An Open Letter: Dear SE, you and current RMT/bot issues

Dear SE

You have a problem, and it will not diminish by following the well worn path you are currently on. As proven time and again, you can ban thousands of bots and they just return. Now, I am not going to say, work harder at that, I am not even going to say give up on it. But I am going to say, you need a different approach because the bots simply will not give up.

As crime shows say... follow the money, or in this case, the gil.

Bots exist for one reason if you were not aware, and that reason is to generate gil to sell to players. I doubt this is news to you.

What you need to start doing , is to inconvenience the buyers. 3 day vacation for first time offenders, maybe a week for the second and the third time, gone. Perma ban.

This is something that can be, if not already, tracked on YOUR end, there is no need for client side code or spyware. This is you, you having code which I am sure already exists on your side of the software. If someone suddenly gains a lot of gil, it should set off a flag for a GM to look at. Lets face it, no one in their right mind spends 5 million gil (or more) on a level 30 item when every other listing is for 1500.

Penalizing the buyers works, I know. Years ago they used to do this in games, and it is a deterrent if you enforce it. You already say its against the ToS.. so enforce it. No one is going to want to lose their in game progress buying gil. So, go after the buyers, once that gets around, and that it is enforced, with a potential perma ban at the end, the market will dry up and the bots will decrease.

There is no downside to this for you. You are enforcing the ToS, you are fighting the bots, and in the end, its a win for you and your reputation, and for the players. You also do not have to add any clientside code that people will complain about, this is all something you can track in your database.

If you do see this, or get this approach, I think it will go a long way to combating a pervasive online gaming problem. Thank you for your time.

I think their main problem is that they seem unwilling to ban people unless they can be 100% positive there's some kind of illicit activity going on, which is why the content selling ads get a free pass but the gil spammers in the capital cities get purged routinely.

They are also seemingly unwilling to draw lines and connect the offenders with their clients/associates because while I've already reported multiple floor bots that were spam mailing maps to map farmers and subsequently gotten them banned, the map farmers themselves remain untouched.

True, because you COULD make a bunch of map farming underground bots, and then mail them all to one person, to get that person banned, if that was how it worked.

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Originally Posted by ICountFrom0

True, because you COULD make a bunch of map farming underground bots, and then mail them all to one person, to get that person banned, if that was how it worked.

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There's a reason why you need to have someone on your friend list to mail them stuff.

Incidentally, that used to be one of the ways the RMTers conducted transactions but SE started cracking down on it due to how obvious it was.

Using the market board for transactions leaves a layer of ambiguity that seems to be deterring them from taking action against it.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

There's a reason why you need to have someone on your friend list to mail them stuff.

Incidentally, that used to be one of the ways the RMTers conducted transactions but SE started cracking down on it due to how obvious it was.

Using the market board for transactions leaves a layer of ambiguity that seems to be deterring them from taking action against it.

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not sure how "ambiguous" it is to sell a level 20-30 item for 5 to 10 million gil and some "random" decides they have too much gil and will buy it when there are many cheaper alternatives. all I know is whatever system they are trying to use is not working, and the only way to do it, is go after the gil transfer mechanism and the end buyers of the product to have any effect.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

There's a reason why you need to have someone on your friend list to mail them stuff.

Incidentally, that used to be one of the ways the RMTers conducted transactions but SE started cracking down on it due to how obvious it was.

Using the market board for transactions leaves a layer of ambiguity that seems to be deterring them from taking action against it.

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Sure, but that just means a person has to be stupid enough to accept a friend request, that shouldn't be grounds to be deleted.

I'm not saying that they should just automatically ban anyone who seems to have a connection to a confirmed bot, because that would be idiotic.

It should, however, be grounds for an additional investigation and weighted against the suspect player(s)...which is clearly not the case because I've reported all of the map farmers on my server and not one of them has been removed yet despite them routinely getting aid from other bots that are blatantly hacking and are getting banned.

There is something fundamentally wrong with how they're investigating reports for the number of bans to be as low as it is.

All of you are still fighting the good fight? God bless your souls. I received the "long-time player" survey from SE today and it made me think of you guys. Filled it out with commentary about the botting and MB situation that I hope won't fall on deaf ears (Yeah, I laughed out loud too when I said that) but as they say: previous behaviour predicts future behaviour - so I'm not betting the chicken farm on that.

Ah, I miss the days of being in MB wars nearly all day every day then having to go out gathering because my mats were running low and I like to keep my costs down, only to see a rival out there, and the situation quickly escalating into who's able to finish gathering materials first and leave to start crafting while the other is still out there sweating about being undercut. Popping sprint, doing button mash and timing tricks to dismount and start gathering at nearly the same moment, canceling the start-gathering animation at normal nodes while doing ephemerals to move between them faster and get a pop, and using other techniques as "weapons". LOL! Player search camping and rushing back to check the MB to update prices when the campee appears in town (I was accused of botting by so many times for "magically" knowing when they updated their prices.)

Sigh. Man, I miss you guys. FFXIV was my GAME. If SE fixes this problem, you bet your sweet bippy I'm gonna be back. Anyway, keep your spirits up! Have a good weekend. Bye! o/

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Originally Posted by Seyoun

All of you are still fighting the good fight? God bless your souls. I received the "long-time player" survey from SE today and it made me think of you guys. Filled it out with commentary about the botting and MB situation that I hope won't fall on deaf ears (Yeah, I laughed out loud too when I said that) but as they say: previous behaviour predicts future behaviour - so I'm not betting the chicken farm on that.

Ah, I miss the days of being in MB wars nearly all day every day then having to go out gathering because my mats were running low and I like to keep my costs down, only to see a rival out there, and the situation quickly escalating into who's able to finish gathering materials first and leave to start crafting while the other is still out there sweating about being undercut. Popping sprint, doing button mash and timing tricks to dismount and start gathering at nearly the same moment, canceling the start-gathering animation at normal nodes while doing ephemerals to move between them faster and get a pop, and using other techniques as "weapons". LOL! Player search camping and rushing back to check the MB to update prices when the campee appears in town (I was accused of botting by so many times for "magically" knowing when they updated their prices.)

Sigh. Man, I miss you guys. FFXIV was my GAME. If SE fixes this problem, you bet your sweet bippy I'm gonna be back. Anyway, keep your spirits up! Have a good weekend. Bye! o/

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in all fairness, I have not been doing any MB for months, and a lot happier about that too. but it is sad when a sizable portion of dev created material is basically useless, but I guess SE doesnt see it that way. I mean the bots use it still right?

always welcome back on Zalera any time Seyoun, MB pvp against real people is always best lol

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

What you need to start doing , is to inconvenience the buyers. 3 day vacation for first time offenders, maybe a week for the second and the third time, gone. Perma ban.

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Honestly this is far too lenient. If they made it official that there were 2 safety nets, players would probably RMT even more.

It should be an instant perma-ban for the first time, with an official warning to ensure players are aware of it. This isn't something you can do accidentally, you make a clear choice to break ToS. There's no reason to give second chances.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

Honestly this is far too lenient. If they made it official that there were 2 safety nets, players would probably RMT even more.

It should be an instant perma-ban for the first time, with an official warning to ensure players are aware of it. This isn't something you can do accidentally, you make a clear choice to break ToS. There's no reason to give second chances.

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while I do agree, the problem is twofold. I dont see SE ever doing that, look how hard it is just to get them to ban obvious botting
second, perma-ban doesnt spread the word as well as people who had a vacation, I mean make it 7 days then a perma even, and then come back, full well KNOWING they could lose their character with the next infraction and telling people about it. in this case, I think word of mouth advertising its bad would be far more effective than removing people for a first time offense. removing people first time cuts down on the forum posts whining about it having happened, also spreading the word.

long ago, in a game called Vanguard, I was one of those idiots. partner at the time wanted some in game spending money so they asked me to do it. I was caught, enjoyed a vacation and even though we didnt play the game for much longer... I learned the lesson. it does work. these days, there are virtually no consequences for breaking the ToS. they need to bring back consequences, and this would do it in a non intrusive (client side) way.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

Honestly this is far too lenient. If they made it official that there were 2 safety nets, players would probably RMT even more.

It should be an instant perma-ban for the first time, with an official warning to ensure players are aware of it. This isn't something you can do accidentally, you make a clear choice to break ToS. There's no reason to give second chances.

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I don't know about instant perma-ban the first time but it should be in terms of months (like 3-6) not days. Short term penalties rarely are an effective deterrent, especially when there are multiple chances to keep repeating the offense as you say. But the second time? Definitely permaban. If they didn't learn the first time, they're not going to learn the second.

I can remember the posts that Blizzard CMs would make regarding player behavior when it came to bot bans. If the player was permanently banned, they'd just make new accounts and do it all over again because that was the only way to keep playing. If the player was given a 6 month ban so they could regain access to the things the character had earned on their account, they rarely repeated the botting (always the tiny percentage that would be an exception) because they got back the things they enjoyed having and didn't want to risk losing them again.

I think one of the bigger problems MMOs face now when it comes to combatting player botting is the existence of things like level boost and MSQ skip potions (or in WoW's case account-wide achievements). While those are intended as QOL for new players to play with their veteran friends or for players to share items locked behind long grinds or heavy RNG with their alts, they also reduce the feeling of penalty when it comes using bans, whether permanent or temporary, as punishment for botting.

Let's say a player loves their Kamuy of the Nine Tails and it's their favorite mount. They had spent hundreds of hours EX farming back in Stormblood getting all the doggos so they would have Kamuy at the end. Then they get stupid and botted, got caught and were banned.

No level boost and MSQ skip potion, and a ban means being without the mount for months as the player either waits out a temporary ban or rebuilds everything on a new account from scratch. There's a lesson learned in both cases, but the temporary one is less likely to build resentment and determination to repeat the same mistake since it's saying "okay, you made a mistake and we're going to trust you won't do it again so here's your stuff back".

With level boost and MSQ skip potion, neither ban is impactful. Get a new account, buy your potions and you're instantly ready to start farming those EX trials again. Better yet, take about 20 hours to run MSQ to level 80 (skipping cutscenes) and you can join unsynced farm groups to get the mounts back even faster. A few weeks of inconvenience is all.

The game lacks sufficient desirable long grind/heavy RNG rewards that appeal to all segments of the player base to deter someone who wants to bot from doing so. A legacy player has a deterrent because they would lose all their legacy exclusives. Someone with the Feast ranking mounts has a deterrent because there would be no getting those back. Hunters with the Centurio Tiger have a deterrent because that's a massive time commitment to get and you can't bot your way to it like the Expert crafting pteranodon. Difficult to get titles like Necromancer might deter players who have them.

Just about everything else, regardless of rarity. is too easy to get if someone who likes to bot has to start over on a fresh account. EX/Raid mounts? Farm unsynced once you have a level cap character again. Rare drops that are sold on the MB? Buy or bot gil to buy it off the MB. Gear for glamour? Farm the content unsynced (possibly using a bot) or buy off the MB (using your RMT gil).

When it's easy to regain desirable items taken away, there's no sense of loss to make someone think twice about cheating.

There's a guy on my server who has routinely been botting since the HW days and has basically every Mogstation mount.

I've tried regularly to get him and his small collection of farm bots banned for years, but it's been working about as well as one might expect.

Ran into a group of map bots while running around on an alt on Balmung. Called it out in chat for everyone in the zone to come look. Because apparently the bot program had gone haywire. Most of them were standing there doing nothing (I switched jobs to a crafting role, then back to a tank role and suddenly two of them instantly began healing me, and once I was full health, went right back to just standing there), 2 were perpetually mounting, then dismounting over and over again. I mean, it was /obviously/ a bot controlled group. Any GM or SE employee who peeked at it would have come to the same conclusion.

Just about every player in the zone came over to look. The conversation in shout chat was depressing. Everyone knows this is going on and knows SE isn't doing anything about it. Nearly everyone who zoomed into see this going on reported them, but today when I did a check, they were all still on, still running maps in the same zone.

I've stopped trying to sell anything on the marketboard, having found other ways to make gil now that don't involve competing with bots. It's nice not to have that stressor, I can enjoy the game again.

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Originally Posted by Nepentha

Ran into a group of map bots while running around on an alt on Balmung. Called it out in chat for everyone in the zone to come look. Because apparently the bot program had gone haywire. Most of them were standing there doing nothing (I switched jobs to a crafting role, then back to a tank role and suddenly two of them instantly began healing me, and once I was full health, went right back to just standing there), 2 were perpetually mounting, then dismounting over and over again. I mean, it was /obviously/ a bot controlled group. Any GM or SE employee who peeked at it would have come to the same conclusion.

Just about every player in the zone came over to look. The conversation in shout chat was depressing. Everyone knows this is going on and knows SE isn't doing anything about it. Nearly everyone who zoomed into see this going on reported them, but today when I did a check, they were all still on, still running maps in the same zone.

I've stopped trying to sell anything on the marketboard, having found other ways to make gil now that don't involve competing with bots. It's nice not to have that stressor, I can enjoy the game again.

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yeah its past the point of "out of hand" and SE really needs to do something about it.

its unreal how they continue to do.. what amounts to nothing when the population has exploded. they want to free up some server space.. ban the bots!

The thing I don't get is why some people who were obviously abusing bots during the restoration rankings did get banned, but the map farmers have been getting a free pass for nearly a year despite being much more prone to glitching out due to the fact that if even one of them lags or otherwise malfunctions it tends to break the rest of them as well.

Diadem being a cross-world environment meant they were probably being noticed by a lot more people, though it shouldn't take a whole DC's worth of reports just get a couple people purged...

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

The thing I don't get is why some people who were obviously abusing bots during the restoration rankings did get banned, but the map farmers have been getting a free pass for nearly a year despite being much more prone to glitching out due to the fact that if even one of them lags or otherwise malfunctions it tends to break the rest of them as well.

Diadem being a cross-world environment meant they were probably being noticed by a lot more people, though it shouldn't take a whole DC's worth of reports just get a couple people purged...

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their policies do seem even more rng related than the game.

Kage, you are on Aether, any decrease with the new character lockdown?

I actually noticed something...troubling, which is that to bypass the character creation restrictions, the RMTers are seemingly either purchasing accounts or using back-ups to do their botting on as I noticed an entire party of map farmers flagged as returners were going at it a couple weeks ago.

It's honestly impossible to tell if any of the usual suspects map farmer or otherwise are truly gone because I've seen some of them go inactive over a year at times then just suddenly return as if nothing happened.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

I actually noticed something...troubling, which is that to bypass the character creation restrictions, the RMTers are seemingly either purchasing accounts or using back-ups to do their botting on as I noticed an entire party of map farmers flagged as returners were going at it a couple weeks ago.

It's honestly impossible to tell if any of the usual suspects map farmer or otherwise are truly gone because I've seen some of them go inactive over a year at times then just suddenly return as if nothing happened.

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The normal RMT stuff is more likely compromised accounts. Not all compromised accounts get used right away.

Have no idea with the map bots though with SE seeming to ignore them, purchasing inactive accounts would make more sense.