Twintania is overrun with bots :(

Hi there,

I'm a new player to FFXIV, and I seriously thought I wouldn't see this amount of bots in a subscription based MMO.
I've started my adventure in Twintania cuz of the new server perks.

But everywhere i go i see wolf packs of bots ruining my gameplay.
They either kill the monsters with 20+ thaumaturges in 1 spot casting fireballs that i'm trying to hunt for my log or quest.

And the weird thing is that they dissapear and appear nonstop with a army as if they teleport into spots.

Is something being done about this?

Kind Regards,
Legendary King

For some reason, I thought you were talking about the dancing plague trial.

Don't get your hopes up about SE doing anything about it either. They ban in waves which happen once in a blue moon and by the time they've got round to a second ban wave the bots are already back at 50 and farming gil. The player used bots aka DoL bots never get banned, there's an FC of about 16 of them on Odin and I've been reporting them for months and no action has been taken.

Square likes to ban the ones with random letters for names in waves. That said that is pretty much all they do. I've seen the same bots farming Aethersands for 2+ years 24/7 non-stop. There are also crafting bots and market board bots that will craft 24/7 and then will lower the prices to be the lowest one every 15 to 30 minutes on the dot. Those ones never seem to get banned.

I mean offcourse it's no easy feat to ban bots, but they can adjust their anti-cheat system to search for certain parameters that bot tools use and ban them instantly upon that.

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Originally Posted by Machi_Machiavelli

For some reason, I thought you were talking about the dancing plague trial.

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Hahaha! Me too... I thought "Dang, those are some advanced bots!"

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Originally Posted by LegendaryKing

I mean offcourse it's no easy feat to ban bots, but they can adjust their anti-cheat system to search for certain parameters that bot tools use and ban them instantly upon that.

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Can't, programs like that have gotten extremely sophisticated. Most of the people they are banning are using crappy programs or doing RMT. The real stuff is indistinguishable from normal keystrokes. They'd have to watch things no system is tuned to do, like watching for commonly taken paths, like monitoring, if a number of people walk to the same path the same point and stand in the same position. And with that, they run the risk of banning innocent people.

They've invading other realms too, I've started seeing Twintania RMT bots spamming on Zodiark.

There's a lot on Balmung lately as well. Many of them are currently running around Limsa.

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Originally Posted by Final-Fantasy

I find it strange that on Twintania for example, the same Bot has been /shout advertising for days, they must require a huge amount of <right click reports> or it does not work at all.

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I find that weird also, cuz i report every single one i see instantly

I remember back in Vanilla/HW days I'd see a group of BLM standing at the Steps of Nald Aetherite regularly in full lvl 50 BLM gear (pretty obvious with that stuff). They had names like gary, spary. lary, etc. Can't remember the server that was on. I'm on Ultuos now, and Don't see many if at all. Guess that's the benefit of a congested server with no new character creation. Sucks when you want to make a new toon tho...

You know what I just wish? That if I use the report feature on a RMT spam shout in chat, the RMT gets on a client session temporary blocklist or something. Anything really to prevent further seeing of the same spam that DOESN'T require me to add several more click and to my blocklist, which gets full eventually and I have to clear it out one... by.... one.... THAT IS TEDIOUS BEYOND WORDS! Please Yoshi... just a current session blacklist of RMT reported characters on my end... that's all I ask...

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Originally Posted by Machi_Machiavelli

For some reason, I thought you were talking about the dancing plague trial.

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I was thinking they were talking about coil turn 5 and i was thinking, "why though?" XD

You'd honestly need just a competent GM or two actively enforcing each data center to keep the less prominent types of bots like DoH/L ones under control.

The RMT bots can't realistically be stopped without more drastic measures because they're a fully automated process.

Yeah, I see so many bots on twintania - it's insane on how many there is. More bots than actual players - a bit of an exaggeration but doesn't seem like a stretch sometimes.

Yes, bot menace has been out of control ever since ShB. I've been playing for a couple years now and I've never seen SO MANY bots. Just now I saw archer with gibberish name literally run through the air in limsa. That's something I've never seen before. I hope SE finds a way to cull their numbers somewhat, because at this point this is getting embarrassing.

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Originally Posted by EriShvakh

Yes, bot menace has been out of control ever since ShB. I've been playing for a couple years now and I've never seen SO MANY bots. Just now I saw archer with gibberish name literally run through the air in limsa. That's something I've never seen before. I hope SE finds a way to cull their numbers somewhat, because at this point this is getting embarrassing.

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They actually tried by nerfing the gil drops in ARR dungeons a long while back, but the farmers just compensated by making even more bots, afterwhich they seem to have just thrown their hands in the air and given up on trying to find a more lasting solution.

Honestly, they need to just keep taking baby steps and patching up whatever the bots decide to exploit until they get cornered into a situation where they can scarcely make any gil at all. To start, removing the gil drops from ARR dungeons entirely would impede them greatly and stop them from clogging up the instance servers.

They're likely flocking to the servers with the new player bonus as I believe that awards a substantial amount of Gil for just hitting certain checkpoints. And Sadly, only way bots will go away is if either the lazy stop buying Gil (Ha!) or SE goes the scorched earth approach, and makes Gil untradeable, and possibly market prices automated.

I think just imposing a hard limit on how much gil can be traded by brand new accounts could be reasonable because realistically, normal players are not going to be rolling in money within their first week of play.

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Originally Posted by Machi_Machiavelli

Can't, programs like that have gotten extremely sophisticated. Most of the people they are banning are using crappy programs or doing RMT. The real stuff is indistinguishable from normal keystrokes. They'd have to watch things no system is tuned to do, like watching for commonly taken paths, like monitoring, if a number of people walk to the same path the same point and stand in the same position. And with that, they run the risk of banning innocent people.

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No, by having people in the exact coordinates, with gibberish names, and their next destination(s) is/are the exact spot-on pixel-perfect location then it's very easy to automatically ban this. Even friggin NEXON had such thing in place, and it was nice. In the original MapleStory I fell through the floor onto the "bottom of the screen". Have been respawned and auto-banned until I showed a GM the place with the mapping error that could you let fall trough the floor as this should not be possible for a player to hit these coordinates without "hacks".

If you manage to be pixel perfect at 4035,56X ,3781.8Y and 362.5Z coordinates together with 5 other people, ban all of them temporarily. Or monitor that and if the next 3 locations match again ban them. It's not that difficult.

I think they need to just address them going out of bounds to kill enemies without taking damage, because it's the only reason they can clear most instances/MSQ duties.

Making the enemy AI able to recognize when something can't be reached and reset or become invincible if their target is in a place they cannot path to seems like it would be doable.

There's so many bots in Twintania gridania alone that I cant go form one point to another without running into at least three groups. and thats just in central shroud. Theres players that cant even get quests completed because the bots are killing everything in sight I mean seriously I feel bad for the new server.

I don't understand... Are we playing the same game??? I play it since Realm Reborn and the only bots I can see is OCASIONAL trade spam. Like 1-2 mesages in the all chat per MONTH. Am I blind? Or the situation is THIS BAD on other servers?

Yeah it really is you can see these cats popping up form under the ground on my Brynhildr quite often and its even worse on Twintania. they dont even try to hide what they are anymore they just run along in huge groups with wwhjwhegwwjdwsj jwehwkd type vomit names.

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Originally Posted by Rakshazi

I don't understand... Are we playing the same game??? I play it since Realm Reborn and the only bots I can see is OCASIONAL trade spam. Like 1-2 mesages in the all chat per MONTH. Am I blind? Or the situation is THIS BAD on other servers?

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Do a player search and filter by level 1-50 THM/BLM and CNJ/WHM. Count how many players there are who have unpronounceable names. Those are the bots, and if you're on an average server that doesn't have locked character creation you're bound to see well over a hundred of them.

They only make brief appearances by quest NPCs and aetherytes as they use hacks to teleport through zones and are usually out of bounds.

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Originally Posted by Rakshazi

I don't understand... Are we playing the same game??? I play it since Realm Reborn and the only bots I can see is OCASIONAL trade spam. Like 1-2 mesages in the all chat per MONTH. Am I blind? Or the situation is THIS BAD on other servers?

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Both the new EU servers appear to be absolutely flooded. If you go on twitter and do a search for "Welcome to Spriggan", someone posted up a video of what appears to be a bustling Ul'dah, except they're all gibberish named drones.

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Originally Posted by GomJabbar

Hahaha! Me too... I thought "Dang, those are some advanced bots!"

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Yeah that got me too.

If a bot actually made it to the Titania trial I would want to cheer them on then I’d ask SE to hire the bot-coder so we could get the trusts working all the way down to level 1... ;)

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Originally Posted by Rakshazi

I don't understand... Are we playing the same game??? I play it since Realm Reborn and the only bots I can see is OCASIONAL trade spam. Like 1-2 mesages in the all chat per MONTH. Am I blind? Or the situation is THIS BAD on other servers?

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Make a new character as a marauder and when you finish the tutorial and spawn in where other players are on most severs you will be in a crowd of male Hyurs with names like “tjrjdne fejwjfi”. As in, random characters guy...

As much as I've crapped on SE for how they handled RMT in FFXI, at least they did something about bots. GM's would/could investigate by /telling them or showing up and trying to talk to them and if inadequate or no response was given they would/could gaol them and/or ban them. The Special Task Force (STF) has always been a joke (it's four people and only in Japan), but it amazes me how SE has regressed when it comes to handling these kinds of player concerns.

24/7 GM support seems wasted if it only works for harassment and not cheaters.

I'm not sure why they feel like you need fancy things like packet readers to tell if someone is botting when the simple "Attempt to communicate" method would axe them assuming the GMs are timely enough in the report response to catch them while they're still AFK.

They clearly do care about the bots to a degree because they've going at the Mogboard data collection bots extremely hard and banning them constantly even though what they're doing could scarcely be considered harmful.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

24/7 GM support seems wasted if it only works for harassment and not cheaters.

I'm not sure why they feel like you need fancy things like packet readers to tell if someone is botting when the simple "Attempt to communicate" method would axe them assuming the GMs are timely enough in the report response to catch them while they're still AFK.

They clearly do care about the bots to a degree because they've going at the Mogboard data collection bots extremely hard and banning them constantly even though what they're doing could scarcely be considered harmful.

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Yeah, I don't understand this. Bots that are compiling all listings between the market boards so you can price things and know where to go to get more for your cash seems less harmful than someone literally farming gil - but with extra steps.

I just hope this issue is being taken more seriously by Square Enix