What is being doing against botters?

The situation with Bots on Lich is just crazy.

I've been afk in Bronze Lake for about 1h and I found the notification, in chat, of around 60 bots all dinging lvl 35.

Clearly someone has industrialized the whole botting process, and they're not even trying to hide.
Is Square Enix doing anything about it?

Edit: I counted them, but they were getting more... 87.

Probably RMT bots...
All jibberish names?


You can't really get rid of these, they're recreated as fast as they're banned.
The important thing in the fight against rmt is to get the accounts holding the money, depriving them access to their stock.

These farm bots aren't important to the rmt.
They are easily replaced.

Yeah, I tried to post the names but I was 1k characters over the allowed limit.
If they're all lvl 35 I guess they're not disappearing all that fast.

Can they get this far with a trial account?

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Originally Posted by akenatoth

Yeah, I tried to post the names but I was 1k characters over the allowed limit.

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First, even though they may be obviously RMT bots, there's a no names rule on the forums.
So you shouldn't post names.

Second, you can edit your post to bypass the character limit.
Just write it out, copy and then paste while editing.

When you see bots leveling, that means several were just banned. They have it automated, do it en masse, and will often warp to/through out-of-bounds areas.

Honestly at this point I wish SE would just change their approach and go after the people supplying the code for the bots, rather than take months to a year to go after the users. Blizzard took their own cheaters to court and won a fairly hefty judgement against them, and I don't see why SE couldn't try to as well. Instead of just banning them, go after their livelihoods. You'd have to find some of them of course, but SE likely has enough money and a good enough legal team to eventually do it.

Even they Do the BANs, it take several months to ban 1 by reporting BOTs almost every day, Make the BANs not effective.

"Cut off one head, two more will take its place".

- Hail Hydra!

It's hard to control when they just steal more credit cards to pay for more games/services. These bots aren't using their real money, it's not like they can just ban Joe Schmoe and be done with it. They are like flies on poop.

https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...87766240bee683

We're getting a post like this roughly every week on the Lodestone.

To quote from the last one (the one I linked):

Time Period: Jun. 7, 2018 to Jun. 13, 2018

・Participation in RMT/prohibited activities
　・Accounts terminated: 3,334
・Botting activity (Using any number of third party tools that allow for automation)
　・Accounts terminated: 4
　・Accounts temporarily suspended: 16
・RMT advertising
　・Accounts terminated: 409

And as far as I can tell those are typical numbers - which shows only what other people already stated: They cant ban as fast as those people recreate accounts.
Its like my dad loves to say: "Kill one fly and seven come to the funeral" (its a german saying, not sure how well it translates, but you get the idea...)
So while there is stuff being done, this isnt something they can get rid off completly, without shutting off servers from character creation (Hello, Balmung!).

If its any consolation: Since they've locked HW and SB areas behind 200+ hours of mainstory, you see basically no bots there - except for "legit" people using a bot to gather mats, I guess... but no RMT-spam in Ishgard or Kugane, no people teleporting in Rubysea...

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Originally Posted by Vidu

[url]...
So while there is stuff being done, this isnt something they can get rid off completly, without shutting off servers from character creation (Hello, Balmung!).
...

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A fact that was a large factor in my moving to Balmung back when I did...
I had to keep tells in a seperate chat tab and the sound off just to function on another server. (there wasn't context menu reporting of rmt at the time...)


While the lack of new players is a bit of a con, I do enjoy there being practically no RMT on Balmung.

The RMT bots aren't the problem, honestly. It's the "legit" bots owned by actual players (Reflected by that tiny number of people banned for botting) who tend to utterly screw up the economy by flooding the market that are troublesome. These guys are perfectly controllable, but SE either doesn't care about them or simply isn't able to tell that they're botting despite how precisely scheduled and repetitive their actions tend to be.

Logically, the number of bans should've gone up due to 4.3's release drawing back a ton of players and with them, bots, but the number of bans has been decreasing instead.

The issue has been so persistent on Cactaur that I see more and more players caving and starting to bot so they can compete with the other dominant forces on the MB and it's rather sad.

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Originally Posted by TaranTatsuuchi

The important thing in the fight against rmt is to get the accounts holding the money, depriving them access to their stock.

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The problem is that they don't even have a "bank" account that stores all the gil like one might think, and everything is totally expendable.

I've actually witnessed someone in the process of conducting a RMT transaction before, and they simply invite you to the FC all of the gil farm bots are in and trade you the money from the FC chest that way.

This means that when SE does decide to crack down on the FC, it's almost a certainty everyone who's purchased from them is going to get punished.

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Originally Posted by akenatoth

Yeah, I tried to post the names but I was 1k characters over the allowed limit.
If they're all lvl 35 I guess they're not disappearing all that fast.

Can they get this far with a trial account?

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They're bots. How long do you expect them to take to accomplish anything? They can probably bot their way to 35 in less than a day.

There are regularly level 50 BLM/WHMs flying around so they have to be using a sub, and it takes less then a day for them to hit that level.

The thing that confuses me is that the devs have shown themselves capable of fixing other hacks such as the Ruin IV hack, so why can't they stop the teleport hacks when they're far easier to detect?

The only way i can come up with is to cut the demand. Make the game less grindy and over all simpler. I'm not sure that would make a good game though.

The demand for gil is already low because there isn't anything major to spend it on outside of housing and honestly, I don't want that to change since the botting would just get even worse.

The majority of people who bot for gil currently are either trying to RMT or just have a strange obsession with making more gil even if they have nothing to spend it on

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

There are regularly level 50 BLM/WHMs flying around so they have to be using a sub, and it takes less then a day for them to hit that level.

The thing that confuses me is that the devs have shown themselves capable of fixing other hacks such as the Ruin IV hack, so why can't they stop the teleport hacks when they're far easier to detect?

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I think I found an answer to this. The "teleporting" bots aren't actually teleporting (as in teleporting via aetheryte), they're sending the "set position" instruction that the game doesn't send until the character stops moving, and hence from a data analysis side, they don't look like they're teleporting. What isn't being sent are the movement vectors, which is why if you stand outside the Waking Sands and wait for the level 35 bots to do the "Bringing out the Dead" quest you will see them literately bend from the entrance to the first corpse.

What they would need to do to fix it, is require that the movement vectors match the position being set, and that probably just makes the processing slower since it would have to do it every half second multiplied by every character and NPC in the zone. It also doesn't solve the problem.

A more obvious fix is to actually count the movement vectors between positions being set. If movements are being sent every 0.5 seconds, then there should be greater than zero movement vectors between each position.

When I was following one of these bot groups, I noticed that they actually move at the same speed as a normal player doing these quests, so I have a feeling that they were already "cracked down" on for doing the quests too fast. However they're obviously not checking the positions they are moving to, as every single bot stands on top of each other, and directly on top of the exact position of the NPC they target.

The developers would need to block joining a FC/invites to a FC, and maybe straight up block doing the level 30 jobs without a subscription if these were in fact disposable RMT bots. So the question is what loophole is wide enough open to allow 100 bots per server to operate with impunity all week?

Let's do the math:

Quote:

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Time Period: Jun. 7, 2018 to Jun. 13, 2018

・Participation in RMT/prohibited activities
　・Accounts terminated: 3,334
・Botting activity (Using any number of third party tools that allow for automation)
　・Accounts terminated: 4
　・Accounts temporarily suspended: 16
・RMT advertising
　・Accounts terminated: 409

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Ok, how many servers does SE have?
66

So divide "participation in RMT" by 66 and we get 50. That is TOO low, so they're clearly not getting all of them.

Then look at "Botting activity", oh wow 4. SE needs to step up their game. SE could list the numbers by server, but then that would simply cause players to take that into consideration when moving or creating new characters. Maybe a data center breakdown would tell us that SE is treating each data center with equal priority and not simply cherry-picking the JP servers.

I've seen some gil farming FCs last for well over a month before they finally got purged (Despite me reporting them), so their response time isn't exactly the greatest.

As far as the "normal" bots go, it honestly seems like the only way they can get banned for it is if they specifically talk about botting in a chat channel before/after they've been reported for it. There's probably close to 20 or so of these bots on Cactaur alone (Not necessarily active simultaneously), so they seriously need to step it up.

There are ways to combat them. Blizzard is getting better at it. One way Blizzard is fighting it is that they recently contracted out to a company that writes really great detection software that was finally able to pinpoint Bots with pretty good accuracy. Another way is that they don't allow free trial accounts like this game does that lets them spam their messages. Botters are usually players with the money to pay for accounts, but RMT are doing their work for free and that is really easy to stop: Prevent trial accounts from talking or remove trial accounts altogether. Another way is to ban the serial number of the game- so that players who are banned will have to repurchase the entire game on top of their new subscription price.

Another way Blizzard put the hurt on RMT was when they introduced the Token system that let players turn cash into gold legitimately. This actually got Blizzard sued by the RMT companies for loss of profit, but Blizz won the lawsuit.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

They're bots. How long do you expect them to take to accomplish anything? They can probably bot their way to 35 in less than a day.

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I can get there in a day by hand.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Nabril

This actually got Blizzard sued by the RMT companies for loss of profit, but Blizz won the lawsuit.

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I'm curious as to what kind of argument they even tried to use in that situation.

Profiting off of someone else's product is kind of a generalized legal no-no, plus WoW's ToS basically states that absolutely everything pertaining to the game is their property, your characters and gold included.

That being said, the bot problem has two main groups causing it. 1, the people who bot to gil farm/sell characters, and 2. The people buying that gil/characters for real world money. Even if the bots aren't getting banned, I am hoping the ones buying the gil/characters are getting banned at least. (There wouldn't be gil farming bots if there's nobody to buy that gil).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Nabril

but RMT are doing their work for free and that is really easy to stop: Prevent trial accounts from talking or remove trial accounts altogether.

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The RMT bots you see are bought and paid for accounts—usually with stolen credit cards or account information, but they are still paid for. Attacking and limiting trial accounts will do nothing to solve this issue.

Quote:

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Another way is to ban the serial number of the game- so that players who are banned will have to repurchase the entire game on top of their new subscription price.

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Since the accounts are already paid for and have a game registered to them, they have to rebuy the game again to set up another account. Again, this is usually done with stolen credit cards and/or account information. The people that sell Gil make a lot of money from it anyways, so finding discounted copies of the game and making an account does little to prevent their practices.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by akenatoth

Is Square Enix doing anything about it?

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"What are we supposed to use, man, harsh language?"

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NessaWyvern

That being said, the bot problem has two main groups causing it. 1, the people who bot to gil farm/sell characters, and 2. The people buying that gil/characters for real world money. Even if the bots aren't getting banned, I am hoping the ones buying the gil/characters are getting banned at least. (There wouldn't be gil farming bots if there's nobody to buy that gil).

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I am 99.9% certain they aren't. That, or they're outright lying to us, because supposedly the delay for banning RMT is so that they can 'track where the Gil is going'. That would illuminate buyers quite clearly, as well as the RMT networks themselves. I think if actual players were getting caught up in that, we'd have heard about it via Reddit and the like by now.

I heard reports that people were getting banned for RMT purchases that had occurred just prior to Shirogane's release along with getting their housing relinquished.

But really, they should be trying to harder to weed out the personal bots that are throwing PvP matches and controlling the economy because they're far more disruptive then any amount of hacking gil farmers will be.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Nabril

One way Blizzard is fighting it is that they recently contracted out to a company that writes really great detection software that was finally able to pinpoint Bots with pretty good accuracy.

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I can pinpoint the bots without software, most players can too. I'm pretty sure SE could write their own data analysis scripts, and probably have.

However I also suspect that SE is cherry-picking what to spend time investigating. I've seen two patterns of "buttonmash" bots, I've seen a few that were not WHM/BLM, and at least two over level 50. The key place to intercept the bots to prevent RMT is the Waking Sands, because all the RMT bots has to pass through it to do the MSQ. But to catch who is actually "buying" the RMT, they need someone to log every player that targets the Free Company chest, and when players join and leave the FC.

The biggest way to destroy the FC loophole is by preventing players from being able to pull gil out until rank 5. However I don't actually know yet what the bots are doing yet at the FC chest because you can't target them by clicking on them. SE could "fix" this itself by making the FC chest only allow activation from the front.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

The biggest way to destroy the FC loophole is by preventing players from being able to pull gil out until rank 5. However I don't actually know yet what the bots are doing yet at the FC chest because you can't target them by clicking on them. SE could "fix" this itself by making the FC chest only allow activation from the front.

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Requiring the FC to be a certain rank wouldn't stop them, because they hit max rank from their dungeon spamming in the matter of a few days.

However, they could stop the gil farmers entirely if they imposed more strict LoS rules as they're abusing the fact that all terrain seems to have one-way LoS and won't prevent them from targeting something if they're standing under the ground/in a wall.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

Requiring the FC to be a certain rank wouldn't stop them, because they hit max rank from their dungeon spamming in the matter of a few days.

However, they could stop the gil farmers entirely if they imposed more strict LoS rules as they're abusing the fact that all terrain seems to have one-way LoS and won't prevent them from targeting something if they're standing under the ground/in a wall.

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SE could change the FC requirements any number of ways to remove the FC loophole. Clearly there is a week cycle thing going on, so maybe not allowing access to FC chests until the FC has existed for at least two weeks, seeing as they seem to all be created on mondays.

As for LoS, the game doesn't take into account distance from ground for... anything really. Perhaps the game should rectify this so that NPC's, can only be activated when facing the 120 degrees in front of them, at least 1 yalm away, but no more than 3. Standing on top of a NPC should not activate it (and would prevent players from blocking NPC's.) The vertical height issue is an issue since Lalafells talking to Roe's would create the same problem. Simply being above the NPC's head or below the NPC's feet should also not activate the NPC.