Lets work together to deal with bots! Click for details.

What I do when i see 20 bots in Gridania now is click on them each to send a tell then c/p their name to a notepad then c/p that list of 20 names and shout it in the area to ask anyone who cares to c/p it and report it in support desk. But this could be annoying to peeps who dont care.

What Im thinking is we start LSs in each world that is infested to share the list of names at time of sight and mass report.

I am on Famfrit, who is down?

To anyone worried about false reporting, all the bots are clones of one another and have names like Neyvbhaw Rquwehwn / Argkgxvs Nuoxoiut / Fryhgrwq Idmebrbf (actual names of bots). So far I have yet to report a name that made any sense. For further safety we could just nab the peeps running through the air / no clipping.

Even if the LSs wont get going I encourage anyone to follow the c/p name from tell method then reposting the list to area at time of sighting.

I have to point out the irony of such a clickbait-sounding title to fight bots. I'm sorry, it just had to be addressed.

The problem with trying to report them all is that they can just make more faster than they can be banned. It's a futile gesture.

I have to agree with TheMightyMollusk. This is not something the players can do anything about, it is fully the responsibility of SE to solve this problem.
The only thing players can do at this point would be to get the problem put out over social media and grab the attention of youTube/twitch users that also care about the problem.

Fairly certain SE has means to detect and collect information on characters that are gil farming bots far faster than we could do it as players. If they wanted players to be assisting in reporting them, they would be adding report options for us to use specific to botting instead of leaving RMT the only report option.

It's frustrating to feel like we can't do anything to help the situation but other than refusing to buy gil or use bots ourselves, it's outside of our hands. If players weren't willing to buy gil or cheat to gain an advantage, the bots wouldn't exist.

I understand the bot situation is getting seriously out of hand and I get that you're frustrated...
but we all are here to play the game, not be the Bot Police Force. SE needs to come on
with it now and start banning them more. Heck, hire some doggone folks to
sniff them out themselves and delete them! xD I'll do it if you pay me lol!

I think the core issues are:

1. The RMT bots come back too quickly for any amount of reports or banning to actually matter.

2. Every other type of bot regularly slips past whatever detection methods they're using, so reporting them is comparably pointless.

They need to realize their methods are flawed if anything is ever going to change.

Just let SE see if they can come up with a solution. We're all here to enjoy the game, not work.

Spamming SE with reports isn't gonna do anything, if one person reports, they investigate and ban the bots listed in that report, what are the other 20 reports going to do other than slow down the system? They need better bot prevention, and that's something we as players can't really help with.

I heard there's a key set of phrases that can be said that activates a firewall, and drives bots out from a certain country in other games. Could try doing that, to see if that would knock any of them out :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NessaWyvern

I heard there's a key set of phrases that can be said that activates a firewall

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"the world is mine"
"pappaya-papapapapa-pappaya"
and the trigger of doom:
"lalafell master race"

The best way to deal with bots is not dealing with bot masters.

They can run the bots at virtually no cost to themselves thanks to wonders of credit card charge-back fraud so I think even the smallest amount of customers would keep them motivated to keep trying.

Many RMT websites actually service several different MMOs; many of which aren't nearly as popular as XIV.

I always fall for click-bait titles. I keep having to explain to my IS department why I keep falling for it.

That "Click for details" though.. unresistable.

But I really thought you came up with a way to track down the bot owners IRL so we can help take care of them... IRL.

So disappointed in so many different ways.

Until bots become a problem on the JP datacenters, very little will happen

You have to fire the special task force to get things done first.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Violet_Galaxy

Just let SE see if they can come up with a solution. We're all here to enjoy the game, not work.

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Key point. This isn't a F2P game. We pay SE for time in game, and it is SE's responsibility to fix this garbage, not ours.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Lambdafish

Until bots become a problem on the JP datacenters, very little will happen

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They're a problem on the JP data centers as well. I haven't seen them in quite the same concentrations I have here (possibly because JP has more worlds than EU and NA do) but that's still a lot of bots running around.

JP has a lower number of gil farmers but the DoL/H bot situation isn't really any better over there.

As of this week bots started invading JP servers as well, I've seen many people posting screenshots and complaining on Twitter, and most of them seem surprised, as if it's their first time seeing bots.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by alimdia

As of this week bots started invading JP servers as well, I've seen many people posting screenshots and complaining on Twitter, and most of them seem surprised, as if it's their first time seeing bots.

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I think it's likely because these ARC/BRD bots seem to be the new thing among RMTers and they make no effort to conceal themselves whilst they casually walk through the air/walls unlike the BLM/WHM bots who'd spend most of their time out of sight or teleporting around which could be mistaken for them simply logging off or some such.

I've noticed they're farming the Wanderer's Palace as opposed to the usual go-to of Amdapor Keep, and I cannot help but wonder why.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jybril

I understand the bot situation is getting seriously out of hand and I get that you're frustrated...
but we all are here to play the game, not be the Bot Police Force. SE needs to come on
with it now and start banning them more. Heck, hire some doggone folks to
sniff them out themselves and delete them! xD I'll do it if you pay me lol!

---

The ones that were/are bot police force get banned because oh noes cannot has John Wayne attitude.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by alimdia

As of this week bots started invading JP servers as well, I've seen many people posting screenshots and complaining on Twitter, and most of them seem surprised, as if it's their first time seeing bots.

---

This is a good thing IMO, the worse the bot problem gets, the higher priority it will be for SE. Remember the live letter just before shadowbringers launch, the one with the sound issues? It can't be a coincidence that a sound problem that had plagued the game since ARR launch (the one where the sound breaks if you switch audio devices) was suddenly fixed in the very next patch after that live letter.

They just need find better way to catch those buying gil from them. I no one buys gil from them they will go away for most part. They cold make it like other mmo's where can't use shouts or chat tell your high level. Remember one you couldn't sell or trade items till you was level 30.

The golden age of piracy was brought to an end, not by the traders who got raided, but by former pirates recruited by the major nations and turned loose upon their former pirate friends.

For a more modern parallel some of the best security analysts are ex-hackers.

I don't think the players have to solve issues for the company who they rent their service from. It should be the other way around.

What i want is an option to right-click report them out in the world and not only in chat. I report all the gold seller spammers, but i can't do anything about the ones floating about or pilling up in the aetheryte crystal.

And there's no way i am gonna go after them to find exactly how to spell their gibberish names. This is just a method of using an army against an army. In the end, we get tired and they got programs to create en-masse. We cannot win the war for square but we can buy them time.


Wth that said, this stuff was a problem in WoW vanilla/tbc as well and it was solved on Blizzards back end. They just broke whatever exploit the hackers were using to run their bots. That is ultimately what square needs to do to get rid of them permanently. They are the ones that can win the war.