"report cheating" support function not working?

I'm starting to think all of the reports we write about cheaters, who use bots or hacks to bypass game mechanics and generate massive ammounts of gil, hurting the economy, don't ever reach the responsible people at SE.

I simply can't think of another reason why these players can continue cheating for weeks and months without anything happening.
Some of them I've reported numerous times, everytime I saw them bot farming or teleport gathering or such, and they are still active MONTHS after getting reported.

Instead SE hunts down legit players for buying/selling something from/through AH with the explanation that either they bought something from a RMT or sold something to someone who bough gil. I mean, really?!


When will the responsible people at SE start doing something against the cheaters which can be found near almost every low-mid level gathering area or near mobs worth farming?
I'd gladly provide a list of 50+ characters which were or are obviously using a bot or hack to kill mobs or farm nodes.


Also, I'd like to know why characters with names like Ytfszcop Pedtxivdq (made up example) don't get filtered and brought to the attention of the STF or another department in charge.
There are legions of characters with such random names, same character model, class and equipment out there and nobody can tell me that any legit player would be "running" (these characters teleport anyway) around without any mount, have a lvl50 base class (archer seems to be popular) without any class quests done and only AH bough equipment ~ilvl45-49, or since patch crafted ilvl55 PvP gear.

It should be pretty obvious to players that 95% of the shards sold through the AH are farmed by bots. How else should 1 player be able to farm over 10.000 shards in one day?
But people buy these shards/crystals every day because nobody else sells them. And nobody seems to care.

Are there no GMs who can check the characters after they get reported and ban/delete them immediately?


Sorry for the ranting, but it's just too frustrating to travel through the areas and see the same characters everytime, cheating 24/7 without any punishment.
If they would just bot for themself that would be bad enough already, but these bots and hack users also effect the gameplay of honest players.

TLDR: Get rid of the bots already.

Thx for reading.

It takes more then one report to invesgiate these thing. Invesgateing each thing also takes time. They also likely ban them in big groups at a time rather then a case by case baisis.

TLDR Don't expect them to wave a wand and make them all vanish in 24 hours. Have some patience.

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Originally Posted by Lego3400

TLDR Don't expect them to wave a wand and make them all vanish in 24 hours. Have some patience.

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That's what I'm talking about. These bots or hack users have been around for months now, no exaggeration, and they still do their thing all day long.
If it takes a year to get rid of a bot they don't need to bother at all, because the damage is already done.

EDIT: I'm not talking about random bots. They have names we're not allowed to post here, but they have been cheating for a long time and still do it.

Are you sure it's the same bots? You said yourself their names are gibberish. Do you honestly expect me to belive you remembered one of them exactly? It's probably similar bots doing similar things. Banning bots is easy. Fixing what they're doing to create that exploit is a bit harder.

I could give you a list of them. No need to remember names if you can make screenshots.
But not all the cheaters use such gibberish names. I also have a number of normal names on my list.

Btw. banning bots seems to be alot harder than you and I think If you compare the number of reported and deleted bots.
I'd like to see the actual numbers from SE. Would be interesting.

SE likes RMT im telling you.

take about 1hr 45 mins - 2hr's to get 10 stacks of 99 using miner or botany. so chances are there botting if you /tell them and no answer or the same message pops up there bots.

if they can cheat and i cant, im not gonna bother re-subbing after tomarrow. i already got suspended 2 times on this forum for the truth yet people messing up the game go free.

It seems that they are not being aggressive enough to combat the bots, and they fear if they use more aggressive tactics it will either leave them with a solution that hurts the community or going through many support tickets for wrongfully banned accounts. Bots will always be prevalent in the community but the swifter you act upon those bots the less of an impact they will have on the community as a whole.

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Originally Posted by Kyana

I'm starting to think all of the reports we write about cheaters, who use bots or hacks to bypass game mechanics and generate massive ammounts of gil, hurting the economy, don't ever reach the responsible people at SE.

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Any bot is likely using some kind of exploit. Instead of banning people what SE probably do is monitor them and see how they operate and find out what they are exploiting. They then make a patch for the exploit and deploy it and tada ALL the botters are gone, not just one. If you ban a botter all you do is stop them and there's nothing to stop him and his friends from doing it again.


It's a scary though but some people like to fish/gather/mine for hours upon end. It mainly probably is bots but some players do like it.

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Originally Posted by Saccharin

It's a scary though but some people like to fish/gather/mine for hours upon end. It mainly probably is bots but some players do like it.

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Not really a scary thought. I mean I do enjoy farming when the mood is right. I can do it for hours on end, I set goals I want to reach and like to reach those goals. I know it isn't for everyone, I can't stand gathering classes or mining, haven't tried fishing but I love to craft I don't know why that is ( I do but not sure if its forum worthy of mentioning) I also like it for other reasons. MMO's to me have laid out goals that the game provides for you and goals you provide for yourself. Very refreshing feeling. Although other games also provide that as well. I just think it is more satisfying in the MMO Genre.

I've been reporting the same bot on behemoth by drybone who has been mining fireshards for at least a month. I agree, SE doesn't seem to care, and if they do , if it takes them 3 months to ban a bot, it takes the ppl making the bots 5 seconds to make another one. I've just about lost faith in reporting cheating anymore.

i mean shouldnt it be : report cheating... GM pops in game. GM examines accused. GM messages accused. GM throws account on suspension pending review. DONE. Instead we seem to have: Report cheating... SE takes forever to investigate... economy destroyed. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.

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Originally Posted by Lego3400

Do you honestly expect me to belive you remembered one of them exactly?

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Really? Like it's that hard... You're just being annoying/arguing for argument's sake

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Originally Posted by Mayin

i mean shouldnt it be : report cheating... GM pops in game. GM examines accused. GM messages accused. GM throws account on suspension pending review. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.

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The same reason SE appears to be using hamster wheels to power their servers. They are clearly running this game on the cheap (FWIW the credits list 4 GMs. Four.)

Starting to feel fleeced TBH. Just look at the housing debacle.

SE doesn't care. The only other explanation is that they are completely incompetent and I like to think that is not true. I have reported the same bot farming fleece now for almost a month. I do it pretty much everyday and guess what... yup, still there. They don't.... care. They want to ban accounts and don't know who they are? Log in for 10 seconds and just ban the 50 people that instantly sent you tells. It's not rocket science. "We just banned 200 accounts..." ahuh... out of how many players? And then how many more popped up to replace them? Know what surprises me is that I know there has to be some VERY talented hackers among our player base. Why don't they go after the sites that are advertising? I mean just go mess with them, take them down, go nuts. :) Serve them right.

I was farming fleece one day and reported a guy for teleport-botting (he would literally warp from infront of me to the ledge, and it was always in the exact same spots)
Long ago prior that day others reported the same guy
The next morning someone shouted about the same guy

Even in FFXI something like this would have been handled within 1 hour
you make a GM call
report the guy
GM sends them to ffxi-jail
Done.

I feel like this game doesn't even have GMs. I miss the days of FFXI where i got a response within an hour almost every GM call, and got to speak personally to a GM

Right now the economy is dependent on bots and balanced around them. Shard prices went from 55 to 15 Gil in the last 2 weeks