet they are most likely trapping them to find out how far the chain of command goes since in the end they can easily remove the gil as needed.

It's like an undercover agent working for drug peddlers, their target isn't to get the people they are working for but to stay on the scene long enough to find out the mastermind behind it all, sadly in those cases it can take years just to reach that point but the point is not to find the pawns doing the work but to find the queen bee and take them down.

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Originally Posted by complexxL9

Funny you mention that, because I heard XI never got it resolved?

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No MMO has ever "Resolved" RMT activities just like no police station has ever "Solved" crime.

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Originally Posted by Jahaudant

The constant and un-winnable battle with RMT is present in every single MMO period. It's impossible to fully eradicate the problem and unfair on Square to expect a bot or RMT free online game.

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This is very true. I've never seen an MMO that didn't have at least a handful of gold sellers. Although, it is still possible to wipe out the vast majority of them, and I'm sure SE will. I remember back in the early days of WoW, I could expect to get at least one PM every 10 minutes from an RMT. By the time I stopped playing last year, such things were unheard of. You had to go to the most desolate, uninhabited areas of the game to even have a chance of finding a bot. But this was the result of years of diligent effort. We have to give these things time.

Personally I think the main problem is people getting their accounts hacked. And 90% of the time that's because players are reusing their SE username/password someplace that's been compromised. SE should force every player to use a Security Token, including mailing one with the boxed copy of the game. If they resolve that I think the problem will die down a bit when subscriptions kick in.

RMT have to level to 20 and do the main story line to be able to sell anything on the AH (which includes running 3 dungeons and a lot of running around). The only way around that is with their hacked accounts.

I think SE should prevent anyone without a GC from trading gil or even using the auction house. Getting to 20 isn't difficult, and you don't need the auction house till level 20. Dye is sold in vendors and there is nothing on the AH you absolutely have to have prior to level 20. All the gear you need till 20 is sold in vendors or given from quests. And the 15-20 dungeons drop gear.

I think doing that, with subscriptions active, will make RMT such a pita they won't be as thick.

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Originally Posted by Ryios

RMT have to level to 20 and do the main story line to be able to sell anything on the AH (which includes running 3 dungeons and a lot of running around). The only way around that is with their hacked accounts.

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Sorry to burst your bubble... But this isn't the case. I've already seen a few groups of characters with randomized names following around a single controlled character who was doing all the quests and killing in Thanaland. This would let 4 characters be brought clear to level 20 just by raising one. After that, most of the instance fights can be scripted very easily. As these users are not operating alone, they can rather easily just churn out many instances of the same class to level 20 and have it taken over by a scripted server that handles the rest.

Those level 30+ characters botting fleece on the legacy servers didn't need to be hacked... They have a script to get them there.

Quite frankly, the fact that these characters persist on a legacy server, day in, day out only proves the point that SE has no real capacity or interest in fixing this problem. Atleast on NA servers.

Square should hire people to monitor the main cities on every server and instantly ban anyone that spams RMT.

Another thing. Put a limit on how many shout/yell messages you can send per 30 secs. That would help with them completely taking over the chat log.

if noone bought, rmt wouldnt exist, only way to know who buys is by letting rmt play a bit, then banning both emt and buyers. If all buyers are banned, no more rmt will come. This is a long process though...

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Originally Posted by Hulan

Let's look at the solution proposed for teleport bots. This solution says that there is some distance over time ratio that is deemed unacceptable by the server and slaps the user with a ban. Such a solution would have to take into account lag, so the ratio would have to be fitted with enough slack to give some wiggle room for users with a slow connection. Lag spikes can still go anywhere between 0.3 to 3 seconds, depending on the user's connection (some may go even higher, but I'll limit this to users with at least urban level Cable connections). From the server's perspective, the aforementioned user suddenly jumped from point x to a point 3.0(v) + x away, where v is the average running velocity of a player.

Here's the kicker though, it did it in a single packet exchange. That means any teleportation banning program would have to allow for sudden jumps of space 3 seconds of regular movement apart. If you extrapolate that concept, teleportation bots could easily determine the period of detection (probably 0.3 seconds, since that is how often movement is measured), and limit itself to the tolerance of the teleportation banning program. That would still allow 9 seconds of travel in 1 second of time.

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The fact that the botters repeat the same action of teleporting to mining nodes over and over might be a good variable to help them differentiate from legit players when banning accounts.

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Originally Posted by nasomi

Because I always get dressed to go out and mine.

There working on it.

If it bans automatically, and bans one person by mistake, there will be an uproar. Quit complaining and play the game. Or wait, did you rush to 50 and are now bored?

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They already suspended tons of people who aren't RMT or doing anything illegal. So yeah, there is a uproar already.

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Originally Posted by complexxL9

SE losing war versus Bots and RMTs

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There is no way you have the info to support this claim. /thread.

34 posts and only 1 person who has the slightest clue about the difficulty to implement a "fix" to RMT/Botters; though, many did get it correct with the fact you will never eradicate it completely. As with most MMOs SE will get rid of 95% of the RMT and botters but we will have to wait for that, the game is extremely new and the task of removing these illegitimate accounts is extremely difficult within a 6 month window...you can forget a solution within the first 2 months of the game's release. The truth is, from a development perspective, you can not effectively automate banning people without catching unintended legitimate players, that's why they have their "strike force" which probably spends all day investigating red flags and player reports. They are just people, and they have a huge and sudden population to deal with, we will just have to be patient while they diligently complete their jobs and dwindle away the "cheating" population.