Reporting Botting Activities

Honestly I don't really want to waste too much time with preambles and some such nonsense, seeing that most likely nothing is going to come out of this anyway.

I am a bit disheartened by the inaction against bots.
I have reported a squad of bots about a dozen times over the past weeks and months and urged other players to do the same, yet they are still going strong. Not one of them has been banned so far and they continue in their merry bot routes every day.
They are super easy to spot, too. All it takes is for someone to go there and watch them go, literally flying the exact same route pixel perfect. They aren't even attempting to hide it, and why would they? Nothing is being done anyway.

So if you want to get a glimpse at SE's inactivity about bots, feel free to visit Twintania and the area just outside of Aporia in Labyrinthos every time the ephemeral Botanist nodes are up and you can watch them go round and round.
You can do the same with the other ephemeral nodes as well, of course.

So yeah, I am super frustrated that nothing is being done against bots that flood the market board with those supposedly rare and hard to come-by resources, which makes it somewhat pointless to farm those for Gil as a player since you'll be competing with bots who like to post dozens of stacks of those every day.

What else can we players do, really, aside from reporting them and watching them continue their bot activity for months without anything happening?

Since nothing is being done about the bots, I will just update this every day with whether they are still there.
And they are. They are still there, doing their rounds.

Bots are banned in waves, not on individual sightings/reports. You'll see the reports every Thursday or so on the Lodestone about bans. Just go about your business and ignore the bots. You will NEVER actually witness immediate action taken against them.

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

Bots are banned in waves, not on individual sightings/reports. You'll see the reports every Thursday or so on the Lodestone about bans. Just go about your business and ignore the bots. You will NEVER actually witness immediate action taken against them.

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They have been active for weeks and months, and been reported for as long as that. I have reported them in game, I have reported their lodestone profile and I have reported them in the help center / customer support website.
None of that had any effect on them. They are just not getting banned no matter what we do. A lot of waves have come and gone and yet they still persist.
So this is more or less the only thing I can still think of; a diary documenting the activity of the bots and the inactivity of SE until that changes.

I mean, this is isn't rocket science. You go there, observe them for a few minutes and that's all it takes. They look like bots, they act like bots, they are bots. All it takes is the will to actually do something about them instead of just posting a token effort on the website.

bots and MMOs go together. there's no way around it. nothing you or I or anyone else can do anything about it.

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

bots and MMOs go together. there's no way around it. nothing you or I or anyone else can do anything about it.

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Anyone else?
SE can do something about it. It's not that hard, really.
Private Servers have no issue fighting bots as long as they are willing to have someone look after the problem. And that's what it really takes: Someone to actually look for the bots in the usual botting places, and to ban them. You could spend more effort to look into what other characters they have interacted with to see where the money is going, but just banning the bots themselves is enough to make it cost-prohibitive as long as the effort is kept up.
But I assume that SE is not willing to go to such lengths; to any lengths, really.
It's super simple to spot them. Again, this isn't rocket science. You just have to go there to see them. That's all it takes.

it's a matter of cost versus return on investment. somewhere along the line someone made a decision that only a certain amount of money will go into mitigating botting issues to a certain extent that the devs consider acceptable. the people/organizations in charge of bots will almost always find ways around banning methods. it's a game of one-up man ship that can only go so far. there is not an unlimited amount of money that can be thrown at the problem to make bots go away forever.

Bots have been around since mmos came over on the Mayflower. They are hard to kill. You get rid of one and two more take their place. You'd think after all this time that gaming companies would have invented a way to rid mmos from botting. Like those nonsense names they come up with "Pejdhsa Jagfdos", for example, just a bunch of jumble letters. I wonder why they can't filter nonsense names and prevent them from creating an account. I'd for one, would much rather report a no nonsense name. Easier to type.

The thing is, is that there is not enough monitoring in real time, in game. It's like SE relies solely on us to report stuff like this. I'm sure they get tons of reports everyday too. Yet the task force doesn't seem to have the means to keep up with that many reports on RMT activity and botting. When they do show how many accounts were banned each Thursday and we keep seeing the same name over the bots heads week after, week, it makes you wonder if the task force is a one man show.

The old days have gone where a "live" GM shows up and bans them for cheating and botting on the spot as soon as they see the report come through. I don't think SE even allots the man power to keep up with them. Therefore we can only expect to see swarms of bots in game, sadly.

So it's Thursday and you'll have seen that they terminated about 4-5 thousand or so accounts. The reprieve will be short however as they are probably already back at it because the bot makers just make more to replace those ones.

There's two FC's full of bots that seem to be doing nothing but farming fates with warriors on hyperion. Keep seeing them, aint sure how the money is made from that.

Accept that crime is a facet of life.

People still speed and drive like idiots; you see it daily. Does that mean cops don't care?

People still murder. Detectives don't care? That's why?

Just because you don't see it with your own two eyes doesn't mean those in charge are apathetic.

You see the crime, you report it, you move on.

Yes, you may still be affected by the crime. Accept it and deal. You might still get in an accident on the freeway today, despite the DOT's best efforts to make freeways safe.

Life. Dig it.

I just checked and our bot friends are still going strong. They showed up in force tonight, too, including a rare Viera.

I honestly don't know what accounts they banned, or whether that number is entirely made up. They are clearly not banning the gathering bots though, that much is certain. Or at least not in EU. Perhaps they are very stringent in Japan or NA, who aside from SE really knows?

Whatever it may be, the "banning bots in waves through automated systems" is clearly not working - if banning bots was the primary goal. The cynical part of me isn't even sure if they actively want to ban bots. They are paying customers after all. Every gathering bot like that pays a monthly subscription, if they are selling these materials on the market without further processing then they are probably paying for additional retainers, too. Every gathering bot also paid for a level boost and a story skip. In that sense they are probably better customers than those people who only subscribe whenever a major content or story patch is released. So there is not a whole lot of incentives to pay a person to go after paying customers like that.
It could be weighed against the potential downside of losing customers who are fed up with bots, but the messages they are putting out about banning bots clearly seem to work to keep the players placid. It's easy to buy into the "More and more bots just keep popping up, there is nothing anyone can do about it" mentality.
Remember the money that I mentioned SE is making off the bots? Most of that cost is upfront for the bot owners. If they see that they can operate a bot like that for a couple months, it's easy to do the calculation on whether that is worth it or not. And it clearly is for them at the moment, as we can see. But if they spend that money on a bot as well as their time to get the bot high enough to unlock the zones they need to in order to gather these nodes, and then their bot is banned after less than a week or so, that is somewhat discouraging for bot owners. They might try again, perhaps more than once. But if your bot keeps getting banned in these lucrative spots, you will think twice before investing another 50€ into your next bot if it hasn't made you any money.

(Continued, because arbitrary 3000 characters limit per post.)

"The bots are everywhere" only really works as an excuse for games that are free to play. The people operating the bots aren't stupid. They know when they are losing money. And this is why you cannot do waves every couple months or so, bots have to be hit hard and fast.
And the gathering bots I am talking about are not hard to find. They are not hiding in obscure places, they are not sitting in a private house or apartment and are crafting. They are not in instanced areas. They are out in the open for everyone to see and for everyone to report. You just have to show up and you have to have someone to do just that. That IS all it takes.
And these are the bots that have one of the biggest impacts of the economy of the game. They are the ones flooding the market board with cheap prices that discourages players from going out and farming those resources for Gil. Those are the ones who supply the crafting bots that spam the market board with unreasonably cheap consumables.

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Accept that crime is a facet of life.
People still speed and drive like idiots; you see it daily. Does that mean cops don't care?
People still murder. Detectives don't care? That's why?
Just because you don't see it with your own two eyes doesn't mean those in charge are apathetic.
You see the crime, you report it, you move on.
Yes, you may still be affected by the crime. Accept it and deal. You might still get in an accident on the freeway today, despite the DOT's best efforts to make freeways safe.
Life. Dig it.

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If you have a person come into the a store every day to rob the owners in broad daylight, at some point the authorities will step in.
I don't know where you live that your system or justice is this disfunctional, but if people keep seeing that same person rob places and keep reporting them to the authorities, including the place where that person lives AND where that person will rob the next place, and then nothing is done, you will have to agree that something is not working as it is supposed to - especially if this continues for months. You walk down the street to do your shopping, you see the same person going into the next store to rob it and all you can think of is "Ah well, nothing we can do about that person, I wonder what store it is going to rob next"?
You don't get to claim that you have a working justice system and working law enforcement and then also tolerate that. These two are not compatible with each other.

The full squad is active again tonight.
This is clearly an active investigation that simply needs time to properly investigate the investigation targets for proper investigationing. Or at least the support person told me something along those lines. That's what the Special Task Force is for after all. Right?
But then again, the Special Task Force is responsible for A Realm Reborn and this is clearly an Endwalker zone.

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Originally Posted by Sankaritarina

If you have a person come into the a store every day to rob the owners in broad daylight, at some point the authorities will step in.

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Yes, but if that same store gets robbed again the next night, it doesn't mean the cops don't care. It means crime is perpetuated by humans, continually. Life.

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Originally Posted by Sankaritarina

You don't get to claim that you have a working justice system and working law enforcement and then also tolerate that. These two are not compatible with each other.

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You say that, fellow human, but that's how Earth works. People busted and prosecuted every day for petty crimes, misdemeanors, antisocial behavior, battery, murder, sexual assault. And yet, we still have these things happen daily.

That doesn't mean the authorities don't care. It doesn't mean they aren't trying. That just means humans are really sick.

Anyway, kids will be kids and there will always be that one kid who melts down over bots in video games and doesn't have anything more pressing in their lives that draws their attention away from their obsessive, compulsive behavior over these bots.

You are that kid, congrats. Maybe you will be the first MMO player ever to cause a lightning bolt to come out of the sky and ban bots. This has never happened, mind you, not even way, way, way back in the day when "MMOs" were ASCII-based (we boomers called them MUDs). And believe me, bots in MUDs sucked, too.

No bot-killing-lightning-bolts since 1985, but hey, you hold out hope.

In your world your problem is super, super serious, unique and totally having an oppressive effect on your life. Ninth grade must be really tough. I hope the FFXIV SWAT team swoops down and solves those bots for you, because clearly you cannot move on until you can make 8 million gil off whatever you're selling without interference from the evil bots.

I really hope you never have a family member get cancer because, dear god, we spend billions on that a year to eradicate it. Your brain won't be able to process why this happened, considering everyone "reported" cancer and all the research in the world has been done on it, the preventative measures are in place, etc. Your head will essplode?

Or if you get mugged or your car broken into a couple of times? How will you rationalize that in your brain? People reported muggings already - on this very street! People reported car break-ins! Why is this happeneing?!?!?

Good luck with your saga here. You could possibly read other accounts and see that bot bans - in any MMO - don't work like how you're insisting they work; but nah, you do you.

When this thread reaches 465 posts and 461 of them are you, I'll come back and have a chuckle.

/shrug

most of those bot accounts are bought with stolen credit card information so they're not really fronting much cost themselves.

bots that farm fates are farming gil from them to sell online to RMT buyers. yes it's 2022 and yet people are still buying gil online with real money. the market is there.

gathering bots are much harder to detect and investigate. the Special task force has to be absolutely sure they can prove that they're bots before they can take any action on them.