Nothing being done about Gathering Bots (PROOF)

A few days ago (9/18/2013) i witnessed 2 Botanist Bots and reported them. Video here http://www.twitch.tv/darkrift1989/c/2965498
Today is the 20th and the same bot is STILL here http://img545.imageshack.us/img545/1518/cedz.png

the worse part is JUST off of level 1-3 stuff that comes from these trees hes gotten an amazing 3 levels from 24 to 27. now think of it for a minute hes teleporting from tree to tree roughly making 1g a second IF he NPC's them lets do some math
1g a second
60g a minute
3,600g a hour
86,400g a day
259,200g for the 3 days ive seen him
604,800g a week

and this isn't even including High Quality items and hes probably been there since level 1 like how many days has this guy been allowed to bot?

It usually takes awhile before they compile all the information from the servers and perform mass bans. Till then all you can do is report them to the GMs using the in game report system.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by April_Fool

snip

---

I have noticed zero of the 55+ bots and gil spammers on my list have been removed after weeks (for some) of being present. I have noticed the gil spammers continually create new characters to get around blacklists. The only way i see and end to this is if they do 4 things at once. First they need to identify as many as possible and lock out all the accounts in question. Second get rid of them all in one massive character wipe. (you do it one at a time and they will catch on to it and start finding ways around it)

Third they need to implement a system check that flags potential spammers and bots by monitoring activities that can be dealt with by support staff. (for example someone posts regularly or includes keywords such as gil, $, buy or regular strange text strings that may be an attempt to get around monitoring) Fourth they need authorities to get involved and trace it back to the source and deal with it. (which likely won't happen) As long as they are free to continue they will find a way around anything SE implements.

It kind of feels like a slap in the face from SE. I'm right there with you OP. I hope they address the issue.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by April_Fool

...

---

I reported a bot miner just outside uldah in the low lvl mining spots. I would doubt anything gets done right away..but it would seem like this would be a relatively easy one to prove and ultimately ban hammer.

In the case of the minors..if their taking shards from those low level spots than their making significantly more than 1g a second because each shard can go for 30-50g at the AH.

I will also mention that the number of gold spammers is absurd.. I have like 75 on my Blacklist and it never fails that when I enter a major city there is at least one (usually 3-4) new people spamming the shout chat and sending tell messages. It has gotten to the point that I gave up on trying to keep up on adding them to my BL and instead just disable the shout chat when I get tired of it.

It's even more gross when you realize that a single RMT company has multiple (10+ would not be an exaggeration) running at any given time.

The only way to get rid of farmers and spammers is to get people to stop buying what they are selling. Everything else is a band-aid and will be circumvented eventually. This is the same in every single online game with an economy. SE has done a ban wave, they posted about it already. I'm sure they will do another one, but they have to be careful because there are people that farm like bots, but without breaking the rules.

There is no excuse for it, any reason SE or a community rep gives you is utter sugarcoated nonsense because there is ZERO reason obvious bots that teleport are not banned the second they're aware of. So they will gather all this gil, distribute it around, and then sell it and profited. Nothing SE have done has prevented this or helped in anyway.

The way I see it is, a market for something is created when there's a demand for it. Since this game requires a heck of a lot of gil to do some things (crafting, repairs, teleporting, to name a few), and only gil farmers really have the patience or drive to do the very tedious things it requires to generate sufficient gil, then the game itself is actually driving the market for them.

by the time SE bans a bot , that bot has made millions (selling things on MW) that legit players bought. And the damage on the market wards is done.

i see price on MW dropping like crazy, shards is just an example ~~

SE need to start banning FASTER or the economy is going down the toilet (if itsnt already :( )

They just need track and ban all accounts related to that bot ... like the one he sends the gils for try make it "safe" from ban. Just Ban all and gg

That is their main strategy, they let the bots run around while they map the group then they ban them all. If they banned the bot instantly the rest would scatter. This however takes a few days or even more than week.

Also even teleporting your getting at best like 4 items every 10 seconds. But the just sell them to players not npcs.

I feel like there's more and more of them recently.
I went to go level up MIN a bit and in the starting area outside of Ul'dah there was me and two other people mining regularly and two bots telemining around.
Then when I went to do my level 5 class quest the area I was at there was me mining normally and 6-8 bots telemining.
It was kind of disgusting seeing it happen and knowing that it's going to keep happening for a while -_-;

What SE seriously needs to do is hire In Game Managers. GM's with the power to ban players with an easy click. Players reporting them will only swamp them with tickets, and if my experience with customer support is any indication to their organization in that department, it will take months for them to get through them all.

The good thing about this game is that there is only one channel, so players can see all other players in the same area. GM's would be able to ban them all quickly and clean the game up for the rest of us.

here is another nice one :-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEWMlGRRuas

Just because you reported someone, doesn't mean they will get banned right away, or even within a short amount of time. What it does do is help that they will eventually get banned when SE is finally able to look into that particular case.

There are literally thousands of these things running around across all servers, and it takes time to go through them one at a time to ensure they really are doing something wrong, are RMT, are a bot, etc. They're not going to just immediately ban hammer someone right on the spot simply because you clicked a few buttons and said "dis guy do minning al daye".

Or would you prefer they rush things to get rid of them asap, and take out legitimate players in the process?

Almost every online game handles bot bans in "waves" as in they will wait for reports to pile up and ban them all at once. For some reason they like to allow the botters to acquire enough real-life currency by selling their in-game earnings to gold sellers so they can re-purchase the game (or several copies of the game) after they are banned and continue botting.

This creates a cycle of sorts that is mutually beneficial for the botters and the company. (Botters make profit and purchase more copies of the game so the company makes a profit too and is able to fluff sales numbers to show their share-holders)

Everyone wins except for us, the people who don't bot.

Some people believe the purpose of the "wave" bans is to be unpredictable, making it easier to ban them along with their currency. The thing with this is that they are almost always predictable and most experienced botters are easily capable of selling off their earnings or spreading it over multiple accounts to avoid this. I recall seeing a story a while back on MMO botters. Some of them have actually done quite well for themselves and have some extreme setups. Of course, I've probably just got my tin foil hat on too tight.

The sad thing is: I have seen non RTM people doing this bot program. The guy was even in a decent sized FC on my server. Makes the entire FC look like trash. I hope EVERYONE that has run this program gets nailed even if the ban comes a month after they used the program. Even if they only used it for a day... It's BS.

Everyone calm down, SE are doing what they always do. They have said they are going to sort it and they will, they will collect all the info they have been sent and verify it and once they have a big long list of Bots and RMT's they will do a mass ban. So relax it is being handled.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nanga

The way I see it is, a market for something is created when there's a demand for it. Since this game requires a heck of a lot of gil to do some things (crafting, repairs, teleporting, to name a few), and only gil farmers really have the patience or drive to do the very tedious things it requires to generate sufficient gil, then the game itself is actually driving the market for them.

---

Nope, so wrong are you. It isn't the game it is the lack of character and moral value of the player buying the gil. It is the choice made by the person and the quality of the person can be gaged by their choices regardless of the actions / conditions affecting them.

" The Devil made me do it " just doesn't flush......

I used to be a bot hunter for Ragnarok Online.. The only way to really get them to stop circumventing bans was by administering IP bans. It's an easy enough job to do if you know what to look for, frankly I think every MMO should have GMs, though one of the other problems is that they can be corruptible. I saw many GMs get banned themselves during my 'career', it is difficult to find someone that is actually trustworthy.

the saddest part is that there are enough pople buying gil from them that they can afford the $30 per account just to spam us

Unless a more automated method is employed, they'll never stop. Why? For one simple reason. How many S-E employees do you think there are devoted to this task? Don't forget to take into consideration how much they must be paid and all the other things they must concern themselves with. Now consider how much it costs to hire a Chinese gold farmer (note also that certain Chinese prisons have been known to force inmates to participate in these operations) or a bot. Which side do you think wins a war of attrition?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Fenrisen

I used to be a bot hunter for Ragnarok Online.. The only way to really get them to stop circumventing bans was by administering IP bans. It's an easy enough job to do if you know what to look for

---

Just so you know, IP bans don't work for Asian countries, cause everytime they reset their modem, they got a new IP, it's how their ISPs work. Unless the game publisher decide to ban the whole country, but in general VPNs & proxies are like common knowledge even for IT noobs cause a lot of sites got blocked by their government.

But yeah, active GMs for each server would do the job. Just monitor chat boards in crowded zones & ban on the spot.
Loading...

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by DragonFlyy

The only way to get rid of farmers and spammers is to get people to stop buying what they are selling. Everything else is a band-aid and will be circumvented eventually. This is the same in every single online game with an economy. SE has done a ban wave, they posted about it already. I'm sure they will do another one, but they have to be careful because there are people that farm like bots, but without breaking the rules.

---

If they are teleporting from node to node then they are breaking the rules. There is not farming like a bot but it is ok to be teleporting from node to node since is a real player.

I wish SE had employees in the game that could go into worlds, screenshot the gil spammer and instant ban. Go to each section of starting cities and sit for a few minutes then move on to the next. I think it would be harder for the harvesting but still is one of those things that it would be helpful to have the spammers gone at least.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by April_Fool

604,800g a week

---

And people say there isn't any gil being generated into the game....oy...

SE was pretty together with the special task force in XI.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by nails

It usually takes awhile before they compile all the information from the servers and perform mass bans. Till then all you can do is report them to the GMs using the in game report system.

---

This, sometimes GM get to many reports at once and they miss to investigate the report immediately. If that happens they can miss the time frame where the reported player is botting/cheating. Normally they would instantly investigate and then mass ban later.
What doesnt happen at all is that they ban just because someone reports something, they investigate the claim first and that can take time.

I know that this is a different game, but I can't help but be reminded of a blue post that was made on WoW's support forums a couple of years ago. The logic shown in the post is likely the same logic shared by any MMO on the market, including FFXIV today. It may be from the mouth of Blizzard and reference the company itself, but nevertheless it does give a lot of insight into the types of decisions that must be made when a company -- any company -- is trying to combat bots and hackers in the MMO landscape. I highly recommend the read for anybody who might be frustrated by SE in this thread:

Quote:

---

There is so, so, so much confused perception in this thread. I'll do my best to clarify, but this situation is one where I can't go into too much detail about the things we do - doing so only benefits those who would take advantage of it.

Why won't Blizzard do anything to these game hackers and cheaters?

The answer we give in response to this question is the same as it has always been - we gather information from those who would exploit the game so that we can hit them back on a much larger level.

There's many reasons for this, but the primary one is that those who abuse our systems usually aren't on their own accounts - they're often the compromised accounts of other players. Banning them does little because they'll just use another person's information. We'd be punishing those who don't deserve it, and not stopping the abusers because they just move on to their next target.

It's much more effective for us to study what they're doing so we can break the processes at a larger level, or detect them earlier. This is a constant, ever-evolving battle. We break a bot, they make a new one, we study that one, break it, they make a new one. So on and so forth. It's a bit endless, and it always will be so long as there is a market for the things that they do. Gold selling and trading is, most of the time, the direct source of these botters and exploiters.

When Blizzard cuts back on combating farmers and hackers it shows and the game starts going to hell in a hand basket very quickly.

These preconceived misconceptions come from not being able to see what it is that we do in these situations. It's unfortunately a byproduct of having to keep our actions veiled in mystery, to be as well armed as possible when combating these things. The military doesn't state the intricacies of their strategies publicly for a reason. I'm unable to provide you hard facts about what we do - I wish I could, because it's all really cool and I'm in constant awe of the work we have going on behind the scenes. You will have to take my word for it - I can offer little more.

So the take away is that as long as you're willing to download a new bot every once in a while, you're golden?

No, most of them do get caught. But on the forums especially, players tend to focus on the negative more than the positive. And those who bot support that ideal, because they want people to think they're winning. They like the community to think that we don't do anything, because it discourages your player reports. And those reports help us immensely in our work.

Not reporting is helping the botters get their way. It doesn't look like, on the surface, it does much. But it runs a lot deeper than we're able to share.

In short... who cares HOW you are fixing the problem. We want to see MUCH faster results.

How we fix the problem matters because it's a lengthy process. We don't want to hastily put out a system that runs a 90% false positive return. Who is that helping at that point?

It's a lot like bug fixing. We have to make sure that stuff works as perfectly as possible when we implement it. We're dealing with whether or not people can access their accounts - I'm willing to bet that's a pretty important factor to you guys, and that you wouldn't much appreciate being suspended for something you didn't do because a 0 was where a 1 should have been. Stuff like that does inevitably slip through... but we work to minimize that effect as much as possible.

I'd like to think you could find a better way -- some form of compromise between long-term research and short term clean-up.

My father used to always say, "There's got to be a better way." When he said that, he meant it for everything - there is always a better way.

But if we had found it, we'd already be using it. >^.~< That's not to say we aren't constantly looking for a way to improve such situations.

---

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Darlingchan

What SE seriously needs to do is hire In Game Managers. GM's with the power to ban players with an easy click. Players reporting them will only swamp them with tickets, and if my experience with customer support is any indication to their organization in that department, it will take months for them to get through them all.

The good thing about this game is that there is only one channel, so players can see all other players in the same area. GM's would be able to ban them all quickly and clean the game up for the rest of us.

---

Banning with one click will cause more problems it will solve, you will get people reporting legit players, either through a misunderstanding, or malicious intent, which is why SE investigates all reports. All SE can do is IP ban all and any RMT rather than an account ban, but they would get around that, RMT adapt very fast to countermeasures put in place, bans, filters, trade restrictions etc etc.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Delsus

Banning with one click will cause more problems it will solve, you will get people reporting legit players, either through a misunderstanding, or malicious intent, which is why SE investigates all reports. All SE can do is IP ban all and any RMT rather than an account ban, but they would get around that, RMT adapt very fast to countermeasures put in place, bans, filters, trade restrictions etc etc.

---

The point of a GM, is for them to see the bot for themselves, not for them to just go with whatever people are saying. That would be the same concept as reporting, which I said would take a very long time to process.

Ban may get rid of the bot but doesn't fix the issue...Alot of these are hacked accounts so banning that one account they get another. Most MMo when they have tis issue they find out what is allowing them to break the game physics, patch the game so it can't be done and mass ban. Unfortunately if you look at WoW it is a constant battle because as soon as they implement a fix they find another way of cheating the game. They only way to stop this is for people to stop using there service. If no one buys their services it would become to costly to bot/hack.

Of course, people go to the RMT websites, register and get their password taken, or go to the website, get infected with a keylogger and when they go online to look for their money they get taken over, and the RMT has just made money and another account to go botting around for them.
There will be legit sites of course, but the fact that all these bots are peoples stolen accounts kind of just makes it obvious. So sad little kids will be attempting to purchase it with their parents cards just like they did the game. Just hope their not into the fraud business too.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Blaetansa

Snip...

---

It's actually a lot more complicated than that... And yes, they'll most likely be into fraud business.
Loading...

i'm on behemoth as well, today i saw 2 bots with speed hacks when i was farming and i reported them both, yet when i came back 4 hours later they were still there

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by AsakuraVN

It's actually a lot more complicated than that... And yes, they'll most likely be into fraud business.
Loading...

---

Obviously. But it is the gist of it.