No response on bot reports

I'm not sure where else to post this, but this is an incredibly frustrating issue. Myself nor the many others who reported a player obviously botting at a housing plot in Zodiark have received responses to our reports, and the botting player still owns the house and is playing daily with no consequence.

We watched him botting the placard for 2+ hours after he'd already purchased the land. How is this not punishable? Why are bots not taken seriously? Why is SE OK with punishing players who want to play honestly and not cheat by doing literally nothing about obvious cheaters?

They basically never investigate reports in person and will only punish people who get detected by their outstandingly faulty detection "tools".

That said, only outright hacking tends to be dealt with semi-frequently and even that can slip through the cracks depending on how people are abusing it.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

They basically never investigate reports in person and will only punish people who get detected by their outstandingly faulty detection "tools".

That said, only outright hacking tends to be dealt with semi-frequently and even that can slip through the cracks depending on how people are abusing it.

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considering you can report those bot hordes in places like gridania and see them attacking a week later from underground out in the world... its a pretty big "crack"
they really only go after low hanging easily banned bots like the RMT barkers

maybe they are more diligent on Japanese servers... who knows

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Originally Posted by lor44

I'm not sure where else to post this, but this is an incredibly frustrating issue. Myself nor the many others who reported a player obviously botting at a housing plot in Zodiark have received responses to our reports, and the botting player still owns the house and is playing daily with no consequence.

We watched him botting the placard for 2+ hours after he'd already purchased the land. How is this not punishable? Why are bots not taken seriously? Why is SE OK with punishing players who want to play honestly and not cheat by doing literally nothing about obvious cheaters?

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The same has been happening on Goblin, for a while now. Every single open plot has multiple bots camping the land, and whenever someone buys it or relocate, the bots remain there for hours on end. I'm pretty sure that, at this point, it's almost impossible for a normal player to buy a house.

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

considering you can report those bot hordes in places like gridania and see them attacking a week later from underground out in the world... its a pretty big "crack"
they really only go after low hanging easily banned bots like the RMT barkers

maybe they are more diligent on Japanese servers... who knows

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They've been fairly consistent about removing the ARR gil farmers on a weekly basis from what I've observed...though that accomplishes virtually nothing as they'll have a new batch up and running within a day of them being removed.

The bots that are not hacking such as the DoH/L/map farmers have not been touched for months/years, though.

I think they dont care (atleast not about housing bots). Thx to the way plots are handled for first timers this happens since years on my server. There are always these people who report bot users which want to keep their sanity and it happens regulary (the bot using and reports). I have honestly never heard of a case where a player was punished for using a bot to get his first time pot purchase. Maybe its because SE knows that their current system is shit and want to keep a low profile.

They openly acknowledged that housing bots were an issue during the Fanfest live letter, but it's anyone's guess as to what they'll do about it if anything.

I do think they should at least remove some of the loopholes that house-flippers regularly abuse to get housing onto low-leveled alts, though. Namely, don't allow a character to own a house at all unless they meet the actual minimum requirements for it, regardless of whether it's a transferred FC house or otherwise.

You won't get a response on any report basically.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

They openly acknowledged that housing bots were an issue during the Fanfest live letter, but it's anyone's guess as to what they'll do about it if anything.

I do think they should at least remove some of the loopholes that house-flippers regularly abuse to get housing onto low-leveled alts, though. Namely, don't allow a character to own a house at all unless they meet the actual minimum requirements for it, regardless of whether it's a transferred FC house or otherwise.

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An individual character can't own a house unless they meet the minimum requirements so that part isn't a problem.

It's the FC loopholes that are problem and one that can't be solved unless SE is willing to have GMs start manually reviewing FCs who own a house, which they would probably consider a waste of GM time. Even if they did, it's still only going to open up a few hundred houses per world at most when there are still thousands of players who want a house.

As long as supply is less than demand, players will find ways to exploit the system. Since SE wants to stick with wards instead of fixing supply, the problem will be with us a long time.

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

considering you can report those bot hordes in places like gridania and see them attacking a week later from underground out in the world... its a pretty big "crack"
they really only go after low hanging easily banned bots like the RMT barkers

maybe they are more diligent on Japanese servers... who knows

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They're not. Althought there seems to be this myth about the STF focusing on the japanese DC.
But no they don't. There are bots there. The only reason there are fewer is because a lot fewer JP players use them, and even fewer do RMT.

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Originally Posted by Sotaris

You won't get a response on any report basically.

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The strange thing is that historically, I usually do; at least some sort of useless canned thing that tells you effectively nothing. This time, however, none of us received anything at all. We spoke to the botter the day afterwards, too, and he had the nerve to say he was "brain-afk watching minecraft vids on YT". Such poor design choices by SE in the timer system, and then doing nothing to prevent or punish cheaters, just makes me feel really sad.

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Originally Posted by lor44

The strange thing is that historically, I usually do; at least some sort of useless canned thing that tells you effectively nothing. This time, however, none of us received anything at all. We spoke to the botter the day afterwards, too, and he had the nerve to say he was "brain-afk watching minecraft vids on YT". Such poor design choices by SE in the timer system, and then doing nothing to prevent or punish cheaters, just makes me feel really sad.

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The GMs don't handle bots. There is a special team that handles that kind of issue (or don't handle as the case may be), and they don't reply to reports sent in.