1 million active players, but how many of them are bots and alts?

Lost Ark averaged 200 thousand concurrent players last March and April. How many of those are bots? Players later discovered that over half of them are bots.

And given how FF14's STF is the epitome of ineptness, and given how the bot problem is getting worse and worse when people do less and less content, can we really say that the game has "grown"?

I daresay that most of the player "growth" is actually driven by bots. A good guess would be that 30-40% of the 1 million "active" players are indeed bots and alts.

quick question. Why do you care? We already know botting is a serious issue with this game and it needs to be fixed, but is this thread's tinfoil theory seriously going to be the tipping point for SE to double down on RMT? For what purpose does this thread even serve besides just being absolute nothing discussion about player numbers.

I rather we instead talk about how SE isnt doing a good job about banning RMT accounts rather than change the narrative about "active players"

Far more when you realize that on Materia alone, bots outnumber actual players by 3:1, and on some of the servers, like Zurvan, even more like 8:1

For a player base of 19000 players on Materia, bots make up a good 10,000 of those.

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Originally Posted by DixieBellOCE

Far more when you realize that on Materia alone, bots outnumber actual players by 3:1, and on some of the servers, like Zurvan, even more like 8:1

For a player base of 19000 players on Materia, bots make up a good 10,000 of those.

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Precisely. It's also rather sad when some of those bots also purchase housing, an extremely limited resource in this game. We have gotten to the point where one would not know whether a player is a player or a bot.

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Originally Posted by TheNight

Precisely. It's also rather sad when some of those bots also purchase housing, an extremely limited resource in this game. We have gotten to the point where one would not know whether a player is a player or a bot.

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And that's literally where you lost me

Shell FC's are not botters, bots dont purchase houses.

Also if housing is "an extremely limited resource" it's because of SE. It also isnt that much of an extremely limited resource considering there's thousands upon thousands of plots on new worlds.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

quick question. Why do you care? We already know botting is a serious issue with this game and it needs to be fixed, but is this thread's tinfoil theory seriously going to be the tipping point for SE to double down on RMT? For what purpose does this thread even serve besides just being absolute nothing discussion about player numbers.

I rather we instead talk about how SE isnt doing a good job about banning RMT accounts rather than change the narrative about "active players"

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Lost Ark's creator, Smilegate, lied to their investors about there being more than 1 million concurrent players to attract investment, while fully cognizant that the majority of those "players" are bots.

Do you see the parallel here? Do you see why Square Enix is not banning bots?

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Originally Posted by Stormpeaks

And that's literally where you lost me

Shell FC's are not botters, bots dont purchase houses.

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While there is a large number of Airship/submersible bot farms, the majority of the FC's are just hoarders.

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Originally Posted by Stormpeaks

And that's literally where you lost me

Shell FC's are not botters, bots dont purchase houses.

Also if housing is "an extremely limited resource" it's because of SE. It also isnt that much of an extremely limited resource considering there's thousands upon thousands of plots on new worlds.

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Perhaps not all shell FCs are botters, but how many of the owners of these shell FCs engage in RMT...?

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Originally Posted by TheNight

Perhaps not all shell FCs are botters, but how many of the owners of these shell FCs engage in RMT...?

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Not any more than other players, how does having houses equals to RMT ? You know people use submarines to furnish their own houses right ? They dont need RMT

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Originally Posted by DixieBellOCE

While there is a large number of Airship/submersible bot farms, the majority of the FC's are just hoarders.

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So be it, if they worked for it, they deserve it /shrug

Well, OP makes up for half the bots and alts, so that's that question answered

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Originally Posted by DixieBellOCE

This is one of the 300+ FC houses owned by a single person on Materia.
Nobody is paying for the subscriptions with legitimate money.

https://i.postimg.cc/DZrBtfNr/image-...-091004147.png
https://i.postimg.cc/qqfHG732/image-...-090456885.png

On average 4 submersibles makes ~1-2m every 3 days, multiply that by 300 Houses and you now have somebody making 600m/week.

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Once again, you are showing a multiowner, which is always or almost always done on a low level character, this proves nothing about RMT lol

Also that person doesnt have all 300 fcs so this doesnt mean much

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Originally Posted by TheNight

A good guess would be that 30-40% of the 1 million "active" players are indeed bots and alts.

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The active player statistic already removes millions of characters that could potentially be bots. There's no reason for gil farming bots to clear Endwalker. That's why there's an enormous discrepancy in the number of male hyurs in this graph.

https://i.imgur.com/h4RHpiV.png

Unless you just mean players who sometimes use third party tools to automate gameplay, which there's no way to know. But they aren't fake, they're just bad people.

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Originally Posted by TheNight

how many of them are alts?

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Dunno but at least one of them is you.

Dunno.

But other MMOs, e.g., Runescape did at one point reveal that around 60% of its player base were bots.

Also, yes, housing is limited, and dead servers don't change that fact, nor does the recent re-emergence of demolition, in a couple of weeks once people have realized they weren't lucky, they'll go for other houses, and then servers that even do have a somewhat abundance will be full again, e.g., Ragnarok, bar FC lots. It's an abysmal system. With the only ones once again being new worlds. - People should not need to transfer to another server to get a plot. The supply should be equalling demand if not exceeding for both personal and FC.

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Originally Posted by DixieBellOCE

https://i.postimg.cc/qqfHG732/image-...-090456885.png

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https://cdn.betterttv.net/emote/58e5...c6f0f9/1x.webp

I mean what do you want to hear? A lot? Probably.

Is the game in a decline right now? Probably, will it turn around for 7.0? Yeah it will, then it will go down again. Its how this game operates.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DixieBellOCE

This is one of the 300+ FC houses owned by a single person on Materia.
Nobody is paying for the subscriptions with legitimate money.

https://i.postimg.cc/DZrBtfNr/image-...-091004147.png
https://i.postimg.cc/qqfHG732/image-...-090456885.png

On average 4 submersibles makes ~1-2m every 3 days, multiply that by 300 Houses and you now have somebody making 600m/week.

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I wonder how many multiowners don't change all the tags to being the same FC tag. If I was a multiowner, I'd probably try to hide that by making everything different.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TheNight

Lost Ark averaged 200 thousand concurrent players last March and April. How many of those are bots? Players later discovered that over half of them are bots.

And given how FF14's STF is the epitome of ineptness, and given how the bot problem is getting worse and worse when people do less and less content, can we really say that the game has "grown"?

I daresay that most of the player "growth" is actually driven by bots. A good guess would be that 30-40% of the 1 million "active" players are indeed bots and alts.

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Who cares? I certainly don't.

This is extremely rich coming from a dude known for having 20 billion alts to fuel his RMT business

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Originally Posted by BlazingErial

This is extremely rich coming from a dude known for having 20 billion alts to fuel his RMT business

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Source the guy is spending $200 billion a month to fund gold selling?

If you can provide a source, I may have to invest in Square Enix or the alternative 0_o

Clearly business to be done there!

So many active players. How many of them are bots?

So few players. The game is dying.

In the end we are all bots, made of flesh and making our way through life for reason we rarely understand... its beautiful and scary.

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

quick question. Why do you care?

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I raise you a counter question:
what else do people do with this game, except care? What else is there to do for those who need the midcore content that this game sorely lacks?
Besides, these are all things that should be said, but people are just tired of seeing it. If the problem were somehow dealt with, we'd probably see less threads like this. So, in the meantime, we may as well let these threads keep happening so that it's annoyingly there for Squeen to see, if they look at all, so that we don't have to write it ourselves. Maybe, one day, it'll lead to some sort of resolution.

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Originally Posted by TheNight

stuff that we don't agree with

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None. We like the game as-is, which means there aren't a lot of bots. In fact, the game is at an all-time high in subscriber count in addition to being the most critically-acclaimed MMO of all time. I literally cried about 12 times during the MSQ (6.x patches) and a few dozen more during Endwalker. I've played for 10 hours a day since 2013 and still haven't run out of content. Still better than WoW, remember Shadowlands? What other MMO are you gonna play if you hate this one so much? Exactly. FFXIV is fine as-is, so your claim about bots is false because everyone else also agrees with me. Stop complaining.

Also, according to post #10 of this thread, you are a bot.

What's the overarching point to any of this though? Every mmorpg in recent history has dealt or deals with this problem to this day. World of Warcraft has probably one of the more 'out-in-the-open' RMT issues compared to any other game in the list.

But because FFXIV is in the current mmorpg 'zeitgeist' -it's this games turn to have this pointed out?

Oh yes, so this is what it feels like to nibble on the bait.

I hate this so much. :(

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

Well, OP makes up for half the bots and alts, so that's that question answered

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/thread
/10 chars

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Neoyoshi

What's the overarching point to any of this though? Every mmorpg in recent history has dealt or deals with this problem to this day. World of Warcraft has probably one of the more 'out-in-the-open' RMT issues compared to any other game in the list.

But because FFXIV is in the current mmorpg 'zeitgeist' -it's this games turn to have this pointed out?

Oh yes, so this is what it feels like to nibble on the bait.

I hate this so much. :(

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Tunnel focusing on things they feel they are associated with.

Virtue signaling to distract from their personal flaws.

Obsession with what others do instead of focusing on having fun with what they do themselves.

Social media conditioning to be part of the "popular" crowd.

If people gave more importance to what they do instead of to what they have, bots wouldn't be a problem.

Very few, mostly because the "Active Player" determinator is going to cut out most basic gil farming bots, as Fawkes mentioned. The only bots that need to clear Endwalker are top-end craft/gather bots, and even a maximally skeptical view of how many of those exist is going to struggle mightily to justify anything above four figures - they're relatively expensive, competition-sensitive, and effective enough operating off a single character or a tandem craft/gather duo that the major limiter is sale slots.. which isn't something you need more full cleared characters for.

Alts is a trickier call in theory, but the tell for me is that if it was a significant factor, I'd expect to see a noticeable uptick on either Balmung and Mateus from all the RP alts, or Gilgamesh from raiders using alts to funnel reclear loot. But.. well, the former doesn't need to be fully up to date save for rare instances of glamour chasing, and the latter isn't really necessary in the modern environment. Both show in the proportional and expected character counts.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Aword3213

So few players. The game is dying.

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Team fortress 2 already had people yelling the game was dying fast in 2010. And especialy overwatch would be the tf2 killer.

The most dedicated core of players can keep a game alive for VERY long. But that only works if the game itself is good. If you think the flaws in this game are bad... try tf2 matchmaking. It will make the botting problem in this game appear as almost non existant. And yet, even with that issue in tf2, dedicated servers keep the game alive.

A game might also appear dead for several years until a good update comes out again and pushes numbers up for a while again. tf2 has the advantage of being pvp, which doesnt require a constant addition of content to be kept alive as much, which helps it a lot. But players can be stubborn.

FF made a major mistake with island sanctuaries as it isnt a grindy combat based thing like eureka. This is probably a major reason numbers now appear extra low. But it doesnt tell anything about what they add later. 7.0 might be a failure, while maybe in 7.3 they add something that revives a lot. Its very hard to create good fresh content that players will like. Its just trial and error.

Add to that FF16 and it will make the current game appear quite dead. But who knows what they will do later on. As long as new content causes a spike in money, there is motivation to keep the game alive. Maybe as barebone and life support. But this little bit can be more than enough.

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Originally Posted by Hurlstone

In the end we are all bots, made of flesh and making our way through life for reason we rarely understand... its beautiful and scary.

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This.

I like you <3

I don't know and I don't care, I just know that I've been real and active since 2016.

Because I have a house in Shirogane and I like playing there at least a few days a week, if not all week.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TheNight

given how FF14's STF is the epitome of ineptness, and given how the bot problem is getting worse and worse when people do less and less content, can we really say that the game has "grown"?

I daresay that most of the player "growth" is actually driven by bots. A good guess would be that 30-40% of the 1 million "active" players are indeed bots and alts.

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I daresay that some of them make forum accounts too.

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/...20170622150432

Haven't brought this bad boy out in a while.

Don't forget people logging in exclusively to afk in a night club! They might as well count as bots.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Atelier-Bagur

quick question. Why do you care?

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I think it's a simple answer - this particular personality of his only knows how to doomsay, and all of his recent attempts at doing so have been thoroughly refuted with real data showing how the game is continuing to grow. I'd say he's given up pushing the lie about the game failing based on the number of players, and is now shifting to acting as if it's failing because there are bots. But without anything to support the idea that there are a greater portion of bots now compared to in the past, it's also meaningless.