100's of level 25 botters teleporting from behind Twin Adders desk to Aetherye. Why?

Besides the obvious (time saving) Is there any other benefit?

Btw, I already reported like 30 names like Tfdf Hfgdf & Yfds Fi. I'm only posting it here, because I was just curious and I know I won't get a response in-game from GM's.

Must be completing a quest or something. Wish there was an easier way to report bots like that, it's such a hassle I hardly do it.

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Originally Posted by Pastahnak

Must be completing a quest or something. Wish there was an easier way to report bots like that, it's such a hassle I hardly do it.

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Yeah. Looks like it. They were there for 2 hours until I fell asleep. Slept 5 hours and they've still been at it again for another 2 hours (so far) Reporting did nothing.

I'm just curious what they're doing with 1000's of characters.

I saw this earlier on Ragnarok. They're so blatant now.

Bots are only banned in waves. It's great that you filed a report, but you're not going to see instant results.

What are they doing with 1000's of characters? gil farming, shard farming for gil.

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

Bots are only banned in waves. It's great that you filed a report, but you're not going to see instant results.

What are they doing with 1000's of characters? gil farming, shard farming for gil.

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True. Not instant results, but almost 24 hours has passed and the train is still going. 100's of players have seen these guys teleporting all over Gridania. New players who spread word-of-mouth to other potential customers. It doesn't make your product look good when obviously no one cares. It shouldn't take 48 hours to send 1 person to Gridania and see what's going on. I'm sure I'm not the only one reporting them. FFXIV is like a free for all for RMT and hackers. Say hello to the Limsa Gil Town Crier next time you're on Zalera. Same guy for weeks. He's been reported probably thousands of times.

Bots are the greatest immersion breakers for me and directly impacts the length of subscription I have with MMO.

All they need to do is post 1 GM at the waking sands entrance on every datacenter and they could ban them right then. But then if bot farmers cannot make a least a little bit of money, they wont buy any new copies when their bots get taken down.

Let's face it, SE probably make a ton of money from selling thousands of copies almost every months to bots farmers.

I call them Parasites.


Why do we have this problem, why isn't any action taken doing any meaningful thing to put a stop to it completely.


The ban waves are not working, why.


Why bother if it will never end, it wont unless something is done!

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Originally Posted by lockey_breezewalker

All they need to do is post 1 GM at the waking sands entrance on every datacenter and they could ban them right then. But then if bot farmers cannot make a least a little bit of money, they wont buy any new copies when their bots get taken down.

Let's face it, SE probably make a ton of money from selling thousands of copies almost every months to bots farmers.

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I'm pretty sure these guys are resorting to credit card fraud or some other underhanded method to avoid actually paying for their accounts.

The amount of gil they'd need to sell in order to actually cover the costs of all those bots and still pull a decent profit would be utterly ridiculous.

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Originally Posted by Masqurin_Iris

Say hello to the Limsa Gil Town Crier next time you're on Zalera. Same guy for weeks. He's been reported probably thousands of times.

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Same actual guy, or just Interchangeable Hyur Marauder #583 after you reported #476 last week?

If they can’t (or won't) automatically block these accounts, they must be deleting them one-by-one as they are reported - but if it’s a computer program creating the accounts in the first place it’ll just keep spitting out replacements.

as soon as one group of bots is banned, another group is created. as long as people buy gil there will be bots. and yes there are people who buy gil.

The bot on my server selling Gil is so dated they're offering a bonus 15% if I can guess who will win the world cup, got my fingers crossed on France.

I'm not sure why they think it's more productive to just keep banning the gil farmers when they come back in the matter of a day when they could pool that time into finding a lasting solution.

The bots regularly abuse how enemy AI and LoS work in order to function, the former by abusing the fact that bosses will not reset even if they're being hit from a location they can't reach (Normal enemies outside dungeons DO have this implemented into their AI, so I'm not sure why it's not a universal thing), and the latter by hiding under the floor/in walls while still being able to interact with NPCs/objects without being seen (Usually) and also to kill enemies without being subject to their attacks.

Fixing either of those problems would severely hinder their ability to function if not stop them entirely.

One time I was in Ul'dah with my potato taking a pose ready to screenshot and I see this lvl 1 Hyur with sticking 6+ arms all in front of me, so I get startled like, holy crap what is this glitch!? I move camera to see it was bunch of bots stacked together ready to port somewhere. It was creepy view for sure. >_>;;

I've seen less gil sellers lately tho.

Still don't get why posting screens with names on it is forbiden, in cases like that, it would save everyone time as you would not need to report manually AND the task force would have most of the names on 1 singe screen oO

In another game I used to play, it was great fun to mess with bots as the game includes a collision physics (e.g. you can't just run through people, you can actually push/move them, etc).

You could easily find ones who were running a set path, so I liked to either block them with my mount, or you could even open a teleport and warp them somewhere completely random. Was good fun :) Now and then the GMs would actually come on "live" and make announcements about banning them on the spot. Granted, that was rare, but nice to see.

Sadly, they're just an eyesore in XIV.

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Originally Posted by Celef

Still don't get why posting screens with names on it is forbiden, in cases like that, it would save everyone time as you would not need to report manually AND the task force would have most of the names on 1 singe screen oO

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Because there is a remote possibility that you might be wrong and it would constitute harassment.

What I want is the ability to right click from the party search, player search, and FC window's "Suspect Automated Play (Bot, RMT)"

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Because there is a remote possibility that you might be wrong and it would constitute harassment.

What I want is the ability to right click from the party search, player search, and FC window's "Suspect Automated Play (Bot, RMT)"

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There is no reason we shouldn't have right click report for anything that can be reported. The function could auto-fill the standard information so all the player has to do is complete the subject and description. I don't understand SE's reluctance to do this other than they don't want to be bothered with problems and would rather ignore them.

I wish they muted them so they couldn't speak or shout once a certain number of people report them for RMT. Make it automated if you need to. Then ban them later en masse like usual.

Considering there's no shortage of RMT going on and prices in the shouts are dropping, I'd say that the ban waves and SE's policy of catching "the big fish" do exactly jack besides kill old farming bots that were probably already abandoned. If they're serious about ever stopping it, they're going to have to place 24/7 teams of GMs in stealth mode on every world watching the hot spots with the tools to hoover up any bot they see during their shift. They could even add achievements for the GMs; ban 1000/5000/10000 bots, that kind of thing. Or an inverse of Honest Gillionaire, "remove 10 million gil from the economy by banning bots", hahaha.

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Originally Posted by Claviusnex

There is no reason we shouldn't have right click report for anything that can be reported. The function could auto-fill the standard information so all the player has to do is complete the subject and description. I don't understand SE's reluctance to do this other than they don't want to be bothered with problems and would rather ignore them.

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It probably goes to a ticket queue or a mass-data-entry system. That's the kind of thing we had at the auction website, where any properly formatted message would be processed by the item removal queue, and the tool for that would literately be a series of check boxes, and it would keep track of the violations. After X violations it would just ban the seller, and the seller would think they're sneaky and create another account, and that would be justification for immediate ban.

If that's the kind of thing SE has going on for reporting, then any kind of bulk report, by the user, is basically useless, as they would only be able to understand one report at a time. And if that's the case, being able to report from the search window or FC list, or even from the lodestone (which you can do, but can't report the FC, and you have no idea if the player has already been actioned.)

The pattern, if you watch, is that these bots only appear for about 3 seconds, just long enough to do whatever they do with the FC chest. And then they disappear, and they go, alphabetically. That's how you know the cycle is repeating. One day you'll report all the button mash bots from c-f, the next day you might get e-j, and so forth. There is probably hundreds on every server that they just cycle through until they're suspended, and then start over. With the same pattern.

From what I remember, only the STF deals with this, and I recall the credits showing the STF has about four people to the team.
Imagine four people and lists and lists of account names being made faster than you can count.

Really what we need is an anti-RMT team. The STF deals with other issues beyond this already.
Problem is, Japanese servers have next to no RMT, so developers and others in charge may never see how big the problem really is. Even with the report numbers.

So what's the business in gil farming!?...


I really doubt they buy thousands of new game copies (accounts) just to farm gil no one buys, because if you buy gil you get banned so there's really no one they can sell the products of their bot farming!...


So whom the hell would buy accounts just to lose them sooner or later!?... Well, I guess they could sell those accounts to new players just the way potions work so they skip the boring parts and get straight to the latest action, a name change and a phial of fantasia would make it viable, maybe!...

most gil buyers IF they get caught only get a slap on the wrist. They don't get banned. S-E wants them to keep playing after all.

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Originally Posted by Omegabear

Bots are the greatest immersion breakers for me and directly impacts the length of subscription I have with MMO.

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If these are bots of gold/gilsellers, SE can't do anything because they will always get their bots back up and running. Not a single mmo, which is not dead, is bot free and never will because goldselling brings a lot of money.
It is not the fault of the publisher if there are bots, this is player made because as long as people buy gil the sellers will earn money and keep going and SE can't do anything besides the stuff they do already.

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Originally Posted by Claviusnex

There is no reason we shouldn't have right click report for anything that can be reported. The function could auto-fill the standard information so all the player has to do is complete the subject and description. I don't understand SE's reluctance to do this other than they don't want to be bothered with problems and would rather ignore them.

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Sounds great, except you roughtly have 5 seconds before they disapear.

Easiest way to deal with their teleportation abuse is to put an instant kill zone beneath the surface and something similar for skyboxes in instances and no fly zones. (Watching tons of WTM/BLM falling dead on the ground after teleporting into the sky of ARR zones would be quite hilarious. Its raining bots! Allehluya!)

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Originally Posted by Limecat

If they're serious about ever stopping it, they're going to have to place 24/7 teams of GMs in stealth mode on every world watching the hot spots with the tools to hoover up any bot they see during their shift.

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This sounds great, until you consider just how much you'd have to pay such a team. Forever. Because if the botters ever caught wind of "they stopped paying attention because there weren't as many bots," they'd be right back at it.

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Originally Posted by lockey_breezewalker

Sounds great, except you roughtly have 5 seconds before they disapear.

Easiest way to deal with their teleportation abuse is to put an instant kill zone beneath the surface and something similar for skyboxes in instances and no fly zones. (Watching tons of WTM/BLM falling dead on the ground after teleporting into the sky of ARR zones would be quite hilarious. Its raining bots! Allehluya!)

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It doesn't work that way unfortunately. The only effective means of preventing bots requires full time no-opt-out PvP with no safe zones. Players love ganging up on bots when they're in the way. However this isn't a self-fixing problem even with PvP, it's just a means to get them out of the way. There's often a huge surge in bots in safe areas (see Archeage), and no way to report actual bots in any quantity. Game devs are too worried about a reporting tool being abused that they don't consider the possibility that the server will be overrun with bots if reporting is limited or non-existent. Version 1.0 was overrun with bots within days of release, and part of the reason I gave up on it, and why I didn't play 2.0 for months after completing ARR, because a bot presence means the developers don't care about the integrity of the game.

The bots that fall out of the air or underground, are simply being told to go to a location that isn't even inside the game's collision box, and rely on the game correcting it. Like if you watch them port in front of the Waking Sands around level 25-35 to do the "pick up the dead scions", you see exactly how the game interprets it. You see the shadow move from the entrance of the waking sands, then the bot, and then drop onto each target. They all move exactly the same way. The bots that are behind the FC chest are not below the chest, they're standing in an empty void with a floor as far as I know because of where the FC tag pops out of the wall.

Maybe a better fix to kill those bots would be to just have a server-sided negative space database, and any character that is spawned or despawned at those coordinates is sent to jail instead. Effectively it's a trap that uses the bots own laziness against them.

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Originally Posted by Limecat

Considering there's no shortage of RMT going on and prices in the shouts are dropping, I'd say that the ban waves and SE's policy of catching "the big fish" do exactly jack besides kill old farming bots that were probably already abandoned. If they're serious about ever stopping it, they're going to have to place 24/7 teams of GMs in stealth mode on every world watching the hot spots with the tools to hoover up any bot they see during their shift. They could even add achievements for the GMs; ban 1000/5000/10000 bots, that kind of thing. Or an inverse of Honest Gillionaire, "remove 10 million gil from the economy by banning bots", hahaha.

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They don't do nothing. They allow them to flood the game with items for weeks at a time. So not only do they facilitate gil to lazy players. They facilitate lazy players by providing insane amounts of tedious items. Which in turn makes the game easier for them, making them feel more accomplished. Also creating a larger financial investment, creating an artificial attachment. Win for sellers, Win for buyers, Win for SE, only a loss for players who think of the integrity of the game.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

This sounds great, until you consider just how much you'd have to pay such a team. Forever. Because if the botters ever caught wind of "they stopped paying attention because there weren't as many bots," they'd be right back at it.

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Or they could start developing some actual automated tools. It is like this is an MMO from a basement in 1999. Who am I kidding.

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Originally Posted by SigmaOZ

I really doubt they buy thousands of new game copies (accounts) just to farm gil no one buys, because if you buy gil you get banned so there's really no one they can sell the products of their bot farming!...

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I'd assume they resort to credit card fraud to "pay" for their accounts, because with the current rate they're attempting sell gil at they'd need to sell six million gil to cover the cost of each bot, and them having upwards of 200 bots per server...that's an unreasonably large amount of gil that needs to be sold to be profitable.

Part of this is to follow the gil. So they don't delete all account that quickly.
Also as long as they are sub 30 they are on trial accounts that can't trade gil to anyone. Inturn SE don't care because they can't interact with anyone. The second a CC is charged they will likely be banned. And SE can follow the gil.

As for the 6 million gil to pay for the account there are whales out there in FFXIV just like any other game. In the 1st weeks of FFXV moble bad game there where people dropping 15k on the game. So don't think there aren't people with disposable money looking to spend on gil to get the best glamour or gear every patch. Just so they can go do some Savage content they don't have time to spend gear up for.


As for paying the person most of it is now coding and scripted imputs so it's just 1 person watching 20 accounts making sure nothing goes wrong.

So if they farm 100m gil in crystals or other stuff before subbing transfer items/ gil it's worth it for them. For all the people that think there isn't a market for having gil.. If there wasn't they wouldn't be there.

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Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

Maybe a better fix to kill those bots would be to just have a server-sided negative space database, and any character that is spawned or despawned at those coordinates is sent to jail instead. Effectively it's a trap that uses the bots own laziness against them.

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What would this truly solve, though? How would they be at all impacted by having to change their coordinates to valid areas in the open? We all already know they're there, we all already know what they're doing. At least as long as they're doing it out of bounds, it's slightly easier to ignore if you're not actively watching for it.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

What would this truly solve, though? How would they be at all impacted by having to change their coordinates to valid areas in the open? We all already know they're there, we all already know what they're doing. At least as long as they're doing it out of bounds, it's slightly easier to ignore if you're not actively watching for it.

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Because they all teleport to the same spaces, on every server. If they force the bots into the open, it makes it so the GM's can actually see the problem and players can get the position of the bot to put in the report. Or you know, let players actually right click and report them. By being out of sight, they get to run with impunity and only players who are observant see the worst of them. The best way to even create a report would be to have "report bot" send a 5 second video from the game client, but that might induce a crash.

Personally I like the idea if the FFXIV Developers could make a auto-detection system of bot accounts, and let players do Open PVP on them where they stand to send them to the Gaol to await their fate. Honestly that would be a lot of fun, and imagine how hilarious it would be to see a huge amount of Bots trapped inside a Gaol when they got slained by Open PVP, and let the Game Master do some fun of his own by going ape on all of them with his own style of justice.

That is just me, probably a more efficient reporting system is just needed.

(Though it would be hilarious to PVP bots in Limsa Lominsa, to the gaol with you scurvy dog!).

Heck give us a achievement for slaying bots on sight, let's make it more lore friendly when they are simply Voidsent Dopplegangers trying to wreck havoc across Eorzea lol.

You say that now. But how will you feel when the bots flip it on you and you're the one in bot jail? You think botters would just stand there and not return fire?

I think the saddest thing about this whole situation is that they already have solutions on hand, they just haven't bothered putting them in place in the zones where the bots are an issue for whatever reason.

There's a deliberate one in the form of the anti-hacking detection in PvP and PotD/HoH that auto-DCs somebody if the server believes them to be moving in a manner that isn't possible without hacks. There was a legitimate problem with warp-hacking bots in Frontlines for a time, but this countermeasure did successfully get rid of them, at the slight expense of people using gap closers like Shoulder Tackle and Onslaught occasionally being wrongly DC'd if traveling over uneven terrain and/or targeting something just before it dies that can result in movement that both looks really abnormal and is detected as such.

There's a more generalized one where enemies will reset if they can't find a valid path to reach you and attack you. The only reason they don't reset against the bots in the overworld is because they deliberately remain in range of their melee attacks while still under the floor (NPC don't require LoS to auto-attack things and also have a much higher vertical reach on their melee attacks then players d)o, which lets them kill them off without being seen. In dungeons however, this AI function doesn't seem to apply meaning that bots are free to just go out of bounds and kill them without any fear of harm. If you keep queueing for Cape Westwind, it's actually pretty easy to encounter a team of bots who will just warp out of the starting barrier and starting nuking Rhitatyn from 30 yards above him while he just watches them do their thing instead of resetting.

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Originally Posted by Hasrat

You say that now. But how will you feel when the bots flip it on you and you're the one in bot jail? You think botters would just stand there and not return fire?

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I don't think any number of level 50 bots could possibly threaten a level 70 player between the accuracy penalty and piddly amounts of damage they'd be outputting. They'd likely all be dead before they could even get a single cast off.

Though as much as I'd love to wipe out a pile of bots with a single Katon, such an idea wouldn't work when the bots spend almost all of their time out of bounds, the only exceptions being when they interact with specific objects/NPCs.

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Originally Posted by Canadane

Problem is, Japanese servers have next to no RMT, so developers and others in charge may never see how big the problem really is. Even with the report numbers.

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I don't know how bad it is on the US servers by comparison, but we do get these type of bots. Not all the time, but they come in waves and seem pretty common when they're active.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

I'd assume they resort to credit card fraud to "pay" for their accounts, because with the current rate they're attempting sell gil at they'd need to sell six million gil to cover the cost of each bot, and them having upwards of 200 bots per server...that's an unreasonably large amount of gil that needs to be sold to be profitable.

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Are you accounting for the "eight characters per account" with that though? (I have no idea what the current rate is and don't want to give them any more web traffic.)

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Originally Posted by CrystalRainbow

So if they farm 100m gil in crystals or other stuff before subbing transfer items/ gil it's worth it for them. For all the people that think there isn't a market for having gil.. If there wasn't they wouldn't be there.

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I don't know that you'd be able to farm that much on a trial account. You're capped at 300,000 gil and whatever quests you can access up to that level. No retainers, no way to amass Allagan coins or other 'cashable' items that I can think of.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

I don't know how bad it is on the US servers by comparison, but we do get these type of bots. Not all the time, but they come in waves and seem pretty common when they're active.




Are you accounting for the "eight characters per account" with that though? (I have no idea what the current rate is and don't want to give them any more web traffic.)




I don't know that you'd be able to farm that much on a trial account. You're capped at 300,000 gil and whatever quests you can access up to that level. No retainers, no way to amass Allagan coins or other 'cashable' items that I can think of.

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They're using the FC's to launder the money, otherwise why would they spend so much time behind the wall of the FC chest?

I'm sure SE could take any of these bots and trace where the gil is going and whack all the RMT bots in one shot. That still doesn't solve the other forms of automated play that others have seen.

Someone answer me this, as I 've never been in a FC. What is the gil limit to a FC?

I guess the gil limit for a fc chest will be the same as it is for a character.