If you hate bots, now is the time to speak up.

The Q&A session scheduled for the next broadcast is to be held with the one responsible, for among other things, the Special Task Force team who's supposed to be dealing with cheaters in a timely manner.

They've posted a thread where you can put your questions for him here: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...84#post4632184

Question why it is that the same players are allowed to keep on doing what they despite being reported for months, if not years on end or whatever, just say something to raise awareness that there is a serious issue with cheaters that is not being addressed.

This might be one of the only chances we can actually get an official response on the matter and know whether or not anyone cares or is at least trying to fix the problem somehow.

They also said that if you have the same question as someone else just give it a like, no need to keep asking the same question.

True.

I assume they'll just take whatever questions have the highest number of likes (Which thankfully, are all ones pertaining to bots instead of ones completely irrelevant to this member of the staff).

I'm willing to bet any amount of money that they will skip the questions about botting.

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Originally Posted by Kisama

I'm willing to bet any amount of money that they will skip the questions about botting.

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If they do that when specifically asking for our input on questions for the guy who is in charge of handling issues related to that then we know its time to start looking at other games to play.

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Originally Posted by Texa

If they do that when specifically asking for our input on questions for the guy who is in charge of handling issues related to that then we know its time to start looking at other games to play.

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I’d start looking now if you are expecting anything real to come out of this. I have absolutely no expectations that they will address botting in an serious ways if they ever addresss them all.

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Originally Posted by Istaru

I’d start looking now if you are expecting anything real to come out of this. I have absolutely no expectations that they will address botting in an serious ways if they ever addresss them all.

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Lmao, I'm not expecting any policy changes just optimally a clear statement on what else we can do to report it.

Bots are a never ending cycle sadly. Mass Bot reports > They put some anti-bot measure in > Bots find a way around > Loop

Bots are just a part of MMOs. Every MMO has them despite what anyone will ever say. If an MMO claims to have 0 bots, then they're lying.

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Originally Posted by SomeRandomHuman

Bots are a never ending cycle sadly. Mass Bot reports > They put some anti-bot measure in > Bots find a way around > Loop

Bots are just a part of MMOs. Every MMO has them despite what anyone will ever say. If an MMO claims to have 0 bots, then they're lying.

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The bots people are generally concerned with are not of a sort that can easily be replaced if they get banned and often are being used with someone's main account.

People don't expect them to be removed completely, but they do at least want SE to actually try to do something about the ones that aren't painfully obvious, expendable gil farmers.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

The bots people are generally concerned with are not of a sort that can easily be replaced if they get banned and often are being used with someone's main account.

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Oh!

You mean like the ones that get reported dozens of times, or do it live on twitch and are reported over months and yet, they’re still here openly botting?

Personally, I’ve given up on SE doing anything about them.

I wish you luck, I really do.

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Originally Posted by Kisama

I'm willing to bet any amount of money that they will skip the questions about botting.

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More likely they will misunderstand it and go on about their RMT countermeasures or think you're referring to automating your crafting/gathering rotation via macros.

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Originally Posted by Texa

If they do that when specifically asking for our input on questions for the guy who is in charge of handling issues related to that then we know its time to start looking at other games to play.

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remember these live letters are first and foremost advertisement. contreversial questions and criticism have no place there.

the idea is to put SE into a better light, not talking about how they didn't handled bots for years...

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Originally Posted by Istaru

Oh!

You mean like the ones that get reported dozens of times, or do it live on twitch and are reported over months and yet, they’re still here openly botting?

Personally, I’ve given up on SE doing anything about them.

I wish you luck, I really do.

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This is basically the last straw as far as I'm concerned.

If they ignore or misinterpret the claims about the rampant botting issues, i'm just going to give up on the matter entirely as well.

With how little concern they've expressed on the US end of things in the matter, I doubt they're going make much of an effort to make the JP staff aware of it, though...

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Originally Posted by Tint

remember these live letters are first and foremost advertisement. contreversial questions and criticism have no place there.

the idea is to put SE into a better light, not talking about how they didn't handled bots for years...

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They at least had the guts to come out and admit that they screwed up as far as the Ungarmax exploit went, though I'm thinking they probably wouldn't want to admit to an even bigger failing that's been happening practically since the day the game launched.

Went through the thread and gave likes but the posts will probably get ignored in the Q&A as always.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

This is basically the last straw as far as I'm concerned.

If they ignore or misinterpret the claims about the rampant botting issues, i'm just going to give up on the matter entirely as well.

With how little concern they've expressed on the US end of things in the matter, I doubt they're going make much of an effort to make the JP staff aware of it, though...


They at least had the guts to come out and admit that they screwed up as far as the Ungarmax exploit went, though I'm thinking they probably wouldn't want to admit to an even bigger failing that's been happening practically since the day the game launched.

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I don't know how rampant botting is on a per-server basis, all I've ever experienced on Excalibur, over time:
- FATE train bots (amazing how they all showed up exactly at the same time just as the FATE appeared)
- Parked harvesting bots in North Shroud, Gelmorra Ruins (which I had to report repeatedly over the course of a month before anything changed.)
- Teleporting harvesting bots
- RMT spammers, which tend to have a large uptick in Ul'dah,Gridania and Limsa Lominsa at every patch, and are either at the Aethernet crystal or at the marketboard areas.

Solving the Spammers tends would simply require disabling any "free trial" accounts or any accounts without service from using the chat system, and I think that's largely what reduced the spam from annoyance to random. Prior to 3.0 the blacklist would be filled by the end of the day. As of 4.0 I've not seen more than 4 spammers and my blacklist has been cleared. From what I hear, the RMT activity all moved to Discord.

Went through the thread and tossed likes on the posts to give one more count to them. Hopefully we will get at least an acknowledgement that they can see its an issue and will look into handling it better at the very least.

I don't anyone is under the delusion that SE has the ability/motivation to get rid of all botting in the game. The main issues are people who have multiple jobs to 70 using bots for high-end gathering, high-end crafting, and automatic exp via pvp. The bots who just do shards, the open-world fate farmers, and the rmt shouters are very easy to replace and don't have that much impact on the affairs of longterm players. It's the bots that are tanking the market board, removing the incentive for other player to craft and gather for things that take a long time to accomplish, and the people trying to take the easy road to level all of their jobs. Those are the bots that players want to see more disciplinary action taken against.

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Originally Posted by Texa

I don't anyone is under the delusion that SE has the ability/motivation to get rid of all botting in the game. The main issues are people who have multiple jobs to 70 using bots for high-end gathering, high-end crafting, and automatic exp via pvp. The bots who just do shards, the open-world fate farmers, and the rmt shouters are very easy to replace and don't have that much impact on the affairs of longterm players. It's the bots that are tanking the market board, removing the incentive for other player to craft and gather for things that take a long time to accomplish, and the people trying to take the easy road to level all of their jobs. Those are the bots that players want to see more disciplinary action taken against.

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How you do even spot a crafting bot, with all the crafters in this game using macro's and quick synthesis. I have yet to see a gathering bot, its mostly RMT's bots I see the most on Lamia.

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Originally Posted by NanaWiloh

How you do even spot a crafting bot, with all the crafters in this game using macro's and quick synthesis. I have yet to see a gathering bot, its mostly RMT's bots I see the most on Lamia.

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They follow the exact same patterns over and over, take the exact route over and over, pretty much something a human can't possible do.

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Originally Posted by Shouko

They follow the exact same patterns over and over, take the exact route over and over, pretty much something a human can't possible do.

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I understand gathering bots follow the same route but a crafting bot still has me lost. When I craft multiples of a HQ item I follow the same rotation over and over as I know it will hit 100%. :( I know I am missing something here..

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Originally Posted by NanaWiloh

I understand gathering bots follow the same route but a crafting bot still has me lost. When I craft multiples of a HQ item I follow the same rotation over and over as I know it will hit 100%. :( I know I am missing something here..

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The people who put up dozens upon dozens of different 99 hq stacks of food and potions are likely botting for mats and crafting.

I really hope they actually respond to these concerns. It's absolutely ridiculous that the people running a particular FC on Cactuar haven't been suspended/banned for their blatant botting. And I'm not wanting them to just address crafting/gathering bots; I'd like for them to address Fromtlines and PvP bots as well. Because it's just ridiculous.

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Originally Posted by NanaWiloh

I understand gathering bots follow the same route but a crafting bot still has me lost. When I craft multiples of a HQ item I follow the same rotation over and over as I know it will hit 100%. :( I know I am missing something here..

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Generally crafting bots will be crafting for hours (and I mean more than enthusiatic crafters craft for), have multiple stacks of 99 of an item like HQ Grade 2 Infusions on the MB (the one that's particularly well-known on my server had thousands of each Infusion up, and this has been the case since SB launched), and if you ever see them crafting, they can show up as AFK, but the script still has them performing crafting actions (versus how when some Quick synth 99 items, AFK status can take over).

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Originally Posted by NanaWiloh

I understand gathering bots follow the same route but a crafting bot still has me lost. When I craft multiples of a HQ item I follow the same rotation over and over as I know it will hit 100%. :( I know I am missing something here..

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Imagine if your macro could detect every single Good or Excellent proc and instead of manually pressing the macro, it sets up the whole craft while you're at work. This allows 100% efficiency without you even looking at the game, much less playing it. That's what a craft bot looks like.

Thanks for the explanations on the craft bots :D I understand now

I went on a binge earlier to "Like" those many posts mentioning bots. Every so often I may pop in again to check for more posts to "Like," because the botting in this game is kinda atrocious.

I guess you don't even have to be mentioning cheaters by name for the mods to think a topic is worthy of being deleted, because the original thread pertaining to the botting issue was purged for whatever reason.

It certainly isn't sending a good message about how they feel about the matter and I have pretty much zero confidence any of the questions in the NA/EU Q&A thread are going to actually be relayed to the JP devs now.