Do anti-bot applications work for other online games? If so, why not FF14?

Like the title states, I've played many mmos that have integrated or side-apps that run to check for cheating/botting. Are those still relevant and if so, why hasn't SE adopted this? I ask this because we're now faced with more than just gil sellers and market bots, but a fleet of them causing DDoS (allegedly) and it's quite annoying :P

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Originally Posted by Eriane_Elis

Like the title states, I've played many mmos that have integrated or side-apps that run to check for cheating/botting. Are those still relevant and if so, why hasn't SE adopted this? I ask this because we're now faced with more than just gil sellers and market bots, but a fleet of them causing DDoS (allegedly) and it's quite annoying :P

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Depends what you mean by "work". WoW has Warden, but they do mass ban waves rather than one here one there, etc as caught (same as FFXIV does for RMT). It wouldn't help the DDOS though, since that happens because they are banned. Whether they are banned today or 2 months from now... they are still banned and will still cause issues if they are inclined to do so.

edit: It would probably catch more if they ran something like Warden that WoW uses, but again.... that wouldn't improve the DDOS situation at all.

That's actually a great question, and would probably help quite a bit if they did. AFAIK, they don't even run anti-cheat software like other MMOs have....and they probably should.

Anti-cheat softwares tend to be extremely easy to work around (WoW still has had constant botting issues despite their security measures, and it's mostly their active enforcement teams that scare most players into not doing it).

They also tend to involve invasive programs which I doubt SE would be willing to take up given their strict privacy policies.

All mmos have bots the anti cheat programs are just speed bumps to botters

I know that WoW had addons like spam-me-not or others that recognised and blocked out certain messages that triggered numerous keywords and certain website names in them. The trouble with FFXIV is that it's not using standard ASCII but everything from unicode to symbols to html entities, and there's so many hundreds of them it's impossible to filter out every single possible variation of spam messages.

As for anti-botting measures I don't think any MMO had any that were successful at removing them permanently, because as soon as you had one group of accounts banned for botting another group would take their place, so it became pointless constantly banning them unless they were being too aggressive and actively hacking the game. Instead a game alarm bot would flag players who were constantly doing activities that triggered the alarm, then every once in a while actions would be taken into mass purging the flagged players. Some MMOs opted to block out certain countries like China and other problematic regions where rmt activities were at their highest.

Cant recall any anti-bot that truly worked tbh, but having one is better than none.
If i could pick an anti-bot/cheat i'd love to have VAC but problem is that they would have to make the game available only through steam on PC at least.

So yeah, as i said in another thread i don't have high expectations.
If anything i hope that in the future they'll add a basic anti-bot and maybe region lock a couple of countries that are responsible for a huge amount of cheaters/botters/RMT in every single MMO.
Obviously neither anti-bot/region lock will not stop them, but it'll hopefully lower the numbers a bit to make the problem more manageable.

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Originally Posted by Saintly

Cant recall any anti-bot that truly worked tbh, but having one is better than none.
If i could pick an anti-bot/cheat i'd love to have VAC but problem is that they would have to make the game available only through steam on PC at least.

So yeah, as i said in another thread i don't have high expectations.
If anything i hope that in the future they'll add a basic anti-bot and maybe region lock a couple of countries that are responsible for a huge amount of cheaters/botters/RMT in every single MMO.
Obviously neither anti-bot/region lock will not stop them, but it'll hopefully lower the numbers a bit to make the problem more manageable.

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Region-locking is pointless unless they're also going to block all the VPNs out there (and if they do that, that negatively affects people who aren't botting, such as myself).

Ya my only issue with anti cheat as someone said theyre very privacy invasive too, may run without the game even up, etc etc etc.

Think win 10 initial version of the creators update, NO thanks lol

And region locking ya, may work for ps4 users but what point would that be. Even something like 6 out of 10 american / euro players have a VPN these days, usa more thanks to that stupid invasive internet privacy act they passed giving ISPs too much user insight.

I don't think those anti cheat things actually work.

However the case with xiv is that they actually aren't able to detect the bot program. Then when they do, they do stupid stuff like block the IP and not the account.

An old friend of my used to bot, he actually got caught cause he was running 4 accounts at once. They IP blocked him and he just went around with a VPN.

Thanks for your input! I guess an app running on the side wouldn't work these days and it would be difficult with A.I. being as good as it is today to genuinely block farming bots. You no longer have to rely on general coordinates but ML could in theory just recognize the game in 3D and act similarly to how humans would. If not now, then soon enough.

As for server-side anti-botting they should at the very least include a sort of measure against certain links and patterns. It wouldn't block every attempt but it would at least make it more difficult to get messages to go through and those that do can get reported to ultimately refine the algorithm.

I don't know, it's just getting out of hand. DDoS can be FF bot related or it can just be people who hate the game. I, just like anyone else here am tired of it all but won't give up on the game just because they hope that will happen. lol

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Originally Posted by Eriane_Elis

I don't know, it's just getting out of hand. DDoS can be FF bot related or it can just be people who hate the game. I, just like anyone else here am tired of it all but won't give up on the game just because they hope that will happen. lol

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DDoS is specifically to hinder access to a service by absolutely flooding it with traffic. This doesn't benefit the bots because all of their business requires having access to the service. They advertise on the service, they garner product on the service and they deliver product on the service. If they can't get on and their customer cannot get on, they're not making money. The bots are causing a similar effect to certain zones on a few servers because they have so many fresh characters hitting all at once to try and keep up with demand. It's not their intention to cause those particular issues, it's just not costing them enough to worry about adjusting their programs to do smaller tiered group distribution.

I have never seen antibot, or anticheat programs work in any game. I have seen them make the game unplayable for people due to crashes that have nothing to do with the game, and false positives. Not one bit of good has ever been solved by those programs.

ps4 limitations™

Honestly, I'd rather have bots screw with the economy and whatnot than have to run glorified spyware on my PC in order to play. By design, a piece of anti-cheat software must be vague about the scope and methods of its data collection. One has real-world privacy implications, and the other just makes a game a bit less fun. I appreciate the fact that SE has not succumbed to using these tools, but I do wish that they took botting more seriously. They should just immediately permaban the user, not suspend them and essentially give them a free chance to illicitly achieve some goals.

Imo, one of the main reasons botting and gold farmers are such huge problem in XIV, is the department responsible for countering them, the SDF, is extremely under staffed. Pretty sure it was quoted a few fanfests ago that they have less than 10 people running it and they have to try to combat thousands of bots.

SDF also isn't all encompassing, when the squadron LB exploit was first reported it went through their nets because technically people weren't using 3rd party software, which back then was only thing they looked for.

The STF really is the core issue behind why bots are as much of a problem as they are. They're understaffed to the point where I don't think they can actually conduct proper investigations and instead are using some kind of automated detection tool that reads the data someone's client is sending the server. This obviously is going to easily pick up on RMT-related bots due to the fact that they're either spamming ads or hacking to teleport around the place, but the other types of bots are not doing anything that I think could realistically be detected from simply reading data.

Actually observing them first-hand makes it painfully obvious, though, and there are still other types of evidence like abnormally high amounts of gathered/crafted items that could be used to weed out suspects.

I really wish SE would allow GM's to take action while the botting is happening. A banwave weeks later seems so anemic.

I'm on Excal, and today I am seeing a lot of bots in Central Than. I run through here often on alts and it's not usually bad, but today they seem to be everywhere. (They love to hang out in the Company Chest in Ul'dah as well.)

They are look-alike Thaumaturges, have the signature nonsense names, execute an action to spawn a Spriggan Chumbler (maybe a levequest mob?) and then disappear immediately afterwards (no teleporting, just blink out). I saw one standing high up in the air killing the mob on the ground, then he blinked out immediately.

I love this game, but I left it years ago because I couldn't stand the bots. I guess I came to terms with their existence after playing other games, but they really are awful in FFXIV - much worse than in other games I have played. I'm not going to let them run me off again, but I sure wish SE would care more about this.

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Originally Posted by Eriane_Elis

Like the title states, I've played many mmos that have integrated or side-apps that run to check for cheating/botting. Are those still relevant and if so, why hasn't SE adopted this? I ask this because we're now faced with more than just gil sellers and market bots, but a fleet of them causing DDoS (allegedly) and it's quite annoying :P

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Because 50 account ban = 50 new account, have you ever seen reports on the goldfarmer?

It's like the tabloids, they have a budget for people's legal attacks (banns for MMOs)

They have license palettes in stock at the time of box games.

It's a scourge that every MMO is more or less good at managing it, but never stopping it.