Please add a way to report people cheating from a quick menu.

Whenever I see a bot some other character teleporting around with a name like Hfhckkalsh Njslaisj it is currently quite hard to quickly report each person as it involves submitting a ticket through the report cheating function. Given how often they just appear and disappear and how many of them can be present at any one time it can be quite hard to keep up and report them all.

If we had a method of quickly reporting we could give the team a more accurate picture of how the bots are being used and allow the team to develop ways to combat this activity.

For instance, I've been standing at the New Gridania Grand Company and like 20 button mashed names just appear then disappear a minute later. If I could mass report it would show the team that the scripts the bots are running involve this section, and thus allow the team to pick off many of them as they appeared.

They don't really have that much of an affect on the game, but still, I would like to see more of them getting banned sooner.

Cool how do you propose they deal with the abusers of this system? Also how much money would it take to hire more people to deal with this new support feature?

People will abuse anything they think they can, a easy report feature will absolutely be abused by very petty people, lost a roll instant report, don't like someone glam fast report, someone name is inappropriate to you report button, rather the current deterrent that is the long report feature form.

Going through these new report system is going to take time and money and SE seem to want to give the FFXIV staff the least amount possible, these reports cannot be automated for the potential abusers outlined above so someone is going to have to be hired or work extra to do this.

This is all from someone who has to take a psn photo of their names just to write the report up whenever they come across these cheaters and would love an easier way to do it, but every solution has negative implications and SE are stingy with FFXIV which is not a great combo especially when technically the current system is working albeit slowly (too slowly personally).

They have a quick report feature specifically for RMT. (people in cities spamming "go to buygil.com" in shout)
I don't see why it would be too labour intensive to add an extra option specifically for botting, with the same caveat that abuse of the report function would be penalised.

Personally they need a simplified report boting action akin to rmt. If I cannot just one click report a bot it is not worth the effort personally.

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Originally Posted by Crushnight

Cool how do you propose they deal with the abusers of this system? Also how much money would it take to hire more people to deal with this new support feature?

People will abuse anything they think they can, a easy report feature will absolutely be abused by very petty people, lost a roll instant report, don't like someone glam fast report, someone name is inappropriate to you report button, rather the current deterrent that is the long report feature form.
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They wouldn't have to hire any more people. All we would be doing is giving the team behind it as much data as possible, potentially making their jobs easier. According to the latest RMT Action Report (Mar 26 - Apr 1), in the last week 3.4k accounts were terminated, so they absolutely have people working on this. They have the people investigating. You're argument holds no weight.

Secondly, in regards to the whole abuse of the system, this was the same thing everyone jumped on when report RMT first came out, and what happened from that? How much trolling occurred? Openly engaging in misreporting would be handled with a rather severe penalty of suspension, like filing a false police report. Again, these reports would be investigated just like a standard report by the team that is currently employed and working, exactly like what is currently happening. You're argument, once again, holds no weight.

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Originally Posted by Crushnight

Cool how do you propose they deal with the abusers of this system? Also how much money would it take to hire more people to deal with this new support feature?

People will abuse anything they think they can, a easy report feature will absolutely be abused by very petty people, lost a roll instant report, don't like someone glam fast report, someone name is inappropriate to you report button, rather the current deterrent that is the long report feature form.

Going through these new report system is going to take time and money and SE seem to want to give the FFXIV staff the least amount possible, these reports cannot be automated for the potential abusers outlined above so someone is going to have to be hired or work extra to do this.

This is all from someone who has to take a psn photo of their names just to write the report up whenever they come across these cheaters and would love an easier way to do it, but every solution has negative implications and SE are stingy with FFXIV which is not a great combo especially when technically the current system is working albeit slowly (too slowly personally).

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SE has billions. They can afford an extra few people or a team to deal with this. Every system in game can be abused, that's why we have consequences when they are.

This would be no different.

I do agree that it would be nice if there was some way to easily report things other than just RMT.

I agree to this however I don't see any gathering bot that I report ever been banned.
That's the problem here.

Even when they do get banned, they're back in a day or less. Usually causing login queues from the sudden influx of new bots. The problem needs to be attacked at the root.

Speaking about it, I wonder since eternities why SE don't take down the internet-pages that sell Gil for money. TV-shows vanish left and right from the internet when their creators find illegal sources, so why can people's dirty businesses exist for so long--- businesses which obviously do something that goes against the rules a ka contract for playing FFXIV?

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Originally Posted by Crushnight

Cool how do you propose they deal with the abusers of this system? Also how much money would it take to hire more people to deal with this new support feature?

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Abusers? The same with RTM quick report.
Money? About the same with the value if it more then RTM quick report, which is just assign a coder or two to update the report function, the personal is already there.

The rest of what you are saying is we should just left bots go free because it's the easiest choice to fulfill. That's like saying doing nothing about everything is better than to do anything.

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Originally Posted by Osteichthyes

Whenever I see a bot some other character teleporting around with a name like Hfhckkalsh Njslaisj it is currently quite hard to quickly report each person as it involves submitting a ticket through the report cheating function. Given how often they just appear and disappear and how many of them can be present at any one time it can be quite hard to keep up and report them all.

If we had a method of quickly reporting we could give the team a more accurate picture of how the bots are being used and allow the team to develop ways to combat this activity.

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I'm sure the STF team already is aware of those bots and what they're doing without any player assistance. It wouldn't be hard for them to have systems set up to automatically identify and report characters meeting certain criteria typical of bots. All a player report system would do is clog their inboxes with character names. It might give some players a sense of "well at least we're doing what we can to help fight bots" but it wouldn't add anything helpful to the dev team.

They also don't "pick off" bots as they appear for a reason. They study the bot behavior to try to find countermeasures that will hinder the bots without hindering legitimate players. If they banned the bots immediately, they lose out on getting data they need to develop those countermeasures.

I know some players think SE isn't doing anything to try to combat bots but I haven't seen any rivers of bots running through the air recently like we saw at the start of the expansion. Have you? If nothing was being done, they'd still be running through the air.

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Originally Posted by MelodyCrystel

Speaking about it, I wonder since eternities why SE don't take down the internet-pages that sell Gil for money. TV-shows vanish left and right from the internet when their creators find illegal sources, so why can people's dirty businesses exist for so long--- businesses which obviously do something that goes against the rules a ka contract for playing FFXIV?

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SE can't get courts to order the websites and business shut down when they're usually operating in countries where IP rights of foreign business aren't recognized so there's no legal recourse. Even those rare occasions when there is, it's usually a very long expensive fight in the courts before anything happens.

The only way to get those business shut down is for players to stop buying from them and there are too many cheaters for that to ever happen.

You guys think a sub for gil deal like in WoW would benefit this game? Certainly see that reducing RMT. How it works is: you can buy 1 month sub and sell it on the market for gil. If you want free sub you buy it with your excessive gil, if you want more gil you buy a sub and sell it on market for gill. All money goes to SE. IIRC in WoW there's a system in place that does the trading automatically in accord with supply and demand.

You could kind of see this as SE providing P2W though with how you can get good set of high ilvl gear with gil alone, but there is always better gear you can only get by ingame systems (instances/grinding) so idk if it matters much. Players can already buy from RMT though so imo its better if all the money goes to SE instead of some 3th party RMT site.

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Originally Posted by SamRF

You guys think a sub for gil deal like in WoW would benefit this game? Certainly see that reducing RMT. How it works is: you can buy 1 month sub and sell it on the market for gil. If you want free sub you buy it with your excessive gil, if you want more gil you buy a sub and sell it on market for gill. All money goes to SE.

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No. All the money would go to RMT-Makers because they would offer the sub for less then SE and no money goes to SE at all.

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Originally Posted by SamRF

You guys think a sub for gil deal like in WoW would benefit this game? Certainly see that reducing RMT. How it works is: you can buy 1 month sub and sell it on the market for gil. If you want free sub you buy it with your excessive gil, if you want more gil you buy a sub and sell it on market for gill. All money goes to SE. IIRC in WoW there's a system in place that does the trading automatically in accord with supply and demand.

You could kind of see this as SE providing P2W though with how you can get good set of high ilvl gear with gil alone, but there is always better gear you can only get by ingame systems (instances/grinding) so idk if it matters much. Players can already buy from RMT though so imo its better if all the money goes to SE instead of some 3th party RMT site.

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Like WoW I could see it curb some rmt but not all. I do have a few friends who purchase gil from those sites they do not have much available time so they use it as a means to allow the time they do have doing things they enjoy. Thankfully unlike WoW FFXIV gil holds very little value, but that is also the reason why selling sub time for gil may not work. The price would have to be astronomically expensive to even try and undercut RMT and even then this game has so many passive / active forms of income that bots could easily use that it would probably not lead to the result people would expect.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

I'm sure the STF team already is aware of those bots and what they're doing without any player assistance. It wouldn't be hard for them to have systems set up to automatically identify and report characters meeting certain criteria typical of bots. All a player report system would do is clog their inboxes with character names. It might give some players a sense of "well at least we're doing what we can to help fight bots" but it wouldn't add anything helpful to the dev team.

They also don't "pick off" bots as they appear for a reason. They study the bot behavior to try to find countermeasures that will hinder the bots without hindering legitimate players. If they banned the bots immediately, they lose out on getting data they need to develop those countermeasures.

I know some players think SE isn't doing anything to try to combat bots but I haven't seen any rivers of bots running through the air recently like we saw at the start of the expansion. Have you? If nothing was being done, they'd still be running through the air.

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They haven't made any meaningful headway against either RMT bots or conventional bots used by lazy people (Which also dabble in RMT sometimes).

The former have been using the exact same farming tactics they have since ARR, just with slight refinements to account for balance changes, gear availability, etc. The problem is they are fixated on getting rid of the bots themselves instead of taking measures against the tactics they're using. Doing something as simple as removing the gil drops from ARR dungeons would make a significant dent in their profits with minimal impact to actual players as it's where the bulk of their gil is coming from.

In the latter case, I'm still seeing the same characters I encountered within my first month of play who are either dedicated farm bots or just lazy players who leave a bot running overnight and have been reporting them periodically since then, but they're still around to this very day.

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Originally Posted by SamRF

You guys think a sub for gil deal like in WoW would benefit this game? Certainly see that reducing RMT. How it works is: you can buy 1 month sub and sell it on the market for gil. If you want free sub you buy it with your excessive gil, if you want more gil you buy a sub and sell it on market for gill. All money goes to SE.

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Originally Posted by Pepsi_Plunge

No. All the money would go to RMT-Makers because they would offer the sub for less then SE and no money goes to SE at all.

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Pepsi, It seems you misunderstand how the system SamRF is talking about would work.

Player A would pay SE a full-price month subscription to obtain a token. This cost would be in addition to the costs they normally pay SE to play the game.
This additional token, which SE has already received a month subscription's full price for, could then be traded to other players for market-fluctuating values of gil.
Tokens would not be generated for free out of gil. SE would still get the money first.

The RMT wouldn't be buying subscription time tokens and selling them; that would be a poor decision because they'd first have to pay SE money, and then they'd have to sell it for less than they gave SE because why would anyone buy sub time from a third party for more than what SE themselves sell it for?

what are bots?

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Originally Posted by Awha

Like WoW I could see it curb some rmt but not all. I do have a few friends who purchase gil from those sites they do not have much available time so they use it as a means to allow the time they do have doing things they enjoy. Thankfully unlike WoW FFXIV gil holds very little value, but that is also the reason why selling sub time for gil may not work. The price would have to be astronomically expensive to even try and undercut RMT and even then this game has so many passive / active forms of income that bots could easily use that it would probably not lead to the result people would expect.

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Could be true, but it seems like there are a good amount of crafters that have ridiculous amount of gil stored up, this alone would I think make the gil price for a sub very high to the point that it would be hard for RMT to compete.

I don't think there will be enough supply for those gill billionaires to have free real money sub for years, thus the price will naturally go way up to adjust to the demand.

Unless I'm overestimating the wealth of many gillionaires.

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Originally Posted by Seddrinth

what are bots?

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Lalafells...

The Lalafell bots are actually a hold-over from when they were optimal for BLM due to getting an extra cast before they had to switch to Umbral Ice thanks to racial stats (Though the normalized MP pools have made that irrelevant).

There seems to be two distinct groups of gil farmers; one that uses Lalafell BLM/WHM and another that uses Hyur BRD/WHM. I've also noticed the latter group tends to go cross-world when leveling/farming...again for reasons I haven't the foggiest clue about. Why they'd go to an already crowded server like Cactuar instead of a lower population where they're less likely be noticed is anyone's guess.

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Originally Posted by SamRF

Could be true, but it seems like there are a good amount of crafters that have ridiculous amount of gil stored up, this alone would I think make the gil price for a sub very high to the point that it would be hard for RMT to compete.

I don't think there will be enough supply for those gill billionaires to have free real money sub for years, thus the price will naturally go way up to adjust to the demand.

Unless I'm overestimating the wealth of many gillionaires.

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It is a fine line in terms of time it takes to earn the gil and how quickly you tokens sell. If the tokens cost too much gil that they do not move quickly then in theory rmt could sustain a supply of gil while undercutting the sub price for SE.

Though the same could he said if the price is too low, and bots can still keep up with the gil demand. FFXIV is a boring dream in terms of gathering, setting up scripts to blaze through old content as a form of passive income. The price point would be tricky. Too high rmt could undercut the sub price too low and even modest gillionaries would be able to stockpile sub time. Which is not a bad thing, and I would love to have something to use my gil on.

Just do not know if the system would work in FFXIV due to how generally low value gil holds in this game. Not many money sinks in place.