Botspotting?

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Calling people out by character name on the forums or on public in-game channels is a big no-no of the "bannable for harassment" sort, whether they are in the wrong or not.

You should file a private report to the GMs using the Support Desk (/supportdesk) window, "Contact Us" tab, "Report Cheating". GM reports can (and should) contain character names and, when applicable, log transcripts.

Any screenshots or transcripts that you post to the forums should have names edited out.

ah i see
thankyou
i apologize

I really wish/hope they implement an easier way to report players outside of just chat log. It's way too tedious trying to report the farming bots. Especially if you find a big stack of them and can't pick out all the names.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

I really wish/hope they implement an easier way to report players outside of just chat log. It's way too tedious trying to report the farming bots. Especially if you find a big stack of them and can't pick out all the names.

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I agree.

Mostly because I shouldn't have to waste time typing a detailed report whenever I report the same set of gathering bots on my sever that I've been reporting at scattered intervals for the past six months, clinging to some small hope that something will actually be done about them.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

I really wish/hope they implement an easier way to report players outside of just chat log. It's way too tedious trying to report the farming bots. Especially if you find a big stack of them and can't pick out all the names.

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Some things never change. You can report the spam bots from the right-click menu in the chat which we couldn't even do by V3.0 , but there's still no way to report the actual botting activity. Other games have tried ways of stopping them from bot bombs, to direct reporting, to indirect reporting, to video and screenshots. Nothing works. The botters know they can create more throw away accounts because they make money from the imbeciles who do that justifies them doing so.

The only thing that really works for destroying bots is unrestricted open-world PvP, and that comes with consequences that drive casual players out of the game in droves. Pick your poison. One thing that was absolutely fun to do in Archeage was to kill the botters with impunity in the PvP areas, but they would always come back, there are more bots than there are players in free-to-play games.

The only way you prevent botters from even being able to start is by streaming the game as video, and that will just not happen until we go back to unmetered data and GigE/Jumbo-Frame connections.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

The botters know they can create more throw away accounts because they make money from the imbeciles who do that justifies them doing so.

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Most end-game bots (e.g. LV60 Frontline, Ephemeral bots) are actually player bots so they aren't actually making money from anything.

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Originally Posted by Skyrior

Most end-game bots (e.g. LV60 Frontline, Ephemeral bots) are actually player bots so they aren't actually making money from anything.

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That doesn't mean it's allowed.

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Originally Posted by Canadane

That doesn't mean it's allowed.

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No, it's not allowed, but that means they can't just create more throwaway accounts casually. If they're caught and banned they'll lose months to years of progress.

So banning endgame bots is a decent way to stop botting in the endgame.

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Originally Posted by Skyrior

No, it's not allowed, but that means they can't just create more throwaway accounts casually. If they're caught and banned they'll lose months to years of progress.

So banning endgame bots is a decent way to stop botting in the endgame.

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But that still requires reporting, and the current mechanism to report active botting (even if it's not RMT) is too much effort so only really pissed off technically-minded people do it. I used to report bots all the time, and eventually something happens, even if it takes a month. But it can take take 15 minutes to report a single bot, get screenshots and video, upload those to imgur/youtube and so forth. Uploading to youtube kills the internet connection for several minutes, so that also involves having to re-login to the game.

The easiest way to report most of this stuff would require being able to target the player in question, hitting a hotkey that records 30 seconds of video, screenshots, and allow the player to select a category and a free-form report. One game's built-in report form actually sent screenshots (which I'll point out was also an easy to identify players who had altered their clients.) In one case, >50% of the players in a screenshot thread were themselves having unauthorized alterations that were identified by the lack of the game's watermark (which the alteration did by default.)

At any rate, what drives away players is the inattention to players who are cheating by the developers. Indeed one of the reasons I take long breaks from MMORPG's is because I just see too much RMT and materials farming bots and just decide the game is not worth playing for the crafting aspects and NOPE out of that part of the game entirely.

I recently reported an entire fc of bots. They were teleporting in and doing class quests. and teleporting away, is disgusting. but hey, people keep buying gil, so they going to keep botting/hacking

There are more player bots (non-RMT) than there are players that have or will quit because of the lack of action, if there have been any at all. SE knows this. People not fond of the lack of action are at the disadvantage of only being worth one subscription, compared to the hundreds of subs that use bots. You're asking SE to expend resources so they can take in less money. The downside of not doing it is what, an incredibly small percentage of players being irritated? Nothing will change until a larger number of players make a fuss or SE starts getting some bad press.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

But that still requires reporting,.
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No disagreement there. I'm just saying if SE decided to take action it will actually solve part of the problem. It wouldn't be completely useless as some pessimists suggest.

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Originally Posted by Vnolan

There are more player bots (non-RMT) than there are players that have or will quit because of the lack of action, if there have been any at all. SE knows this. People not fond of the lack of action are at the disadvantage of only being worth one subscription, compared to the hundreds of subs that use bots. You're asking SE to expend resources so they can take in less money. The downside of not doing it is what, an incredibly small percentage of players being irritated? Nothing will change until a larger number of players make a fuss or SE starts getting some bad press.

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Actually, if they are vigilant and just temporarily ban bots (24 hrs) as a first offence warning, many player bots will stop because they'll be scared they'll eventually get permabanned.

You know we could make a new activity out of this.

It'd be called bot watching. It's like bird watching, but with instead of birds, it's bots. SE could capitalize on it by giving us a bot watching log.

Alright I'll shut up.