The bots are too much

I came back to Final Fantasy XIV after a six year hiatus. I really wanted to get back into crafting, gathering, and running treasure maps/trials with friends.

Your lack of moderation in the game has ruined those first two things.

Six years ago, bots were an issue. However, they were only a minor issue. You would occasionally see a bot here or there, but it never made much of an impact on how you played the market.

2025? It's a completely different issue. There are hundreds, if not thousands of bots across the data center. Gold Thumb gear? Every single listing is an item crafted by a bot.

How do I know? First, let me explain my background.

I have a background in cybersecurity, OSINT, and SIGINT, which I use to track down terrorists and other enemies. It's my job to put scraps of information together and see patterns.

What patterns am I seeing on FFXIV?

• Free companies with no description, closed recruiting, no housing, no active time, etc.
• Characters in said FCs with generic names, most or all of which share the same naming scheme.
• At least one member of the FC is always online. This member has an apartment and never leaves it. This apartment's access is restricted.
• Several members of the FCs have one class, and this class is almost always a level 25 tank.
• The crafter is always level 100, and only has one level 100 DoW/DoM class.
• The gatherers always take the same route to the unspoiled nodes. They approach the node from the same angles, every single time.
• Searching for the names of some of the crafters on the Lodestone yields characters with identical names on dozens of other worlds. These names are often gibberish, or otherwise only found within the realm of Final Fantasy. (That is to say, they're not common names that just anyone would come up with and use)
• The bots will never immediately undercut you if you undercut them. Their attention to their retainers is highly regimented and scheduled, but once they do, they undercut by 1 gil.
• The bots will stop undercutting you and remove their item from sale if the price is too low. They will never leave the item up at a price higher than yours.

Why am I bringing this up? Obviously, everyone knows bots are an issue. Everyone always talks about how SE bans these bots every so often. (I think I heard weekly)

This isn't enough. Some of the bots I've found have been operating since January of 2024. Two years of ruining the game for other players, and SE hasn't done a thing. I've read the forum posts. I've seen Reddit. Square can absolutely find these bots if they bothered to look. I guarantee I'm not the first to see and report them. Why are they still here? Why are we not handing down permanent bans to players who pay for RMT gil? Literally every other MMO does it. Why must Final Fantasy be the sole outlier?

Something needs to change or things are only going to get worse.

Two years? Jesus Christ, Square.

Why? The complotist in me makes me think if they did ban them, their player count would drop again and in the current state of the game, they need them to blow the number up.

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Originally Posted by Kailyn_Swiftheart

I have a background in cybersecurity, OSINT, and SIGINT, which I use to track down terrorists and other enemies. It's my job to put scraps of information together and see patterns.

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Then shouldn't you use your immense talents to safe some lifes, instead of wasting them on a silly video game?

Such is the hallmark of a dying MMO.

1. Paid-subscription game has bots (unavoidable)
2. "I guess we don't have to ban all the bots since they pay subs" (greed is the deadliest sin)
3. Dev misstep or game age causes real player population to shrink (suddenly or over time), bots become a larger portion of playerbase
4. Bot numbers grow as there are less players to compete with/report for botting
5. "We can't ban the bots or the in-game economy would die" <- You are here
6. Whales begin to leave for bluer pastures in the wake of high bot-to-player ratio (point of no return)
7. Bot populations vanish overnight as there is no point in botting a dead game with no whales, sub numbers crater
8. "We have made the difficult decision to stop development"

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Originally Posted by Gwenkatsu

Then shouldn't you use your immense talents to safe some lifes, instead of wasting them on a silly video game?

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> mfw people do things other than work

Adding to this.

I play the marketboard a lot, so it is a glaring problem for me that seemingly, no matter how often I report it, never gets addressed.

Item listings, en masse, of non-craftable drops that are extremely hard to get, like last room rares from treasure dungeons. You cannot tell me that this person with his keysmash retainers has 20 of the same item. No, this is the result of multi-boxing. It's not super well known in FFXIV but as an ex WoW player I can smell the signs from a mile away. They have multiple accounts running their characters together through these instances and gathering maps with them to spam the content and farm items to dump on the MB. There is external software to chain accounts together with automated accounts, specifically for this stuff. It usually was used in WoW for crafting material farming but since that is not as lucrative on FFXIV with the market moving very slowly in comparison they just often times choose to instead invest in the high value tradeable drops.

You'll see them listing these 10-20, sometimes less, sometimes more depending on the drop rates, then nothing for weeks. Then suddenly something else is flooded onto the market. They don't really undercut much but it does absolutely ruin an item's listing for months since it forces people to either wait ages for all the botted items to sell or undercut them even further and lose value on the drop.

It is intensely frustrating and the fact that they just let it slide unless you catch them in action (you won't, it is well known that players will clip under the map to stay unseen. RMT bots have been doing it for years).


When it comes to the nodes that is a bit more of an iffy issue. I will not dox any of the members I see on the regular on my server but there are a good amount of people farming orange scrips for the mounts. You need - i think - 50k of them to get it which is a damn lot so they have been running a rotation of nodes for hours almost all days of the week and they do tend to fill the cycle with regular, non-collectible timed nodes, probably to make some extra gil on the side for their teleport costs. Folks who have been doing the same thing for a long time may appear bot-ish because they are in a routine. That is a little more difficult to vet and only SE will be able to monitor that by checking in the backend for exact timed keystroke input. Talking to them is not a good way to check either. I can almost bet you they are doing stuff on the side, be that on their phone or a second screen, to keep entertained so missing a whisper is easy.

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Originally Posted by Gwenkatsu

Then shouldn't you use your immense talents to safe some lifes, instead of wasting them on a silly video game?

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Sorry boss. I thought my schedule said 0800 to 1700, Monday through Friday, not 0000 to 0000 Sunday through Saturday.

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Originally Posted by Gwenkatsu

Then shouldn't you use your immense talents to safe some lifes, instead of wasting them on a silly video game?

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I'm sorry, but does your job have you working 24/7? What an insane stance. The OP has free time and in that free time likes to play games, games they notice problems with thanks to their professional skills. There's nothing wrong with that.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

Hell, there's bots on Maduin that have been running since the day I joined almost THREE years ago that never got dealt with.

I put in tickets for a while, but after about the 2nd month of seeing the same names still farming mobs in certain zones, I thought I was going to be the one getting tossed into the gaol over "bad reports" so I just stopped bothering and to this day you can still find three year old Lalafell Bard Moles in certain parts of Maduin ARR.

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It's incredibly frustrating, knowing that SE is just ignoring these reports. And it's not like there's any doubt as to whether or not they're botting. They make it obvious as hell. I'm sure the logs of these accounts, since they can track every single gil and item that goes through an account, would only make it more so. They have actively chosen to ignore bots and let them persist on the system.

Also, I should point out, which I failed to elaborate on in my original post (I blame it being super early in the morning, as well as being at exactly 3,000/3,000 characters) is that a lot of these bots have super obvious naming schemes which take the first four letters of the world name as the character name, and use random gibberish as the last name. For example, if the bot were on Leviathan, the bots might be named Levi Aaaacd, Levi Zaaaad, and Levi Abcde. If they were on Behemoth, they would be named Behe Zaaaad, Behe Aaaacd, and Behe Abcde. There is always one "normal" named character in each FC, and it's the crafter account.

Yknow I'm gonna just say, and it probably won't be a popular opinion here but, the bots honestly don't bother me at all. They're not invading gameplay (that I can tell at least), they're just saturating the market keeping prices of things lower. Ok... that doesn't bother me and as for trying to play the market, I just go for things the bots can't farm (lately it's been the Occult carrot drops and glams). You want to see a "bot problem", go take a look at old vids of Lost Ark .. they had a problem (maybe they still do, I quit ages ago). At least the bots here are paying SE some $$ which I optimistically (though maybe hopelessly) like to think that $$ is helping development more forward.

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Originally Posted by Appleboops

Yknow I'm gonna just say, and it probably won't be a popular opinion here but, the bots honestly don't bother me at all. They're not invading gameplay (that I can tell at least), they're just saturating the market keeping prices of things lower. Ok... that doesn't bother me and as for trying to play the market, I just go for things the bots can't farm (lately it's been the Occult carrot drops and glams). You want to see a "bot problem", go take a look at old vids of Lost Ark .. they had a problem (maybe they still do, I quit ages ago). At least the bots here are paying SE some $$ which I optimistically (though maybe hopelessly) like to think that $$ is helping development more forward.

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It'll impact you when the people who are frustrated leave and you have nobody left to pop queues with.

I am very much alive I just keep on undercutting item untill it sells... if I make 10 millions or 5 millions on one item is not important, what important is, that can line the next one up asap or in a few days of actually playing the game.

Gil = not important in FFXIV.

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Originally Posted by Kailyn_Swiftheart

Also, I should point out, which I failed to elaborate on in my original post (I blame it being super early in the morning, as well as being at exactly 3,000/3,000 characters) is that a lot of these bots have super obvious naming schemes which take the first four letters of the world name as the character name, and use random gibberish as the last name. For example, if the bot were on Leviathan, the bots might be named Levi Aaaacd, Levi Zaaaad, and Levi Abcde. If they were on Behemoth, they would be named Behe Zaaaad, Behe Aaaacd, and Behe Abcde. There is always one "normal" named character in each FC, and it's the crafter account.

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Yeah, they changed the name scheme half a year ago, before it was just some random characters.
But a much better solution would be to implement a server-side height check, so when these bots clip under the map the server knows it and kicks them. (3 kicks == ban)
A speed hack check (not the ordinary, they are using the forced lag one) would be a nice thing too.
But meh, just offload everything to the client, best solution ever.

On the other hand, I don't care anymore.
If someone buys from these bots and gets banned, the person deserved it.

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Originally Posted by GiR_Zippo

Yeah, they changed the name scheme half a year ago, before it was just some random characters.
But a much better solution would be to implement a server-side height check, so when these bots clip under the map the server knows it and kicks them. (3 kicks == ban)
A speed hack check (not the ordinary, they are using the forced lag one) would be a nice thing too.
But meh, just offload everything to the client, best solution ever.

On the other hand, I don't care anymore.
If someone buys from these bots and gets banned, the person deserved it.

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The best solution, IMO, would be to use an anti-cheat software like Easy AntiCheat or Xigncode. Black Desert Online uses one of them (I don't recall which, as they've switched between the two over the years), and they never have issues with botting. The only RMT issues BDO has are the piloting solicitors, and those people at least use a human to do all the work.

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Originally Posted by Appleboops

They're not invading gameplay (that I can tell at least), they're just saturating the market keeping prices of things lower.

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They ARE invading gameplay. The crafting/gathering/market system is a part of FFXIV gameplay. It's one that many players enjoy doing, such as myself. It's one of the reasons I returned to FFXIV after a six year hiatus. To have one of the core aspects of my play style severely stunted because I cannot compete with bots that churn out items and check their retainers 24/7 is very much invading gameplay.

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Originally Posted by Kailyn_Swiftheart

The best solution, IMO, would be to use an anti-cheat software like Easy AntiCheat or Xigncode. Black Desert Online uses one of them (I don't recall which, as they've switched between the two over the years), and they never have issues with botting. The only RMT issues BDO has are the piloting solicitors, and those people at least use a human to do all the work.

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They use Easy, and yes they do have a bot problem, but they have it under control (better than most). The difference is, they actually ban them, not give them silly warnings to keep their numbers up.

This is like saying the sky is blue and feeling it's necessary to back it up with your degree in photonic science.

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Originally Posted by Kailyn_Swiftheart

The best solution, IMO, would be to use an anti-cheat software like Easy AntiCheat or Xigncode. Black Desert Online uses one of them (I don't recall which, as they've switched between the two over the years), and they never have issues with botting. The only RMT issues BDO has are the piloting solicitors, and those people at least use a human to do all the work.

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Xigncode was really bad for TERA back in the day. Many people got banned unjustly for using simple ping mitigators or other harmless QoL stuff (that game was extremely ping dependent) and many just straight up left because no one wants a program like that snooping around their PC. Please do not suggest things that would harm more real players than bots...

I'm impressed with the OP's attention to detail regarding pattern recognition. All of their deductions are really useful and I hope that CS3 actually pays attention to these common botting tells.

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Originally Posted by Kailyn_Swiftheart

The best solution, IMO, would be to use an anti-cheat software like Easy AntiCheat or Xigncode. Black Desert Online uses one of them (I don't recall which, as they've switched between the two over the years), and they never have issues with botting. The only RMT issues BDO has are the piloting solicitors, and those people at least use a human to do all the work.

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As a cybersecurity, OSINT, and SIGINT one you should know Easy AntiCheat or Xigncode are basically rootkits and rootkits are a bad idea and not always working, as you should have seen in BF6.
Oh not to mention they sometimes not playing well together and sometimes even prevent to install a game with an other anticheat...
That's great so I have uninstall XIV when I'm installing CoD or BF6, perfect.

I would much rather have a better, bigger team to moderate this kind of stuff. Humans make errors as well, but usually that is then individual cases that can be rectified fairly easily and won't hit people in massive, sweeping waves and when those players then try to appeal they are auto-denied by the same system. You do not need to hire specialists to figure out who is doing RMT shenanigans and who is botting, and if there are fringe cases where it is not clear you can always send those to individual specialists.
If monitoring software is employed it should just flag players for review. Create a few extra jobs, make the community happy for a fairly low cost. They just keep saving costs at all the wrong ends.

Recognizing all those patterns doesn't require you to be a genius. A random casual player will sooner or later see that something's amiss and will know its a bot. Some of them aren't bots but real players who just afk the game with automation and do something else. Then they will finish it and go play normally. Those are half bots and a lot of mentors do this. Real bots are those that never participate in any action other than farming. There are also bots underground farming and pulling mobs. Devs know this but don't care. They only implemented "anti-cheat" in deep dungeons to prevent coordinates jumping. You can still use cheat engine to move yourself to another position within the game without triggering any system btw, it still works.

Bots give a lot of money through subscription and banning them would mean a massive playerbase down.

Also this posts seems like it was just created so you could tell us what you have from degrees and stuff. Really don't see how that matters here, but it's one of those posts.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

Hell, some of us would do it for free.

Give me the power to go under the ground of Maduin gaoling bots and their accounts and I'll turn whack-a-lalafell-mole into my own version of a FATE/hunting mark chain event. At least it would give me something "solo and casual" to do when I log in, SE could even pay me in gil/company seals/bi-color gems/tomestones if they really wanted to, lol.

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I would absolutely do it for free too.

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Originally Posted by MayuAmakura

Recognizing all those patterns doesn't require you to be a genius. A random casual player will sooner or later see that something's amiss and will know its a bot. Some of them aren't bots but real players who just afk the game with automation and do something else. Then they will finish it and go play normally. Those are half bots and a lot of mentors do this. Real bots are those that never participate in any action other than farming. There are also bots underground farming and pulling mobs. Devs know this but don't care. They only implemented "anti-cheat" in deep dungeons to prevent coordinates jumping. You can still use cheat engine to move yourself to another position within the game without triggering any system btw, it still works.

Bots give a lot of money through subscription and banning them would mean a massive playerbase down.

Also this posts seems like it was just created so you could tell us what you have from degrees and stuff. Really don't see how that matters here, but it's one of those posts.

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Bot subscriptions are a miniscule amount of money compared to the subscriptions of actual players. The difference is, the bots genuinely hurt the game.

And no, this is not "one of those posts." I don't even have a degree. You can leave your snide remarks at the door, or you can post elsewhere.

I tried to say Helluuuu to a bot, it didnt answer.

This post will probably be deleted, since it's considered "name dropping," but if SE isn't going to do something about it, the least that can be done is outting them for it. Tell me these are standard FC setups. Tell me their explicit purpose is not to bot items, sell them, and sell the gil for real life money.

https://media.discordapp.net/attachm...ality=lossless
https://media.discordapp.net/attachm...ality=lossless
https://media.discordapp.net/attachm...ality=lossless
https://media.discordapp.net/attachm...ality=lossless

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

We have one on Maduin that's basically just filled with low level male Hyur Gladiators, where a new one pops up every week or so and they're always parked by the market board/retainer bells, or company chest.

Unless its a player with a very specific screening process/strange fetish, there's something very sus going on with it.

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The first one I mentioned, with the gibberish FC name, isn't even here on Behemoth, but they cross data centers to sell their items on our world.