Small window into the state of botting

Hey all, I just whipped this up a while ago, yeah it's more bot recognition but it's just a small clip of several (10-20) bots farming the Eureka bunny fate, which literally can generate around 100k gil an hour.

Their performance starts at around 2 mins in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR73ggQMZPw

These have all been reported, along with hundreds of other bots that I've reported in the past, but I can't help but notice SE's lack of action against botting.

I'm referring to their weekly banwaves, which show minimal action against botters, where only 1-2 are banned per month, and a handful suspended per week... Though here we have about 20 just running around in Eureka destroying the game economy (and making FATE farming in Eureka extremely harder for those poor few who are trying to do other FATEs)

Sadly nothing will be done, but the more the community shame and pressure SE the more likely they'll eventually one day do something about it.

Yeah, it's really saddening. What worries me is the complacency I'm finding when having discussions with people about botting. They always give the same reactions of "what's new" or "it's an mmo of course it has bots", but it's complacency like that which is giving SE a big old thumbs up for their negligence towards botters.

I love this game, the community is mostly great, and the devs are incredible, but this is issue of botting is growing exponentially, and SE need to get involved soon, as we're at a pretty serious point in the growth of botting and the expanse of their capabilities now.

You know what… it was like..Tuesday when I logged into my lala for her to do CL and that was the first time I saw an intense amount high levels standing around waiting on that fate. I didn’t think they were bots, especially since while I was farming mobs around them, a WHM from that crowd kept regens on me. Now I’m wondering if they really we’re all bots… creepy and kind of annoying.

Ohhh that's something I noticed a while ago back in shb, it's likely a bot tbh.

I was doing maps with a few buddies and noticed another group instantly healing me and I thought it was a little odd. Started happening more often whilst doing maps and clearing the trap mobs, and so I decided to test something that proved they were botting.

If you ever want to test and find that proof, simply switch to a gatherer/crafter (class with low hp), switch back to your highest lvl class so that you have like 1% HP left, and you will get an instant benediction (less than a second of response from the bot).

I was on SGE mass pulling and honestly getting annoyed since they were stealing what little joys of healing I get out of Eureka. But thinking on it, there were moments I would be just standing there checking cl for the amount and I don’t think I got a regen. But once I started mass pulling again… ah damn… lol yup…

You know what they'll do about it.

"Bunny FATES in The Forbidden Land: Eureka no longer award gil".

Oh it's highly likely that'll be the case, but that'll just be barrelling towards a bad practice, because at this point bots can almost do anything in the game, even carry you through the entire MSQ. Bots will always find another way to make gil so long as nothing is done about them, and we have to suffer when the game changes because of them. Yay...

I'm honestly surprised they didn't start abusing this sooner.

It probably explains why all of the treasure map bots seem to have up and disappeared recently as opposed to them actually being banned, though...

They really should just start being less terrible at banning the bots that can't be speedily mass-produced as opposed to taking measures that hurt actual players, though. There is one mild positive about this, though, which is that since Eureka is cross-world it means they have the potential to be noticed by a greater number of players then they would had they simply been farming treasure maps.

It really puts a bad image on the game when I'm sure this isn't even the devs fault. I'm sure they're aware, but SE make money out of this stuff, and it gives them a juicy MAU statistic. But the way botting is just growing and growing, it's going to create a lot of disinterest in wanting to achieve things that were once otherwise hard or took long to achieve.

When games tend to struggle, they usually have the option of letting bots do their thing and hope that players remain interested, or nuke the bots and hope that the community can regrow.

This game is not struggling, but it might if more and more bots begin to swarm every feature of the game to the point where these MMO activities are just full of bots. If SE actually do something about the bots however, they still stand to keep a stable revenue and retain player interests. FF will grow no matter what, but if the ratio of bots continues to grow, it will cause a slow exodus of players. Albeit, very slow because the game is still good for other reasons, but the grind will feel hopeless and a portion of the community will look elsewhere for better managed games.

The forces of darkness say this is a troll thread.

Bots are to be expected, especially in an MMO as popular as this one. The main issue is that the task force meant to take care of these things is laughably small. Like, no more than a few people. There's no way they can handle all these reports in a timely fashion. That force needs to be expanded if they are ever going to get a handle on this situation, or RMT.

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Originally Posted by Roflcopter

The forces of darkness say this is a troll thread.

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What part of this thread gives you that impression? o.O

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Originally Posted by Vahlnir

Bots are to be expected, especially in an MMO as popular as this one. The main issue is that the task force meant to take care of these things is laughably small. Like, no more than a few people. There's no way they can handle all these reports in a timely fashion. That force needs to be expanded if they are ever going to get a handle on this situation, or RMT.

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And they can either increase the STF (because yes, they literally have only 5 people as of EW) or have something proactive in place, many games have systems that are designed to confuse bots and don't effect players at all (literally known as a honeypot), or have a system that goes through event logs and flag unusual behaviour (such as players who have managed to remain online and never AFK for like 2 full weeks).

It's occurred to me if the bots are able to know exactly where the treasure is hidden the moment they get a bunny (Via client-side datamining or some such), that would be an undeniable indicator of foul play being involved because this method of farming would not be efficient if they were having to manually check every single treasure map spot with no direction whatsoever.

It also bears mentioning that there is a limit to how many bunnies can be distributed per FATE meaning these bots can potentially deprive actual players of them if their numbers are high enough which really can't slide.

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Originally Posted by Roflcopter

The forces of darkness say this is a troll thread.

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I guess pointing out a known problem with video evidence is trolling now...?

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Originally Posted by DigbyCaesar

What part of this thread gives you that impression? o.O

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Probably to do with how any time bots get brought up, people just assume "LOL THEY BANNED LIKE 5K LAST WEEK OBV TROLL" knowing full well how their reports specificly split things up and show that the only things ever getting smacked are the lowest of hanging fruits my little cousin could probably clean up.

FFXIV is a very bot friendly game. The absolute lack of numbers (and, potentially effort) from the task force have made that pretty clear and easy.

I did a little "research" into the status of the situation on the Aether DC, and while I didn't see tons of freshly level-skipped accounts grinding bunnies like in TC's video, there were nonetheless a handful of suspicious players who were mounting up on the standard chocobo (Which is the mount botting scripts default to) in perfect unison and running EXACTLY to where their bunny chest was every single time with no pauses along the way to suggest they were checking other spots.

Hopefully it doesn't go mainstream for the RMTers on every DC like with the treasure map bots.

It most likely will hit the mainstream tbh. It takes one google to get several results of different botting programs, freely advertising how they can do everything in the game for you.

The fact that these can be found so easily without fear of intervention from SE is just another example of how welcome botting is to the game.

And this only cascades into influencing RMT, as these people use the gil they're generating to sell and fund the several bots they're paying a subscription for.

If this grows, this will put (mostly new) players into a position where they can't make gil as easily as we did once, and resort to RMT to be able to catch up with people.

There are already predatory sites that go under the cloak of "guide websites" that always suggest "you need about 3 mil to start doing things" and the same website uses 2/3 of it's page to advertise that it sells gil. I'm probably not allowed to mention the name for obvious reasons but it rhymes with "millionaire mirls".

LMAO!

https://forums.playlostark.com/t/inc...ot-bans/233996

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Originally Posted by Skiros

LMAO!

https://forums.playlostark.com/t/inc...ot-bans/233996

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Honestly, if I saw this post a year ago I'd white knight for FF, but I really can't anymore lol

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Originally Posted by DigbyCaesar

It most likely will hit the mainstream tbh. It takes one google to get several results of different botting programs, freely advertising how they can do everything in the game for you.

The fact that these can be found so easily without fear of intervention from SE is just another example of how welcome botting is to the game.

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I have seen some of these proudly advertising themselves into Square's social media with the comments. While uncommon, I feel the fact some are willing to go to that level, to proudly flaunt their program right in front of them, shows enough that they aren't concerned at all.