Anti Bot System

I've questioned why this hasn't been implemented for some time now. And i'm only writing about it because i'm currently STARING at a bot in game. They have been on for about 4 days now (that my group knows of) and being as my group is on different hours of the day, we've checked to see if this person has been on during when we play. They have been on non stop thsi entire time. And bought over 1500 sublime solution and slithersand. After their time at the board they go up to the Mizzentmast Inn and lock themselves away from prying eyes.

Now. What does that have to do with the title? Well. I do not see why there is no system check in place after all these years to see if you've been logged in, lets say, over 24 hours. Yes, people afk. But there is also an afk kick timer implemented into the game. If someone was to go over a certain amount of logged in time with said system, it would mark them for GM survey to see if they are botting. Or for that matter, account sharing. Considering THAT is also against ToS and was a big problem during Firmament ranking. It really shouldn't be that hard of a system to put into place. IT's not intrusive and it helps mark these types of acts all around instead of relying on us, the player, to report what might not even be suspicious activity.

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Originally Posted by Lecru

I've questioned why this hasn't been implemented for some time now. And i'm only writing about it because i'm currently STARING at a bot in game. They have been on for about 4 days now (that my group knows of) and being as my group is on different hours of the day, we've checked to see if this person has been on during when we play. They have been on non stop thsi entire time. And bought over 1500 sublime solution and slithersand. After their time at the board they go up to the Mizzentmast Inn and lock themselves away from prying eyes.

Now. What does that have to do with the title? Well. I do not see why there is no system check in place after all these years to see if you've been logged in, lets say, over 24 hours. Yes, people afk. But there is also an afk kick timer implemented into the game. If someone was to go over a certain amount of logged in time with said system, it would mark them for GM survey to see if they are botting. Or for that matter, account sharing. Considering THAT is also against ToS and was a big problem during Firmament ranking. It really shouldn't be that hard of a system to put into place. IT's not intrusive and it helps mark these types of acts all around instead of relying on us, the player, to report what might not even be suspicious activity.

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I've been afk for over 24 hours before... went to sleep forgetting I was at the marketboard. my PC screen was asleep, I went about to do my daily business IRL, came back to log in and. Well.

A system like that wouldn't work, really. What happens to the people who pull all nighters and do the whole "36 hours because the Expac has just been released!" thing? Or people who, like me, might have forgotten they were doing something that doesn't AFK auto-log you out?

They ban bots frequently but implementing anticheat software would be against the law in their country as far as i know. That's why they also can't detect if you use mods or damage meters or anything else that is just clientside. They detect how people act as bots and they ban them frequently.

But yeah, they said they will never burden us with spysoftware like most other mmos etc. do. Dunno if that's cause of japanese law but that's their stance on it.

I could be way off, but it seems to me that a lot of bots seem to do gathering mainly. And we have this neat gathering system in FFXIV, where you have multiple items per node, and you can select which item you're after. What if the item placement in the gathering window were randomized each time you accessed a node, and among them were "dummy" spots that would heavily damage your gathering tool and even kick you out of gathering completely? It would be completely obvious to an actual player, but a bot might not have any way of telling the difference. Would this be possible, or just something the botters could easily bypass with clever programming?

Bot detection is not that easy. Yoshi P said in an interview that they will not scan the computer of their playerbase for bot- or cheat-software. So they have not many opportunities to detect a bot. They can use heuristics but heuristics are not very reliable. They still will need some personal ressources to detect and ban them.

You can help SE when you report them. It could be more reliable than an approach based on heuristics.

Cheers

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Originally Posted by Fyrebrand

I could be way off, but it seems to me that a lot of bots seem to do gathering mainly. And we have this neat gathering system in FFXIV, where you have multiple items per node, and you can select which item you're after. What if the item placement in the gathering window were randomized each time you accessed a node, and among them were "dummy" spots that would heavily damage your gathering tool and even kick you out of gathering completely? It would be completely obvious to an actual player, but a bot might not have any way of telling the difference. Would this be possible, or just something the botters could easily bypass with clever programming?

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Something that botters could bypass - also when grinding out gathering levels could harm players in the long run. IDK about others but I ended up relying on muscle memory to level MIN, knowing what was where was a lifesaver for me.

How do you know he doesnt log off when they go to an inn? Why go through the effort of botting and taking your sweet as time to walk all the way to Mizzentmast inn?

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Originally Posted by Juun

How do you know he doesnt log off when they go to an inn? Why go through the effort of botting and taking your sweet as time to walk all the way to Mizzentmast inn?

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You can use player search to find out if they're online. And I assume if they're doing massive crafting, they would want to go somewhere to make it less obvious, like a place only they can get to. It could be programmed into the bot to do that.

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Originally Posted by Fyrebrand

Would this be possible, or just something the botters could easily bypass with clever programming?

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Sadly bots could bypass this. Bots are intelligent enough to clear Savage and spam Expert Recipes.

For gathering and crafting, since they can't scan player computers developing a system to defeat bots is difficult. Probably the only viable option is to implement weekly limits. For example, a character enters an account-wide fatigue state after gathering 2000 current content Timed Node items or crafting 200 (non-material) current expansion items per week. Sure it'd suck for those legitimate players who just want to gather/craft all day to relax, but most normal players would be unaffected and bots would hit a wall fast. It would even promote mb trade and add value to items. Extract Materia could use a 2 day cd on each slot after use too.

I don't know, personally I dislike when bot measures impact gameplay for normal players, but facts are they have no power to detect them and they have to do something. I'd take a compromise at this stage.

I honestly agree that imposing more limitations; albeit ones that aren't going to affect 99% of the populace is probably the only way they can really combat them.

The current treasure map abuse is a good example of this as their practice is to have a mule account constantly mailing dozens if not hundreds of maps to a player in one of their farming parties. Simply removing the ability for them to mail maps would slow them down considerably while not likely impacting actual players that much.

Even if they did, say, upgrade their detection methods to ID certain abnormal patterns of behavior the bots exhibit, they would likely just feel the system out again and develop a workaround.

I've seen countless times bots teleporting all over the map and attacking from underground. Can't just developers chose an even map as a trap and flag suspects when their altitude gets beneath certain number, I mean, coordinates of your character are tracked after all.

I never get why everything were we cant go isnt marked as insta deathzone like the border of some fights...

The fact of the matter is that SE would rather spend money on game development rather than policing. It's why third-party tools are TOS breaking but they never act on it. It's why bot reports go mostly ignored. This coupled with a respect for personal data = they won't scan your personal computer for these and traction is hard to get.

The one thing they COULD do is work with their payment service to identify credit cards that pay for multiple accounts. Order those by most accounts to least and slowly work down the list to. You know that the top of the list is going to be full of botters. When a CC is found to be running a bunch of bot accounts. Ban that CC. It's a one-time setup that shouldn't be too expensive to get working and operate. And this kind of CC ban would be a real pain for the mass botters.

It does nothing for people botting on their personal account, but one thing at a time right?

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Originally Posted by SatoTheLalafel

I've seen countless times bots teleporting all over the map and attacking from underground. Can't just developers chose an even map as a trap and flag suspects when their altitude gets beneath certain number, I mean, coordinates of your character are tracked after all.

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Those types of bots are usually banned weekly. SE does have some traps in place at various locations to catch them (if you're paying attention while doing MSQ on a new character, you can see where at least a couple of the traps are located). SE is banning 4000-7000 accounts each week for RMT related activity and posts a weekly report on Lodestone. Here's a link to the most recent one as an example.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...7162366c584e51

But those bots are also easily replaced with new bots on new accounts. That's why it can feel like nothing is being done even though SE is working on it.

As for the OP, they're referring to suspected crafting bots and that's caused problems because sometimes legitimate players end up accused.

I think they don't have as much of a bot problem on the JP servers as the NA and EU servers do. But I also think they saw just how bad the problem is with the Ishgard Restoration rankings -- when you've got a character logged in 24/7 gathering nonstop and crafting nonstop (and I'm speaking here as one of the people who DID make it into the ranking), if it can be exploited, it will be.

The solution then, if they can't/won't ban the bots or players en masse, is to consider an alternative where cheating will get you nothing. Imagine that for Ishgard restoration, if you really wanted that title, you had to craft something like 50,000 points worth of material. Not impossible but a definite investment of time and crystals. After you hit 50,000 - you're guaranteed to get it. Full stop. Sure, some bot could come along with their 200,000 points but who cares? You put your time in, you worked at it, you got your reward.

Why Feast is not structured similarly, I will never know.

I seen a strange thing today. 4 off the exact same characters leaving a map. Would that be a bot?

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Originally Posted by Tarryme

I seen a strange thing today. 4 off the exact same characters leaving a map. Would that be a bot?

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If you see groups of identical-looking characters moving around in an unusually synchronized manner then that's probably what you're looking at.

Not all of them use hacks since they know it's basically signing a death warrant for their account, but you can still catch glimpses of the hacking ones whenever they're crossing a zone line.

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Originally Posted by Lecru

I've questioned why this hasn't been implemented for some time now. And i'm only writing about it because i'm currently STARING at a bot in game. They have been on for about 4 days now (that my group knows of) and being as my group is on different hours of the day, we've checked to see if this person has been on during when we play. They have been on non stop thsi entire time. And bought over 1500 sublime solution and slithersand. After their time at the board they go up to the Mizzentmast Inn and lock themselves away from prying eyes.

Now. What does that have to do with the title? Well. I do not see why there is no system check in place after all these years to see if you've been logged in, lets say, over 24 hours. Yes, people afk. But there is also an afk kick timer implemented into the game. If someone was to go over a certain amount of logged in time with said system, it would mark them for GM survey to see if they are botting. Or for that matter, account sharing. Considering THAT is also against ToS and was a big problem during Firmament ranking. It really shouldn't be that hard of a system to put into place. IT's not intrusive and it helps mark these types of acts all around instead of relying on us, the player, to report what might not even be suspicious activity.

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I think you don't understand the principle of bots, who would make a bot that stays afk 24h?

A bot or gold farmer, they are there to work for a player while he does something else.

An afk 24h can't be a bot. And for the people who are always farm, you can't be sure that it's a bot either, except in special cases. There are players who are able to farm comp for hours.

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Originally Posted by MilkieTea

I've been afk for over 24 hours before... went to sleep forgetting I was at the marketboard. my PC screen was asleep, I went about to do my daily business IRL, came back to log in and. Well.

A system like that wouldn't work, really. What happens to the people who pull all nighters and do the whole "36 hours because the Expac has just been released!" thing? Or people who, like me, might have forgotten they were doing something that doesn't AFK auto-log you out?

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Well upon a GM getting to you or investigating you they'd see you aren't botting now wouldn't they. No reason to be worried if in fact you weren't doing anything wrong in the first place

Where all of you are getting that it would be software on the players end baffles me. As it would be a system implemented SERVER SIDE while in the client.

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Originally Posted by Juun

How do you know he doesnt log off when they go to an inn? Why go through the effort of botting and taking your sweet as time to walk all the way to Mizzentmast inn?

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Because you can search for them and it tell you they are literally sittin gin Mizzenmast. The search function works that way. And people without housing go to Inns to get away from prying eyes. This isn't my first time watching a bot craft let alone their tendencies. Being in an Inn stops all from seeing you do nothing but macro craft with no downtime. Should really look into crafting vs third party crafting. You'll notice the difference almost immediately. They have zero downtime between skill usage (the system more or less slams the next button as soon as the previous is counted as done) and when doing another craft, the first one is only ever finished miliseconds prior.

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Originally Posted by Naoki34

I think you don't understand the principle of bots, who would make a bot that stays afk 24h?

A bot or gold farmer, they are there to work for a player while he does something else.

An afk 24h can't be a bot. And for the people who are always farm, you can't be sure that it's a bot either, except in special cases. There are players who are able to farm comp for hours.

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Nobody ever once said "stays afk 24 hrs". The point was flag characters who were logged in LONGER than 24 hours. As for 1, there is an afk kick timer impemented for people to no congest. And 2, that would clearly mean that it's either somebody who doesn't have work or school OR it's a person using third party or account sharing. Which are both against ToS. Sure peopel can farm for hours. But at some point an actual human needs to sleep