Support Desk - Report Cheating

Recently, I caught a player using "Teleport Hack" farming at La Noscea. I video it and put in on Youtube, make a report to GM with the video link. That was one week ago.

Somehow, I saw that guy at Ul'dah - Steps of Thal three days ago. Yesterday I checked again, and I was shocked because that guy still hanging around until today.

So what was happening? I know the authorities unable to provide individual responses to our reports, but I do hope to get a reply from them regarding this case.

(That's too bad.)

People saying that SE doesn't care, are very contradictory. If they didn't care, why do mass bans? If they didn't care, why are there so many rules against RMT and botting? Why did they nerf gold drops in WP if they didn't care and make it almost impossible to make large amounts of money without playing the Market Board Game? Games that don't care are the ones where you can make lots of game money buy selling items to NPCs and from money that drops from monsters.

They are SLOW at banning, but it doesn't mean they don't care. They don't put a great deal of resources into investigating RMT reports/not enough people report (guilty of that. I just blacklist, not report).

If they really want to stop rmt they would go after all the gil buyers. One ban pretty much means they are gone for good.

Dude, I've been reporting the same bots farming snurble tufts since before Christmas. They're still there. I feel your pain.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by jabbywocks

They are SLOW at banning, but it doesn't mean they don't care. They don't put a great deal of resources into investigating RMT reports/not enough people report (guilty of that. I just blacklist, not report).

---

I think slow isnt the word you are wanting here. Slow is weeks later before they are banned. I still see bots that have been in my area since day 1 launch. That isnt slow, thats just not caring. Do you remember when the goldceo players were spamming? You could look up goldceo on lodestone and it brought up 45 pages or players with that name. Did SE do much about it? Not much at all, it took out cry after out cry on the boards for the super obvious RMT to be banned. You dont have to put alot of resources into investigating teleport bots. Its not that hard to stand there and watch them flit around. And a mass ban would be thousands of accounts gone in one swipe, not 1000 or less every 3 months or so across ALL servers. So you see Im not contradictory at all.

SE does not care one bit about bots, because they are paying a monthly fee, and money is still the almighty god of the world, real or digital.

I wouldn't have found it weird except that they just did a mass ban and the person's still there. So that's kind of weird.

In all honesty, though, I've no idea how many reports they get that they have to go through. If it's 10 guys investigating tens of thousands of reports, I could see how it could take a while to go through all of them, especially when RMT are constantly adding new bots and spammers that they have to go through. They're always hacking accounts or buying new copies of the game and jumping back in. They're like cockroaches. You can't ever actually get rid of them.

they work fast in dealing with trolls. so as long as that's a priority they can deal with bots when they feel like it. a bot will shoot a message in my chatbox. blacklisted. done. A troll ruins whole dungeon runs and make everyone else have a miserable time. It makes me really think first before doing CT as to whether or not i have the patience to deal with it. A bot is 1 second fix on our end.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Yurikitty

..

---

Cops don't care about arresting criminals. That's why jails are over-crowded, yet there are still plenty of criminals running about. Right?

The ACTUAL player base provides them with more money than RMT do. Our godly money is more valuable than the RMT's couple of subbed accounts. If they truly didn't care, why was gold drops nerfed? Just for funsies? Why doesn't every mob drop gil? Wouldn't the gold farmers make so much more gold to sell and buy more subs if they can have thousands of characters farming low level mobs over and over for gil?

RMT is VERY hard to eliminate. This is happening in every game out there, even app games on Facebook. Does SE drop the ball when getting rid of obvious bots? Often. Very often. But does that mean that they don't care and want the RMT in their game? Hell no. No company wants it's consumers to be able to make more money off of their product then they can. They charge more for gold than the price of a basic sub. They're making more profit than SE is.

If people weren't buying this gold constantly, they would be no profit in it for RMT. They could ban every bot and gold seller in the game right this moment and they will just pop up again because of cheating players who want to buy their gil.

most of the regular players should know better. but some of the new ones may not. (don't tell me they should know because of ToS because nobody reads that stuff)

I think SE should have a super serious customs NPC that greets you when you come to the game and warns you about people who may try to solicit you about RMT and the penalty involved. I didn't know you couldn't buy gil like that. This being my first MMO and not starting the game in an FC to tell me why it isn't good.

They often leave the bots up in order to track the money. If a bot has been farming for months on end they are aware of it. That bot trades its goods to get money. Then he trades that money to some characters who hoard it. Then that player tends to distribute the money to people who purchase the gil. If they follow the money they hit the big characters who are hoarding all the cash. This results in a handful of bans removing billions of gil from the economy. Meanwhile, the same bot keeps on botting as SE uses them as their little spy. Getting his RMT stockpile baned left and right.

Everyone thinks SE doesn't care because the bot remains. Seems no one here understands how police informants work in real life. No one cares about the small fry. Use them to get to the big daddy.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Tiggy

They often leave the bots up in order to track the money. If a bot has been farming for months on end they are aware of it. That bot trades its goods to get money. Then he trades that money to some characters who hoard it. Then that player tends to distribute the money to people who purchase the gil. If they follow the money they hit the big characters who are hoarding all the cash. This results in a handful of bans removing billions of gil from the economy. Meanwhile, the same bot keeps on botting as SE uses them as their little spy. Getting his RMT stockpile baned left and right.

Everyone thinks SE doesn't care because the bot remains. Seems no one here understands how police informants work in real life. No one cares about the small fry. Use them to get to the big daddy.

---

That's what I thought, so I wait patiently until today, almost three (3) months since I reported that guy, well he was still hanging around.
I'm not sure if I can put the video link at here since the hacker name clearly shown in the video.

So for those who said SE does care, what's your take on this? I'm just curious what's going on.

SE doesnt care they get paid. All those tell bots ? SE could solve it easily with next to no man power. Write a bot of their own put it in town tell recieved banned instantly. Teleporting farmers not hard to higher 1 intern to jump around in high reported areas do 1-2 servers a day every week clean slate. Its really not hard SE just doesnt care. How do we even know those reports that say x number have been banned are real I can type in random numbers assign them dates and say I did it to doesnt mean it was done. They make their money of them and they dont care enough to lose the thousands of dollars a month they are getting from the cheaters. I know people who have been reported and openly talk about how they bot nothing ever happened to them and its been over 6 months.

lol paying monthly fee. i'm pretty sure a significant amount of those accounts are hacked or paid for with stolen credit card info.

its funny really SE view on RMTs we will slowly work them down when they over populate.
Same tools used for turn 6 on party that didn't even finish turn they just wanted to look at boss. SE view permanent banned for you suckers no waiting around no reports.

The ability to report cheating is for the player reporting's benefit. It makes them think they are accomplishing something... It's the equivalent of writing letters to Santa.

Do you still believe in Santa? SE thinks you do.

I think I'm going to do an experiment where I wipe my blacklist clean, start accumulating RMT advertisers' names and reporting them (but not blacklisting them), and record the next occurrence(s) of their advertising. Then post the results on an external site somewhere for all to see.

In my personal experience, they have not dealt with the vast majority of names I've reported.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Astralos

I think I'm going to do an experiment where I wipe my blacklist clean, start accumulating RMT advertisers' names and reporting them (but not blacklisting them), and record the next occurrence(s) of their advertising. Then post the results on an external site somewhere for all to see.

In my personal experience, they have not dealt with the vast majority of names I've reported.

---

Unfortunately this is not a good measure of progress since the RMT themselves delete and remake the character to continue to get past blacklists. A better judge would be to go out to your nearest mining area run right up to a wall and angle your camera so it clips a little through the terrain so you can see the people mining underground report them then check back next week 2 weeks 3 weeks a month later and see if anything has been done. I know several are still doing it that I have been reporting for months.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Yurimi

Unfortunately this is not a good measure of progress since the RMT themselves delete and remake the character to continue to get past blacklists.

---

That isn't true in my experience. If you blacklist a character and they get deleted for whatever reason, it will show as "(Deleted)" in the blacklist. 99.5% of the names I've ever entered into my blacklist remain intact.

SE doesn't delete accounts which are banned. If it says (Deleted) the bot or the account owner who the bot-runner stole the account from, deleted the character themselves.

One thing for sure is SE are extremely slow when dealing with bots and hacks, they do eventually get them though but the thing is by the time they do they have done a lot a harm to the economy.

They definitely need a faster way of dealing with RMT, bots and cheaters.

They not only using the teleport inside the wall hack for gathering either.

A few days ago I queued up as a tank for an in progress roulette and found 2 blm inside a wall in Wonderer's Palace Aoeing mobs for gil.

Person saw a criminal.
Person reports criminal to the police.
Police moves out of their chair a month later, catching the criminal in the same spot as reported.
During this one month criminal has already murdered a victim a day.
Person who reported is baffled and complains.
Person gets chastised: "It's okay, the police is just slow. They're still catching bad guys! Calm down!"


It's okay. The botter has already amassed massive amount of items and dumped them on the market boards and ruining it for legit players but at least they'll be caught...eventually.

I'd like to know how many people who are saying 'it's easy! All SE has to do is...' actually have any experience as a company dealing with RMT.


Its more complicated than you seem to think it is. It was obvious early on that they hadnt hired many GMs because they needed to find the required amount. I dont know if they've stepped it up or not since then.

When it comes to teleport hacks, do you really think they have the time to just stop what they're doing, stand out in a zone and wait to see if they spot one guy teleporting around? Maybe they do that, maybe they dont, but I highly doubt they have enough gm's to spot every botter doing that at a time. They have procedures to follow, and its not so easy to look over logs for a botter in the way it is to just check chat logs for /tell spammers.

Speaking of those spammers. I regularly clear out my blacklist and Im never seeing familiar names. They get banned, or they delete the character. There's the added issue of 'was this account hacked or not?' A good portion of the accounts banned probably then have to be reviewed when people show they were hacked and want it unbanned. Of those people who got hacked, I'll wager at least some of them were stupid or inexperienced enough to not fully secure their details after, allowing RMT to get straight back on.

How about bots just farming over and over? Is that really a bot or a player who just likes farming? Are the rmt who run into dungeons and aoe for gil really RMT or just selfish players/trolls? Can you imagine the backlash if they just banned any character that looked even slightly suspicious and they turned out to be a real player just farming? Add to that the people who report and make up reasons just to spite someone they don't like. It happens.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Dijana

I'd like to know how many people who are saying 'it's easy! All SE has to do is...' actually have any experience as a company dealing with RMT.


Its more complicated than you seem to think it is. It was obvious early on that they hadnt hired many GMs because they needed to find the required amount. I dont know if they've stepped it up or not since then.

When it comes to teleport hacks, do you really think they have the time to just stop what they're doing, stand out in a zone and wait to see if they spot one guy teleporting around? Maybe they do that, maybe they dont, but I highly doubt they have enough gm's to spot every botter doing that at a time. They have procedures to follow, and its not so easy to look over logs for a botter in the way it is to just check chat logs for /tell spammers.

---

It's so complicated that you need three (3) months to accomplish that? You got to know I upload the video on Youtube, and I paste the link on my report. A HD video that you clearly can see that guy was teleporting around spamming Rain of Death and with his name on it, isn't that not good enough?

Besides, just banning those RMT isn't the proper way to do it. they will just keep coming back anyway with new account. To minimize RMT, SE needs to figure out why players buying gil in the first place. Selling Primal wins or coils run from the players is one of the reasons other than housing, materia, etc.

And that's why so many bots, RMT spammers on the NA server and yet you barely see them on JP server.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Dijana

When it comes to teleport hacks, do you really think they have the time to just stop what they're doing, stand out in a zone and wait to see if they spot one guy teleporting around? Maybe they do that, maybe they dont, but I highly doubt they have enough gm's to spot every botter doing that at a time. They have procedures to follow, and its not so easy to look over logs for a botter in the way it is to just check chat logs for /tell spammers.

---

They should be able to tell if people are teleporting outside normal zones, if they can't then they are more incompetent than we first imaged.