Bots and Cheaters.

The Title says it all.
I have made a new character I am doing quests with just for the heck of it.
BUT at ever quest spawn point I see one bot after another trigger the quest (From UNDERGROUND) and you can see the mobs standing looking stupid while they are being attacked by an invisible character and when you use Target's Target to see they name it is all random letters and when you look them up on the Community they are all identical Lalafels. At one spawn point I saw this happen no less then 12 times over just 2 minutes, I seriously wish SQ would do more to combat this plague.

As they tell it, they do. There are lodestone reports every 2 weeks where they say how many they banned or suspended. They just do it in waves, so you can still see them between all of these waves.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

As they tell it, they do. There are lodestone reports every 2 weeks where they say how many they banned or suspended. They just do it in waves, so you can still see them between all of these waves.

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Yeah 17 bots accounts banned between sep 28 and oct 4 that's ALL across the world.. Today ALONE I've seen over 30 CLEARLY bots running around.

The issue with this is that they have a high burden of proof for banning a bot. And they should. Banning a legitimate player for odd behavior that might look like a bot would be a PR nightmare and majorly demoralizing. On top of this, the people most likely to engage in bot-like behavior without actually botting are people on the autism spectrum, ie: people who use online as their primary social outlet and are less likely to cancel their subs due to a content drought.

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Originally Posted by Valoria3

Yeah 17 bots accounts banned between sep 28 and oct 4 that's ALL across the world.. Today ALONE I've seen over 30 CLEARLY bots running around.

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Then report them? It's not like these things can always just be detected automatically. For stuff like this, the player base is basically the filter system.

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Originally Posted by PredatoryCatgirl

The issue with this is that they have a high burden of proof for banning a bot. And they should. Banning a legitimate player for odd behavior that might look like a bot would be a PR nightmare and majorly demoralizing. On top of this, the people most likely to engage in bot-like behavior without actually botting are people on the autism spectrum, ie: people who use online as their primary social outlet and are less likely to cancel their subs due to a content drought.

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Except a lot of these bots are always teleported under the map. They were all over Alpha and Raiden last summer when those servers opened last summer. I recall seeing many mobs in the world dying while being attacked by "players" that were under the map. It's the same as the RMT bots that are clipped under the aetheryte plaza in every main city.


There's absolutely more Square Enix can and should be doing to moderate their game. Anything out of bounds should be a slam dunk for auto detecting. Start by disconnecting and if it continues, then start start issuing suspensions. Likewise they could actually implement client side anti-cheat mechanisms so these things are detected much sooner and don't rely on players having to manually report things (which takes far longer than it should in XIV and it's less effort to just join in with the cheating myself).

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Originally Posted by PredatoryCatgirl

The issue with this is that they have a high burden of proof for banning a bot. And they should. Banning a legitimate player for odd behavior that might look like a bot would be a PR nightmare and majorly demoralizing. On top of this, the people most likely to engage in bot-like behavior without actually botting are people on the autism spectrum, ie: people who use online as their primary social outlet and are less likely to cancel their subs due to a content drought.

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yeah, all legitimate players run around underground...

people on the autism spectrum run cheat programs.

please explain how "legitimate" players are doing this and accessing quest givers as well as mobs from below ground... please. I have seen bugs and glitches in this game, but I cannot say that that behaviour is one of them.

I just wish they would at least implement a system that bans people below the map. I mean shit you can go to Central Shroud, stand by that one root that leads to the level 30 area and literally watch bots teleport into midair, run on air into the root and gather their quest items. The botters don't give a fuck because SE doesn't give a fuck.

I don't know why they don't just do a check if the bots are under the map and ban based on that. Plenty of other games ban people who go OOB on the map and there's no real reason to go OOB under the aetheryte unless you want to advertise RMT in say chat.

I've fallen under the map before, I think about 3 times. One time it happened while running over a bridge in Limsa and I remember it happening twice in East Shroud.

I don't know how or why it happened because I have run over the Limsa bridge thousands of times but that one time it happened. So you can fall under legitimately. They would need to test for other behaviour happening, such as interacting with quests and mobs from below.

It was easy to /teleport out though.

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Originally Posted by VerdeLuck

I don't know why they don't just do a check if the bots are under the map and ban based on that. Plenty of other games ban people who go OOB on the map and there's no real reason to go OOB under the aetheryte unless you want to advertise RMT in say chat.

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Then they'd have to patch up all of the holes above ground that lead under the map or people who stumble upon those will get hit as well.

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Originally Posted by Johners

Anything out of bounds should be a slam dunk for auto detecting. Start by disconnecting and if it continues, then start start issuing suspensions. Likewise they could actually implement client side anti-cheat mechanisms so these things are detected much sooner

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Out of bounds DC is easy to propose and difficult to implement, even more difficult to implement without creating a whole kettle of extra problems. Blizzard started doing it with WoW, and it's taken literal years to get it into some semblance of order. Are you willing to deal with that many years of such bugs?

Areas with rough terrain become nightmares. Trip over a rock and get detected as a hack attempt and DC'd. Bit of latency during mountain climbing? Next thing you're off the mount... server altogether because it thought you were trying to phase into the mountain. Happened TOO often in Highmountain, in Legion.

A small, simple placement error on the part of the server goes from a minor annoyance to having to get a hold of customer support. Exile's Reach did it a bunch with the boat at the start, to the point where it was even thought that if you got disconnected on the boat you might have to delete your character and try again. Real issue: server placed your feet an inch below the deck, so every time you tried to reconnect it would go "nope, you're out of bounds" and re-DC you until you filed a ticket.

Some areas in Shadowlands still have the issue. Fall down the proverbial well and the momentum will result in you being seen as trying to hack below the floor, so instead of just dying from the fall like you used to ... DC loop till you file a ticket.

Which means stuck characters would likely often go from a matter of hitting Return or typing /stuck to having to file a ticket. Hope SE decides to implement an automated ticket service for stuck characters like Blizzard had to, then. Given how long it takes them to implement any changes to customer support? Not holding my breath, there.

It is unfortunate that this game seems unusually vulnerable to bots, and it's not just because of the lack of an anti cheat system (which has its own problems: most significantly, performance hits, and loss of a non-trivial amount of player revenue when the graphics modding RP players quit in droves), but also because the gameplay in this game is so deterministic that legitimate player improvement literally equates to trying to play more and more like a robot (as in almost all modes there's a definitive one, static, best way to play) - meaning the SNR between bots and repetitive clockwork player behavior is even worse. And I'm not sure of a solution other than how the game already goes (the impact of bulk gil farming being fairly minimal due to the fact that bulk gil is simply not that significant in most cases).

This is something that the devs simply do not care about. If they did, it'd be fixed.

People are arguing about burden of proof and not thinking it through. There is zero, zero reason for your character model to be clipped under the map.

A two strike system for this would *decimate* this problem instantly, but they don't care enough to roll out a flag system for it.

Strike one, your character model trips an under the map trigger and you are instantly disconnected and booted from the game for three hours.

Strike two, permanent ban.

Still, there will be people who will argue that's not fair to real players, as if you could somehow accidentally get yourself under there daily.

Easy solution to the bots that run underground, make the entirety of ALL the undersides of each map a death wall. They go down? Dead instantly.

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Originally Posted by mythgraven

A two strike system for this would *decimate* this problem instantly, but they don't care enough to roll out a flag system for it.

Strike one, your character model trips an under the map trigger and you are instantly disconnected and booted from the game for three hours.

Strike two, permanent ban.

Still, there will be people who will argue that's not fair to real players, as if you could somehow accidentally get yourself under there daily.

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So, just ban all the people who don't have stellar Internet (like, e.g., all our Oceanic players that don't settle for "You might get to run one alliance raid a month with queue times" Materia)?

Again, this kind of thing, on a technical scale, happens a lot more often than you think. In other words, where you don't - on your end - yourself move into walls or the ground, but where the server nonetheless receives a movement request from the client that would place you there.

Moving quickly in rocky terrain? That vector might very well have initially pushed you into the wall, or across a bump in the ground (that's what got the people in Highmountain in WoW). Falling? Especially difficult to adjudicate, because of gravitational acceleration meaning that falling from a large height often has you moving far faster than any otherwise legitimate movement in the game (that's why even after years of such features WoW still has you stuck in DC loops if you fall in certain places).

I'm not sure if the boat situation is possible in XIV because I'm trying to remember if there's anywhere where the terrain realistically "rocks" (that's what happened with Exile's Reach, the boat does bob a fair bit and if you DC or log out on it, if the boat lurches up while you're logged out, now you're in the floor when you log back in at your current coordinates) ...

Note, "DC loops." It is annoying enough in WoW, where you must file a stuck character ticket to fix it. You willing to take a permanent ban because you fell somewhere, got DC'd, you log back in and your character is still in mid fall so the client immediately sends a through-the-floor vector accordingly?

Don't forget this likely affects casual players the most, they're the ones that do lots of overworld running around, crafting, RPing, housing (would the common housing practice of clipping through your own furnishings to get out of decoration corners/hide secret rooms trip it?), and sightseeing (remember those vistas with odd convoluted jumping you need to do to reach them?).

Latency makes it all worse, of course.

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Originally Posted by Avatre

Easy solution to the bots that run underground, make the entirety of ALL the undersides of each map a death wall. They go down? Dead instantly.

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Again, the problem is that's likely to get folks on even a technical attempt (that you don't see graphically on your side) to go through the floor. Do we really want sprouts dropping dead at random to get rid of bots?

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Originally Posted by Amarande

So, just ban all the people who don't have stellar Internet (like, e.g., all our Oceanic players that don't settle for "You might get to run one alliance raid a month with queue times" Materia)?

Again, this kind of thing, on a technical scale, happens a lot more often than you think. In other words, where you don't - on your end - yourself move into walls or the ground, but where the server nonetheless receives a movement request from the client that would place you there.

Moving quickly in rocky terrain? That vector might very well have initially pushed you into the wall, or across a bump in the ground (that's what got the people in Highmountain in WoW). Falling? Especially difficult to adjudicate, because of gravitational acceleration meaning that falling from a large height often has you moving far faster than any otherwise legitimate movement in the game (that's why even after years of such features WoW still has you stuck in DC loops if you fall in certain places).

I'm not sure if the boat situation is possible in XIV because I'm trying to remember if there's anywhere where the terrain realistically "rocks" (that's what happened with Exile's Reach, the boat does bob a fair bit and if you DC or log out on it, if the boat lurches up while you're logged out, now you're in the floor when you log back in at your current coordinates) ...

Note, "DC loops." It is annoying enough in WoW, where you must file a stuck character ticket to fix it. You willing to take a permanent ban because you fell somewhere, got DC'd, you log back in and your character is still in mid fall so the client immediately sends a through-the-floor vector accordingly?

Don't forget this likely affects casual players the most, they're the ones that do lots of overworld running around, crafting, RPing, housing (would the common housing practice of clipping through your own furnishings to get out of decoration corners/hide secret rooms trip it?), and sightseeing (remember those vistas with odd convoluted jumping you need to do to reach them?).

Latency makes it all worse, of course.



Again, the problem is that's likely to get folks on even a technical attempt (that you don't see graphically on your side) to go through the floor. Do we really want sprouts dropping dead at random to get rid of bots?

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Do we really want sprouts unable to gather couerl pup whiskers for a required MSQ quest, and deducting correctly that the bot deterrent measures in this game are *pitiful*?

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

yeah, all legitimate players run around underground...

people on the autism spectrum run cheat programs.

please explain how "legitimate" players are doing this and accessing quest givers as well as mobs from below ground... please. I have seen bugs and glitches in this game, but I cannot say that that behaviour is one of them.

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https://newslit.org/wp-content/uploa...T-Staw_man.jpg

Running underground is not botting. Its cheating. More than likely someone is actually controlling the character, which means not botting. Learn what words mean before you say that mine are wrong.

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Originally Posted by mythgraven

People are arguing about burden of proof and not thinking it through. There is zero, zero reason for your character model to be clipped under the map.

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False as I said previously. I believe SE had to change some FPS settings because it allowed people to fall through as well.

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Still, there will be people who will argue that's not fair to real players, as if you could somehow accidentally get yourself under there daily.

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You can't daily but it could happen more than once throughout 10 years of playing like it did for me. I was on a laptop at the time with 15 or less FPS, so I don't know if that affected it, but I haven't had it happen for years now.

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Originally Posted by Amarande

So, just ban all the people who don't have stellar Internet (like, e.g., all our Oceanic players that don't settle for "You might get to run one alliance raid a month with queue times" Materia)?

Again, this kind of thing, on a technical scale, happens a lot more often than you think. In other words, where you don't - on your end - yourself move into walls or the ground, but where the server nonetheless receives a movement request from the client that would place you there.

Moving quickly in rocky terrain? That vector might very well have initially pushed you into the wall, or across a bump in the ground (that's what got the people in Highmountain in WoW). Falling? Especially difficult to adjudicate, because of gravitational acceleration meaning that falling from a large height often has you moving far faster than any otherwise legitimate movement in the game (that's why even after years of such features WoW still has you stuck in DC loops if you fall in certain places).

I'm not sure if the boat situation is possible in XIV because I'm trying to remember if there's anywhere where the terrain realistically "rocks" (that's what happened with Exile's Reach, the boat does bob a fair bit and if you DC or log out on it, if the boat lurches up while you're logged out, now you're in the floor when you log back in at your current coordinates) ...

Note, "DC loops." It is annoying enough in WoW, where you must file a stuck character ticket to fix it. You willing to take a permanent ban because you fell somewhere, got DC'd, you log back in and your character is still in mid fall so the client immediately sends a through-the-floor vector accordingly?

Don't forget this likely affects casual players the most, they're the ones that do lots of overworld running around, crafting, RPing, housing (would the common housing practice of clipping through your own furnishings to get out of decoration corners/hide secret rooms trip it?), and sightseeing (remember those vistas with odd convoluted jumping you need to do to reach them?).

Latency makes it all worse, of course.



Again, the problem is that's likely to get folks on even a technical attempt (that you don't see graphically on your side) to go through the floor. Do we really want sprouts dropping dead at random to get rid of bots?

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Yes, anyone who falls under the floor, whether by accident or purpose, should be instantly killed to have to respawn.

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Originally Posted by PredatoryCatgirl

https://newslit.org/wp-content/uploa...T-Staw_man.jpg

Running underground is not botting. Its cheating. More than likely someone is actually controlling the character, which means not botting. Learn what words mean before you say that mine are wrong.

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oh, pardon me, the thread is about botting and cheating.

learn what the thread is about before blowing your top. legitimate players, are not going to get banned because they are running around the game underground all the time. that was my point. as for being underground, I hate to point this out, by many bots do just that, so maybe learn the issue before venting off.

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

oh, pardon me, the thread is about botting and cheating.

learn what the thread is about before blowing your top. legitimate players, are not going to get banned because they are running around the game underground all the time. that was my point. as for being underground, I hate to point this out, by many bots do just that, so maybe learn the issue before venting off.

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And I was only addressing the botting.

You assumed something I didn't say.

Take the L.

Respond to this, or don't. I don't care, because as far as I'm concerned, my conversation with you is over.

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Originally Posted by Jeeqbit

I've fallen under the map before, I think about 3 times. One time it happened while running over a bridge in Limsa and I remember it happening twice in East Shroud.

I don't know how or why it happened because I have run over the Limsa bridge thousands of times but that one time it happened. So you can fall under legitimately. They would need to test for other behaviour happening, such as interacting with quests and mobs from below.

It was easy to /teleport out though.

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It's actually quite easy to see if this is the case since the player will often teleport out right away.. Here you have bots that are constantly under ground it would be quite easy to implement a system were it disconnection you if you don't teleport back up with in a certain time period and if you keep going under ground again it will sent a log and alert to the GM's (It's how SOE did it back in Everquest one in the 1998's so don't tell me SQ can't do that in 2023 :P)

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Originally Posted by Avatre

Yes, anyone who falls under the floor, whether by accident or purpose, should be instantly killed to have to respawn.

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yea, its not like you lose anything dying. curtail cheaters and eliminates the need for a gm call to get you un-stucked. lol

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Originally Posted by Valoria3

Yeah 17 bots accounts banned between sep 28 and oct 4 that's ALL across the world.. Today ALONE I've seen over 30 CLEARLY bots running around.

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That's only the bots that aren't related to RMT. Those involved in RMT are included in the RMT numbers (3993 accounts for that same week).

The vast majority of botting is RMT related. Those underground bots are leveling up to get where they can start farming dungeons like Amdapor Keep that drop a lot of gil plus items that can be sold to vendors for gil.

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Originally Posted by VerdeLuck

I don't know why they don't just do a check if the bots are under the map and ban based on that. Plenty of other games ban people who go OOB on the map and there's no real reason to go OOB under the aetheryte unless you want to advertise RMT in say chat.

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As others have said, bugs can occasionally cause players to go out of bounds. The need to manually review every OOB to see whether it was due to a bug or if it was a bot would require a lot of manpower when there are simpler ways for SE to detect which characters are bots.

If you want bots out of gaming, then players need to decide they aren't interested in cheating. As long as there are players interested in cheating to get what they want or engage in RMT, there will be sellers appearing to provide those services. Just banning those selling the services does nothing since they'll make new accounts and continue their operations. There's a profit to be made, after all. Remove the buyers, who are far less likely to enjoy constantly losing access to what they had gained, and there's no profit for the sellers to continue their operations.

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Originally Posted by Valoria3

It's actually quite easy to see if this is the case since the player will often teleport out right away.. Here you have bots that are constantly under ground it would be quite easy to implement a system were it disconnection you if you don't teleport back up with in a certain time period and if you keep going under ground again it will sent a log and alert to the GM's (It's how SOE did it back in Everquest one in the 1998's so don't tell me SQ can't do that in 2023 :P)

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Unless they intentionally went under the map for exploration purposes/hanging out. The spot in Sea of Clouds is a great example of one since the view is spectacular and you can also see the Void Ark cruise by you at certain times of the day. I'd rather not lose an unintentional hidden gem implemented by the devs just to attempt to stop a problem that won't end with this solution.