So if I've been seeing the same 4 people botting N.Than on my server since last Saturday, and have filed multiple reports on it, can I assume that's a sign they're condoning this method?
I mean, it sure would make leveling up jobs while I'm asleep, at work, or playing other things a lot easier.
North Thanalan Botting
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07-24-2015, 04:42 PMihatevnecksNorth Thanalan Botting
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07-24-2015, 05:13 PMLego3400
They will not take action the moment you file a report. You could be wrong, they need to investigate (Also theres less then a dozen people assigned to handle such cases). They investgate a bunch and then ban in huge waves. Come back in say, two months, when they've had a chance to take action.
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07-24-2015, 05:46 PMKaedan
The instant gratification and hyperbole is strong in this OP.
Basically what Lego said. They aren't going to immediately take action against the characters right after you file a report. They have to investigate. If you're wrong and they simply took your word, then they would end up wrongly disciplining a player. -
07-24-2015, 06:03 PMihatevnecksI'm not sure Saturday > Friday is "right after" really :) It's not a difficult thing to verify - 5 minutes of seeing the duplicated pathing, not to mention the time active + logged in. We're not talking a few hours/day here, they've been consistently at it day and night, no matter what time it is.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaedan
And like Croisciento said, by letting it go for a week (read: over 100 hours per bot) or more, they're only encouraging the behavior. -
07-24-2015, 06:43 PMGunspecLord forbid rules be enforced in a timely manner. Considering the punishment only involves a temporary ban, be sure to let cheaters cap all of their classes before they receive a mandatory two week vacation.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaedan
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07-24-2015, 06:58 PMKaedanNow multiply that 5 minutes (it's actually more than that) by several thousand. That's a lot of manpower that would be necessary to ban them in a timely manner. They've got a backlog. And they ban people in large chunks every 1-2 weeks. So it's reasonable to think that if you report someone, it probably won't be for 2-4 weeks at the minimum (unless someone reported them before you).Quote:
Originally Posted by ihatevnecks
Not to mention that XP botting is a lot, lot lower priority than other forms of botting and RMT. -
07-24-2015, 07:13 PMZfz
Also there are a lot of automated questing bots. Yes they exist. They teleport (not the in-game teleport, actual teleport hacks letting them drop in on any designated location, i.e. in front of mobs, kill mob, then drop in front of the quest NPC to hand in the quest) everywhere and do quests and the hand-ins. They usually appear late night and come in groups of 3~4 of the same job.
Perhaps in ten or twenty more years when communications are by default encrypted with a very strong encryption that changes dynamically and still give us virtually no communications delay, the problem of bots and teleport hacks can be solved... -
07-24-2015, 07:16 PMMoonleg
If they only watch one player at a time they're doing it wrong.
Recognize a bot's movement pattern is relatively simple; simple enough that you could easily watch several characters at once to see if they constantly follow a set path with no deviation. -
07-24-2015, 07:24 PMKaedanAnd so you're ok with suddenly not being able to play because someone falsely/mistakenly reported you? I'm pretty sure the first thing you'd do (if your forum account wasn't temp banned as well) would be coming in here screaming about how you were wrongly banned.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gunspec
See, the issue you have is that you don't see the big picture. Yes, it doesn't take that long to investigate a single bot. But they don't have the manpower to have GMs sitting around N.Than (and other areas) on every server 24/7. So they rely on reports... but those reports have to be verified, which takes time, especially considering they get thousands and thousands of reports.
And while I don't condone/support botting, XP bots aren't hurting you in any way. If they are merely using the bot for leveling (and not spiritbonding), then it's not hurting you or anyone else. It would be no different than if a group of friends rotated on a character so it could be played 24/7. -
07-24-2015, 10:55 PMKaze3434except account sharing is against the rules.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaedan
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07-24-2015, 11:50 PMKit-KatThe thing here is morals. If someone doesn't give a flying kweh to openly bot like that, what other things could that person bot. It would be quick to judge, but from experience from past MMOs, if someone has access to a certain tool that will do the job for you, you'll use it for everything possible aswell. And it becomes addictive to the point you get completely used to it and rely on it. "Oh look I need X item to craft that, UGH I should bot it, afterall I already botted before" <-- I actually read these words from other players in other games.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaedan
EXP botting itself didn't hurt anyone (in fact, it helped a lot of legit players to clear fates faster). Us, legit players, just get frustrated and jelous that we have to do the boring and long work by ourselves while others don't put effort on it just because we can't get ourselves so low to have to cheat. -
07-24-2015, 11:55 PMIzzyData
You only get a 2 week ban for botting? brb.
But seriously, other subscription based mmos aren't nearly this bad at banning bots quickly. Write some software to auto detect this kind of thing then auto perma ban them. Done. -
07-25-2015, 12:40 AMKisaiTenshiI take it you've never researched what exactly botting entails.Quote:
Originally Posted by IzzyData
I've been "taking notes" on what bots do for years. The bots for FFXIV utilize the same software "DPS parsers" do, and hook into the "add ons" API so it gives them access to almost as much stuff as the developers do. The reason it's so "easy" for FFXIV bots to exist is that there's no protection on the game binaries, so players and botters can just drop whatever files they want into the program directory and the game will happily let hook/injections run. This is how most if not -ALL- unauthorized addons work in any game, it's also how protection software gets "patched out" by having the C/C++ runtime patched to hide itself.
The dumbest bots, are the ones that use a certain open-source utility to just copy-paste text into the game and spam relentlessly. They have no feedback loop, so they don't actually know what's going on in the game, unless the pixel-hunting aspect of it recognizes a dialog box. This is generally what RMT's use on throw-away accounts.
The fight against botting requires better self-protections in the software before anything will change. Because a 2 week ban means nothing to a throw-away account. -
07-25-2015, 01:16 AMLego3400Actully I see this same kind of post on WoW forums all the time. "Wah I reported bots but they didn't take care of it when I said to, Blizzard loves bots"Quote:
Originally Posted by IzzyData
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07-25-2015, 01:19 AMIzzyDataQuote:
Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi
I don't see how that is relevant although I wouldn't mind them making parsers be recognized as 3rd party alteration and ban them too as long as they add in an official dps meter.
What they should do is create a separate system to watch for patterns in player behavior that could be determine as a bot. Or if they are never going to make player addons a thing then severely limit the unused addons api so that you can only do a limited number of things. -
07-25-2015, 02:09 AMKosmos992kAgreed, but when the developers can't (or won't) even secure the server-side database against teleportation hacks, sanity check movements, or even enforce basic in-world geometry to prevent 'underground' mining, I can't see them doing anything to protect the executable or integrity of the game client when the database and/or game servers are as open for abuse as they appear to be.Quote:
Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi
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07-25-2015, 02:36 AMrepoe
Oh man, when I was leveling mining in outer la nosc. I ran the same triangle over and over. People.Think.i.am.smart.because.I.talk.like.a.robot
Joking aside, you filled the report and did your due diligence, if you have nothing better to do then monitor ppls movements...I don't know what else to say -
07-25-2015, 03:31 AMGunspecSE not having manpower IS the big picture problem. The game has cheaters, botters, hackers, and RMT spam operating more openly than any other subscription based game I have ever seen. And yet, despite "thousands and thousands" of reports, SE has made no effort to expand it's rule enforcement team. Ordinary players are bombarded by RMT spam which could easily be ended if such accounts were immediately terminated. And as for leveling bots, those players ruin the game both mechanically (by forcing fates to scale higher for players not participating) and aesthetically (zones in which players teleport around and attack enemies underground are so life like and pleasing, no?).Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaedan
Sure, banning someone due to only a single report is wrong. But in a game that has $25 mogstation items, in addition to $15 a month subscription fees and added retainers for $1-$3, there really should be enough staff to investigate cheating in a timely manner. Cheaters basically get a free week before any action is taken by SE staff. -
07-25-2015, 10:31 AMrepoe
something about this thread for immediate action on reports filed screams medieval mob mentality
http://i.imgur.com/Ku8pGSC.gif -
07-25-2015, 11:21 AMKisaiTenshiThe problem here is that it's impossible for SE to know the difference between an unauthorized add-on and legitimate one. Since there are no authorized ones, right -now- they could just outright ban anyone using an addon and that will ban everyone with a DPS parser, no matter how they were using it.Quote:
Originally Posted by IzzyData
As for "patterns"... they could look for people who are solo in content that should be impossible (Eg Extreme Primals) if they want to nab people who are cheating for the sake of cheating. A lot of what cheating players do is ALSO quite lazy.
I just want to mention that there is a bit of a misunderstanding about what is going on. In FFXIV V1.0, SE encrypted the Login server but not the Gameplay Server, at most they compressed some packets. In V2.0 they reused this mechanism, so "not securing the database" isn't what is going on, rather it's they are fabricating/editing extra packets. There are cheat tools that are readily available that hack memory and packets. "Teleporting" happens because the game client and server send a "where am I" packet several times every second, and the server does NOT go "no you're not there" rather it just accepts it. A lot of MMORPG network traffic is no different.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kosmos992k
As I mentioned elsewhere, the server isn't aware of the world geometry, all the collision detection is on the game client. So teleporting bots are simply getting a list of the gathering nodes straight out of the network stream, teleporting to them (many of the bots at ARR V2.0 release literately dropped out of the sky, because they were teleporting to the actual node location) and they end up "underneath" the ground by setting the Z location to whatever Z coordinate would put them under the node but still let the game client see it within reach.
A lot of "fixes" require validating every action, which immensely slows down the server and it's capacity, which increases the amount of network traffic. So unless we want much smaller maps I don't see these things happening in real time. Rather mass-data-entry systems could check player velocities and locations and anything that is more than 0.1% out of normal gets flagged. Like there is absolutely no excuse for bots being "underground", the server is being told by the bots they are under the map, an out of bounds checker could scan every player on the server in seconds against the actual map's geometry and ban the accounts instantly... if there was a will to do it. -
07-25-2015, 04:46 PMKosmos992kThats the kind of thing that I am talking about, except performing some real-time sanity checking should be possible, the client already does it for every invisible wall players encounter. One thing I have to say though about the other information you gave about the hacks essentially editing, or reconstructing data packets en-route to the server. There is zero excuse for allowing that to occur.Quote:
Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi
The communication between the game and client should be secure enough that without some decent effort it's not possible to perform live packet modification. Hell, even if the encryption is hacked and the key reversed, we have sufficiently frequent patches to allow the encryption scheme to morph each time, as well as changing the keys. Not securing the communication between client and server is a pretty horrible data security failure.
From a database point of view, the coordinate system should have validation rules on the coordinates themselves, to do exactly what you stated. I also agree that the player movement and teleportation commands could and should be validated off-line by a system that has no impact on the game servers. As you say, violations detected there should result in account suspension. Hell, every reported bot/cheat should be put through that ringer at least, to facilitate faster/more accurate detection.
I'm not familiar with other MMO's and how they do their thing, but in the world of corporate databases, systems, networks and data security, the lack of security and integrity in the data seen here would be inexcusable. -
07-26-2015, 06:07 AMArkann
So, there's this guy who used to be in my FC then left to make his own with another member (a girl he literally showered with minions, glamour items, money for a house, furniture, etc. despite not being a crafter, gatherer, raider, anything that makes money). It's been a week (maybe more) since he's been botting in N. Thanalan, not answering my /tell or emotes. So there is not the shadow of a doubt he's botting. And I've noticed many of those who bot use the same gear:
http://img15.hostingpics.net/pics/880688681.jpg
When the bot was leveling his Dragoon, it was also wearing the Dragoon-equivalent on the left side, and level 30 strength accessories instead of level 30 vitality accessories. Looks like there's a pattern here. -
07-26-2015, 06:12 AMMwynnIt's probably the same Guy running tons of Characters at once. It's a common thing for Gil/Gold/Whatever Farmer.Quote:
Originally Posted by Arkann
They level up to 60 and then they only run Duties (No Random Group but his own Group of 4 Bots run these) to farm Gil and other Stuff which they sell on the Marketboard.
You'd be surprised how stupid some Bot Owners are, they gather all their Characters in a Spot, wearing all the same Items.
There are also a few "Clever" Bot Owners, you won't see them hanging out in Town or in populated Spots such as North Thanalan as there are other Methods to grind your Levels.
When they made enough Gil, it's extra $$$ / €€€ for them. This is not just in FFXIV, you'll mostly see it in F2P MMORPG Titles.