RMT and Botting Out of Control

[Nysneirdre]

Ad hominem attacks and dismissing the problem isn't helping anyone. The gathering bots are real and do hurt the games economy with flooding the market with goods. I find them every time I go out to harvest. If you aren't seeing them the perhaps you are lucky or don't know how to recognize them when in fact are gathering near you.

[Mezolitik]

I think you are a liar as I am on Balmung and almost all the zones have bots. Well unless you don't have any gathering jobs. There have been more than one shout on Balmung about certain botters who have been around for weeks.

I'm gonna play devil's advocate here, and say that I haven't seen a single gathering bot for about 3-4 weeks; in fact, the only place I've ever seen them is just outside the main gate in Ul'dah. And my combined gatherer level is 98. Maybe they're just really clever; I don't know.

I'm not denying that it happens, I just think that some servers are much worse than others - and calling somebody a liar because they had a different experience to you is pretty unfair.

The /tell spam is ridiculous on Ragnarok, however.

[Tagihi]

It is now really mean time to develop any AntiBot system to be completely honest they have now reached the teleport to speedhack extreme botanist gathering or mining, it is quite impossible to make a screenshot of them are completely invisible the only thing you can see is when them level up

[Ricships]

I believe there is a new kind of gathering bot around, while i was gathering closer to bentbranch meadows and i heard the noise of gathering, twice, really quickly on a tree, but there were no one near, i think they have gone more underground in a way you can't even see their names to report.

about SE tracking bots, i don't think they know how, i mean, if you have to say the date and the server you are when reporting, it's clear that they are having problems with their programers :P

[Vittrae]

I believe there is a new kind of gathering bot around, while i was gathering closer to bentbranch meadows and i heard the noise of gathering, twice, really quickly on a tree, but there were no one near, i think they have gone more underground in a way you can't even see their names to report.

about SE tracking bots, i don't think they know how, i mean, if you have to say the date and the server you are when reporting, it's clear that they are having problems with their programers :P

Yep, seen these aswell, it seems to be an organised group, as the ones doing this type of botting is usually part of a FC that's present on alot of servers.
Reported these fellas a cpl of times myself, but have yet to see any action taken, the one i reported was about lv 15 at time of report (last week) and today when looking at the lodestone, it's 49, thats kinda fast from from whacking shards tbh..

[NeruMew]

I believe there is a new kind of gathering bot around, while i was gathering closer to bentbranch meadows and i heard the noise of gathering, twice, really quickly on a tree, but there were no one near, i think they have gone more underground in a way you can't even see their names to report.

about SE tracking bots, i don't think they know how, i mean, if you have to say the date and the server you are when reporting, it's clear that they are having problems with their programers :P

I think it's more to just have a complete report, more detailed, to add to the context and also have it explicitly written somewhere. Anyway, yeah.

Ohhh... Maybe they just forgot to zoom out their camera.. =O!!!

Yep, seen these aswell, it seems to be an organised group, as the ones doing this type of botting is usually part of a FC that's present on alot of servers.
Reported these fellas a cpl of times myself, but have yet to see any action taken, the one i reported was about lv 15 at time of report (last week) and today when looking at the lodestone, it's 49, thats kinda fast from from whacking shards tbh..

Problem is that even if you report them, they still remain. . . So reports are not getting anything done.

[DSN]

There are more and more topics of this nature and it is getting quiet apparent SE is either at a loss on how to deal with this problem or they just don't care either of which is unacceptable and going to start seriously affecting them.

I get there are problems at launch and some tweaks / tuning needs to be done but the number of 'exploits' in this game and the ease in which it is to interact with the client via 3rd party tools is just embarrassing, its almost like no one over there understands security in regards to programming. It's like they thought by having a console game they would be protected from some of these attacks but totally forgot they are selling a PC version as well and just by opening up wireshark you can find ways to exploit the game. Some of the first exploits from this game were really bad SQL Injection or DB Service layer accepts all commands with no signatures or way to ensure the request is valid. You have bad session fixation attacks allowing the most recent 'buy as someone else' exploit which occurred and required the game to be shutdown to address.

With all the being said step it up or be prepared to fail again, it would be a great shame to see the relaunch which was done so well destroyed because the economy has crashed and the game is overrun with exploits, bots, and RMT activities. I really do enjoy this game and want to see them succeed, however I find myself logging very frustrated at the current state of things and eventually will stop coming back as my levels of frustration start to shine over the enjoyment and love I have for this game.

[Xystic]

People are starting to blow things out of proportion here.

RMTs have existed for over a decade now. WoW continues to battle RMT's daily. This is WoW, which has a substantially higher amount of financial backing to battle RMT's and yet RMT's still run rampant in WoW.

Whether it be F2P or P2P there will always be RMTs as long as people are willing to buy virtual currency. People are acting like they've never seen RMTs before, when we know, they've been nearly around as long as MMOs and are nearly impossible to get rid of.

[DSN]

People are starting to blow things out of proportion here.

RMTs have existed for over a decade now. WoW continues to battle RMT's daily. This is WoW, which has a substantially higher amount of financial backing to battle RMT's and yet RMT's still run rampant in WoW.

Whether it be F2P or P2P there will always be RMTs as long as people are willing to buy virtual currency. People are acting like they've never seen RMTs before, when we know, they've been nearly around as long as MMOs and are nearly impossible to get rid of.

This is a tad different than 'seen around'. There are tons on top of each other multiboxing, not underground, clear as day, easy to spot, have been there for weeks now with nothing being done to slow them down.

[Sixmp]

This is a tad different than 'seen around'. There are tons on top of each other multiboxing, not underground, clear as day, easy to spot, have been there for weeks now with nothing being done to slow them down.

Things have been done. Accounts have been banned thousands of them. Huge amounts of gil have been removed from the game causing the price of gil being sold to rise. Claiming nothing is being done is far from accurate.
If you understood the tactic being used by SE to deal with the RMT problem you would understand why you get to see all those collectors running around.