Level 70 gathering bots go unpunished

Why is it that the same gathering botter, gathering level 70 aetherial reduction nodes, can continue with breaking the rules for at least a month after I and many others have reported it? It is the old "it's only a gathering bot. It's doing something no one else wants to do and keeps MB prices low" excuse again?

To an extent, yes. Although, it has more to do with SE severely underestimating how bad botting is getting outside Japan because it's far less common there. That, and to some degree I wonder if they even want to ban these accounts since it's money at the end of the day. No matter how you slice it, their inaction has led to more and more botting because everyone knows they won't do a thing about it unless you're an idiot and say something in-game.

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Originally Posted by Krojack

Why is it that the same gathering botter, gathering level 70 aetherial reduction nodes, can continue with breaking the rules for at least a month after I and many others have reported it?

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They can't detect the bots.

Well to be fair they may be observing the bot so they can figure out how to detect it, or maybe it's not a software bot at all. Maybe its a legobot playing the game...

SE hasn't done anything about bots since 2010 when it was originally launched so don't expect anything to be done. XI even had a bunch that nothing was ever done about. Bots are something you need to just live with in FFXIV. V1 was horrific in the amount of bots there were and no matter what you did, how many times you reported them, nothing was ever done. There was one at each sheep camp in Coerthas farming wool just about from launch, til final save. We would often try to gather the sheep up before the bot could and lead them away or kill them before the bot could get them just to get wool ourselves. Was so frustratingly bad.

I actually went on /follow with a bot one day, just for fun, no real reason, and starting just talking away to it. Asking it questions about why its name looked like someone slammed their head against a KB to just making up random stuff about my day. Telling it a whole big story about some made up romance I had and yada yada yada. Took about 30 minutes before they went private so they couldn't get tells, so I switched to /say and about 10 minutes later they started all caps screaming at me in very very broken English telling me to leave them alone and that I was harassing them and how they were going to call a gm on me. It was hilarious.

I feel like the biggest issues are that their whole manner of handling bot reports is needlessly convoluted, coupled with the fact that the JP side of things doesn't seem to be aware and/or care just how bad the issue is outside of their country. The only response they could offer to the outcry they addressed in a Q&A was "Keep reporting the bots" (If that was actually working, the same ones wouldn't be here still since the ARR days...).

This is the only MMO I've ever seen where the GMs need to forward reports to a separate team that goes through some manner of extensive and evidently faulty screening process before they even try to investigate.

The way things usually go is:

1. Player sends GM report that they suspect someone is botting.

2. GM goes to observe said player to see if they're suspicious and sends them a tell to see if they respond.

3. If no response, they drop the ban hammer. If they do respond, they just leave them be.


It's quick and efficient, and with how swift the GM response time is coupled with 24/7 service, it's easy to get them to show up at a time where you can be relatively certain the bot is truly AFK and not being monitored by its owner. I don't know why they need go through this extra hurdle of having the STF handle things (Particularly when their team is MUCH smaller then the GM team, if the credits are anything to go by).

The STF supposedly have special "tools" they use to investigate/detect bots, but I get the impression they're ineffective to the point where only the really poorly programmed bots that do things like spam the server with an unrealistically high number of commands in an attempt to work faster ever get caught by them. They evidently are catching some of them if the weekly illicit activity reports are to be trusted, but they might be under the mistaken impression that these super obvious bots are the only ones that exist when the majority of them are slipping through the cracks.

The thing that bugs me the most, though, is the uncertainty about whether the reports are even getting through to them in the first place, because considering how slowly even a major exploit like the Ungarmax issue was handled they seemed to have some serious issues when it came to communicating things between their different teams and I don't doubt that they still do to some degree.

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bots that do things like spam the server with an unrealistically high number of commands in an attempt to work faster ever get caught by them.

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I can't tell you how many times I'm sitting there waiting for an ability to come off global cooldown and I'm just spamming the heck out of the key just waiting for the action to go through! Dang PvP can get intense sometimes!

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Originally Posted by JackHatchet

I can't tell you how many times I'm sitting there waiting for an ability to come off global cooldown and I'm just spamming the heck out of the key just waiting for the action to go through! Dang PvP can get intense sometimes!

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There's a limit to how hard a player can mash a keyboard (Even with a turbo function installed). However, the bots skip controller interfaces and send commands directly to the game client, so the only limitation is basically their computer's processing power.

Most users of them are script kiddies who let the developers do all the work, but some people try to use custom scripts, which if not handled properly (IE, accidentally putting a "0" before the value for the interval at which they want a certain action or sequence of actions to be repeated) can make them even more obvious then normal bots already are on a visual and/or server-side level.

I've seen them try some cute things like pretending to be AFK by unspoiled nodes and not gathering from them until a while after they've actually spawned to look less suspicious, except after I noticed they were consistently moving to the nodes at the exact time according to the Eorzean clock, it kind of fell apart. Most of them are totally shameless, but some of them try to (Unsuccessfully) conceal their activity in such manners or by only doing it on an alt (Who oft conveniently happens to be wearing only gear made by their main character).

If they were to let GM's take actions against these bots, they would drastically limit their numbers. These lvl 70 gathering bots are no way close in number to the RMT or leveling bots. And you can even tell by the fact that people on each server already know these botters. And if GM's were to take one down, it would cost the botter a lot of time and/or money to make another one (depends if they bought a level boost or botted their way up to 70). And within a short time of doing so, the GMs would only have to deal with a very limited number of gathering bots, instead of the mess that we have now.

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Originally Posted by Alucard135

If they were to let GM's take actions against these bots, they would drastically limit their numbers. These lvl 70 gathering bots are no way close in number to the RMT or leveling bots. And you can even tell by the fact that people on each server already know these botters. And if GM's were to take one down, it would cost the botter a lot of time and/or money to make another one (depends if they bought a level boost or botted their way up to 70). And within a short time of doing so, the GMs would only have to deal with a very limited number of gathering bots, instead of the mess that we have now.

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All it would take is GMs observing how the bot moves, which will always been predictable. Do that for a couple days or so and see whether it's consistent. If so, ban. Once a handful of people start getting banned others would stop simply out of fear of losing their account. The whole reason it's been getting grow is because no one's remotely worried about potential consequences.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

I've seen them try some cute things like pretending to be AFK by unspoiled nodes and not gathering from them until a while after they've actually spawned to look less suspicious, except after I noticed they were consistently moving to the nodes at the exact time according to the Eorzean clock, it kind of fell apart. Most of them are totally shameless, but some of them try to (Unsuccessfully) conceal their activity in such manners or by only doing it on an alt (Who oft conveniently happens to be wearing only gear made by their main character).

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Most are shameless really. The crafted gear is one example. Now if someone were logging what everyone was wearing as you stand around a crowded area, you would eventually find the player who owns that crafting alt, if that is indeed a crafting alt and not the player themselves. Too much work for a player, but I'm sure the STF does something like this.

The thing with gathering bots is that even if a human was using website to check the timing of the nodes, there would be seconds, before the character responds, and they would actually move towards the node as though the keyboard or game controller was used, and the timing would be inconsistent (eg they'd miss some times if they went to dinner or something.) A bot however never misses, reacts within 500ms of the node appearing, and if they aren't already in front of it, move linearly to it (mounts help this since they can summon, go straight up, go to the target, go straight down, and then select the node without unmounting) it's that "too accurate" aspect which gives them away, and even a bot designed to mimic a player as much as possible (eg only sends input via Keyboard, Mouse or Game controller) is still going to read the network data to know where the node is, and where the character currently is. Close the gap between the player and the node, and then activate. The most obvious bots are the ones that simply have those nodes set as waypoints in their script, and thus they always move in exactly the same manner.

The STF could catch both by exploiting the fact that they're not humans and can't actually see what's on the screen. Throw obstacles in the way so the "waypoint"'s are blocked, put aggressive monsters in the way that blockade the node and respond to "smell", so they can't simply walk around the monster, they have to wait for the monster to move. If the monster can't attack them (the player is underground, behind an obstacle) then that alerts the STF of "unreachable" players.

It would be nice if SE banned them because it gives them an unfair advantage over those of us that play on a PS4. That being said I agree with what someone else was saying in the fact they won’t ban them because SE can’t afford to lose anymore paying people than they have to. Everyone knows that the actual active sub numbers are far, far les than they’d want us to believe

I feel leery about them implementing any kind of automated countermeasures for bots when the only one currently in existence to my knowledge (The whole "fish sense something amiss" thing) only serves to inconvenience players as all of the fishing bots have a multitude of alternate fishing spots they'll cycle through whenever it kicks in.

The only automated measure I've seen actually have some measure of success are security softwares that link to a MMO's client and will either prevent from you connecting at all or immediately close the game if it senses some kind of outside program interacting with it, but they're really just an additional hurdle for the bot makers to work around in the end and it can potentially alienate people who use more harmless things like parsers.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

I feel leery about them implementing any kind of automated countermeasures for bots when the only one currently in existence to my knowledge (The whole "fish sense something amiss" thing) only serves to inconvenience players as all of the fishing bots have a multitude of alternate fishing spots they'll cycle through whenever it kicks in.

The only automated measure I've seen actually have some measure of success are security softwares that link to a MMO's client and will either prevent from you connecting at all or immediately close the game if it senses some kind of outside program interacting with it, but they're really just an additional hurdle for the bot makers to work around in the end and it can potentially alienate people who use more harmless things like parsers.

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Those programs only hinder curious people, it does nothing for the script kiddies who are the main customer of the bots. Hackshield is defeated by undermining the CRT (C Runtime) and every other kind of DRM is defeated the same way. Basically something else "launches" the game, sees the anti-hacking software, and then just disconnects the function path so that it just spinwaits while doing nothing yet leaving the "call home" function working as normal, which is why the client closes in those games. As pointed out frequently, these anti-hacking tools simply don't stop anyone. The PC is simply not a secure platform.

If MMORPG's only came out for the PS4, it's very likely (due to the non-encrypted nature of the game's communication channels) that someone would just run the game through a linux box and tamper with it that way.

That's why encryption of the network traffic has to be the first defense against tampering. The developers reluctance to even do a trivial level of encryption is probably because it would hamper their own security tools.

I guess it really depends on the game.

They hardly worked as a deterrent for more main stream MMOs, but it did seem to get the bots to back off in some more niche games like PSO2 (Which initially had the exact issue with money farmers flying around the place and RMT spammers).

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Originally Posted by Vnolan

They can't detect the bots.

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Don't give me this. Players see bots teleporting all over cities every day. You can follow a gathering bot for a few minutes and see that it follows the exact same path every time as it loops around.

I think the STF never actually observes the bots to see if they're suspicious or not and just simply uses some kind of tool to see if they're exhibiting any abnormalities with the data they're sending the server (Which is not going to be the case for any of mainstream bots that are paid services, which is yet another reason why they should be taking them more seriously).

I don't think you even need to observe a player firsthand to write them off as suspicious if the number of items they'd gathered/crafted is several times higher then that of other players on the server, though...

I'm pretty sure the STF is still only a 4 person team (used to be 3) that only speaks JP, so anything forwarded to them goes through the additional process of being translated, or possibly goes to a void where it gets ignored. That might be one of the reasons that the only real action against bots we have ever seen is the periodic ban waves. Actual policing in this game is non-existent unless a GM has to put a band-aid on someone's feels.

I have a feeling that SE is sorta trapped in their current crafting situation. If they were to exterminate all of the bots, then crafting in its current form may become unsustainable due to supply costs skyrocketing and crashing the market. Because of this, they just turn a blind eye to the whole botting system on the crafting side. I have read about the sophistication of the bots in the media and they are getting to an amazing level. The amount of resources that SE would need to invest to capture these automatons would be incredible. I'm not fond of botting in any way and wish people would not do it but I don't see any way for SE to stop the current generation of bots with the resources they have.

Trying to offload that much work onto such a small team, let alone a foreign one we can't necessarily even communicate with properly is honestly ridiculous with how much bigger their GM team is.

I'm assuming this is just another side effect of SE trying to fund XIV as little as possible.

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Originally Posted by Hyperia

I have a feeling that SE is sorta trapped in their current crafting situation. If they were to exterminate all of the bots, then crafting in its current form may become unsustainable due to supply costs skyrocketing and crashing the market. Because of this, they just turn a blind eye to the whole botting system on the crafting side. I have read about the sophistication of the bots in the media and they are getting to an amazing level. The amount of resources that SE would need to invest to capture these automatons would be incredible. I'm not fond of botting in any way and wish people would not do it but I don't see any way for SE to stop the current generation of bots with the resources they have.

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While XIV bots can execute some pretty complicated scripts, they're still terrible at making themselves not stand out like a sore thumb, and even if they weren't obvious, the sheer amount of time they spend online and active is still a giveaway. The GMs wouldn't need anything more then their eyes and a few PMs to determine whether or not someone is botting.

Also, the whole situation with bots and crafting/gathering isn't quite that simple. A lot of people back out from crafting/gathering to make gil specifically because the bots have tanked prices to the point where it's scarcely worth the effort. Get rid of the bots and more people will be gathering/crafting again.

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Originally Posted by Hyperia

If they were to exterminate all of the bots, then crafting in its current form may become unsustainable due to supply costs skyrocketing and crashing the market. Because of this, they just turn a blind eye to the whole botting system on the crafting side.

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What if SE was to make its own bot system in the game for these kind of stuff? In a game called Forsaken world, they literally give you the tools to make your own combat bot for quests that asks you to kill 200 mobs.

Honestly, as long as people can still make a profit from crafting, the supply costs are reasonable. If people don't like the costs, then they'll just gather mats themselves until the prices tank because nobody wants to buy anything.

I was able to move aethersands at a decent clip for 5K each when SB first dropped, but the bots swiftly crashed it all the way down to 1.5K within a few weeks of them becoming active.

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Originally Posted by Alucard135

What if SE was to make its own bot system in the game for these kind of stuff? In a game called Forsaken world, they literally give you the tools to make your own combat bot for quests that asks you to kill 200 mobs.

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Mabinogi let you script your pets in a way that Nexon had to nerf because people used it to harass others by "following" people not in the party and such. Modders quickly nerfed those limits.

That's why you don't see this kind of thing, despite it probably being the next best way to destroy the illicit tools market. Basically create an "online-idle" script that switches the player into a mode that allows the game client to execute certain things depending on what job the player is currently as:

- DoW/DoM = Player will start participating in FATES in the zone, or doing any currently pending combat Leves according to a combat script defined per role by the player.
- DoH = Player will produce gear using a specific series of steps until X amount is in the inventory, or until all materials in inventory have been exhausted, if all materials exhausted but space is available, attempt to buy materials under a ceiling price.
- DoL = Player will start gathering specific items a specific way until X amount is in the inventory, or until the shopping list is full.
- DoW/DoM/DoH/DoL without sufficient inventory space = Player will check their shopping list (buy and sell) and attempt to sell all items on their sell list in order of priority.

Offline-Idle mode will not participate in parties, nor attack anything they haven't been specifically set to "KoS" (Kill on Sight). Anything set to KoS, activates whatever macro the player defined for KoS'ing that target.

An RP mode could also extend that to housing zones so that a player can target a "RP - Shop" player who owns the house and will be able to pay for any services the player is capable of (eg "I have X materials, I want a Y, how much?", "repair this for me", "meld this materia to X for me") along with being able to sell any materials or items that aren't market prohibited in the players inventory. An "Appriase" skill would need to be added.

I'd like to extend that to a full "merchant" class/job that is scriptable with buy and sell tables, but I think the problem with that is there are players who would just sit there with a multi-box setup and take up all the best spots all week like what happened in Mabignogi. Of course that can be made harder by creating a license system so that a player can only sell items of a certain level in places that are that level, so no selling HW items outside Limsa Lominsa or Mor Dhona. If you want to sell items in the back of a cave, that's cheaper than being able to sell them near a sanctuary. You'd get those licenses from the same NPC that does the leves since it's essentially a "merchent leve".

Anyway, it's all a lot more complicated for normal users. Players who enjoy programming or role playing might get a kick out of having their player avatar do certain things, but it might also just get old and stale fast, and then we're back to just lazy bots drowning the market.

So the same bot that I and others have reported several times over the past 4 months is still gathering high level nodes (Aetherial Reduction) and now there are 2 more bots for a total of 3.

I see others noticed that gather bots go unpunished and are starting to use them. Maybe everyone should just jump on board and start botting. Clearly SE doesn't care.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

Honestly, as long as people can still make a profit from crafting, the supply costs are reasonable. If people don't like the costs, then they'll just gather mats themselves until the prices tank because nobody wants to buy anything.

I was able to move aethersands at a decent clip for 5K each when SB first dropped, but the bots swiftly crashed it all the way down to 1.5K within a few weeks of them becoming active.

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This kind of thinking is what kills gathering. I've never been a big fan of crafting in most games. I've always enjoyed gathering more and used it as my income. How would you feel if there were crafting bots non-stop spitting out gear and making the market on that tank?

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Originally Posted by Krojack

So the same bot that I and others have reported several times over the past 4 months is still gathering high level nodes (Aetherial Reduction) and now there are 2 more bots for a total of 3.

I see others noticed that gather bots go unpunished and are starting to use them. Maybe everyone should just jump on board and start botting. Clearly SE doesn't care.

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FFXIV is a product/service created and maintained for what purpose? To make money for SE. Going after bots would cost money and it would result in players getting banned, which would result in fewer subs and less money generated. What would the benefits be to SE if they did it? None. Almost no one is going to unsub because of bots at their current numbers and it won't attract more subs. SE doesn't care because there is no incentive to.

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Originally Posted by Hyperia

I have a feeling that SE is sorta trapped in their current crafting situation. If they were to exterminate all of the bots, then crafting in its current form may become unsustainable due to supply costs skyrocketing and crashing the market. Because of this, they just turn a blind eye to the whole botting system on the crafting side.

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I doubt it. This would imply that bots are necessary to maintain a stable economy.

Crafted items wouldn't skyrocket. It's not like there aren't crafters in the game, quite a large number of players enjoy it. If supply ever dropped, crafters would see a profitable market, move in and competition would settle prices down fast. You just wouldn't get Rakshasa for below material cost and 4k gil endgame consumables anymore.

This whole situation is extra concerning now that we know World Travel is going to be a thing. There'll be literally no reason for people not just seek out the cheapest items with the aid of marketboard databases, which is going to shift even more sales to the bot farmers.

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Originally Posted by Krojack

This kind of thinking is what kills gathering. I've never been a big fan of crafting in most games. I've always enjoyed gathering more and used it as my income. How would you feel if there were crafting bots non-stop spitting out gear and making the market on that tank?

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Uh...what are you getting at exactly?

I was making a counterstatement to the people claiming that the economy would get messed up if the gathering bots were eliminated when the exact opposite would happen, since if legit players sell stuff at prices that are too high, people simply won't buy them, so prices will eventually normalize until both gatherers and crafters can be satisfied. Right now, the trend I'm seeing is that the prices on gathered items are so low that it's not worth the effort. The only fluctuations that occur are a result of the bot farmers noticing that they've scared off their competition which leads to them occasionally jacking up the prices until people catch on, after which they'll tank everything down to uncomfortable lows again.

And there already are crafting bots tanking prices on pretty much every server. Either yours is lucky or you just haven't noticed them yet.

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Originally Posted by Vnolan

FFXIV is a product/service created and maintained for what purpose? To make money for SE. Going after bots would cost money and it would result in players getting banned, which would result in fewer subs and less money generated. What would the benefits be to SE if they did it? None. Almost no one is going to unsub because of bots at their current numbers and it won't attract more subs. SE doesn't care because there is no incentive to.

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You could apply this logic to every MMO in the market, yet some like WoW still make an active effort to actually control their issues with cheaters because they know it can potentially turn people away or discourage them from even starting.

XIV is easily the most negligent P2P MMO I've encountered when it comes to this matter, but who knows whether it's due to incompetence or an actual lack of concern because we already know they have serious communication issues between their staff from how long it took them to address the Ungarmax glitch.

They need to do what they did in Final Fantasy XI Online ban about 7-12,000 people per week, they literly almost completely eliminated RMT in that game.

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Originally Posted by Melondra

They need to do what they did in Final Fantasy XI Online ban about 7-12,000 people per week, they literly almost completely eliminated RMT in that game.

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...Did they really?

They've been banning the RMTers constantly in XIV as well, but they just keep coming back nigh instantaneously due to being created with automated scripts that produce several dozen bots simultaneously.

The biggest problem is that these guys are largely self-contained and not that harmful to other players overall as their farming done by spamming instances, but they're being targeted over the ones that are instead abusing the market board for their income which does impact other players negatively.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

XIV is easily the most negligent P2P MMO I've encountered when it comes to this matter, but who knows whether it's due to incompetence or an actual lack of concern

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72-hour ban for botting makes it easy to see which.

They seem to have a zero tolerance policy for the RMT-related bots, so I don't know why they're flexible about what is/isn't worthy of a permaban, particularly because most of them are paying for subs so they can shout and/or hit level 50.

All bots in general should just get perma-banned, since it's not like it's difficult to determine whether or not someone is doing it (They can just PM a suspect then banhammer if they don't respond within X number of minutes, since any normal player would reply).

I'm not sure what it even takes for them to get caught, since it's not like all these gather/craft bots aren't painfully obvious from their abnormally long periods pf activity and awkward movement patterns.