Suspicious Characters

[Senfei]

EVE Online's system would never work here. The reason they can allow players to buy in game currency with cash with little to no negative impact on the game is that all of your assets can be destroyed permanently. If the ships/modules you bought with the ISK (eve equivilant to gil) you received from your sanctioned RMT through their company could not be destroyed, the game's economy would fall apart. Essentially sure, you could spend boatloads of cash irl and get super rich in EVE, but one bad decision can put you right down at the bottom of the barrel so to speak. Having money doesn't make you OP, it just makes you competetive until someone better happens along.

[Felis]

Personally if I were SE I would create my own gil buying website and ban anyone who tried to buy gil... If people would stop buying it then they would stop advertising it...

Just do it like at the beginning of 1.0 and put in 15k gil rewards for leves.
And also put in a chance to get 100k gil from one leve ^^



This way people would not think about buying gil with real money.

[Sparky]

I think there are definitely characters out there who are involved in RMT activity who go against the grain of the observations that were noted earlier. Take this player I spotted on Wellwick Road farming fire crystals:

Clearly a bot/rmt farmer in my opinion. No significant character progress, no mount. He had no FC or GC affiliation.


And his gear. Note that he DOES have his pick and AF gloves; but there is no belt AND some of the gear is lv1/lv5.



Personally, I would have no problems reporting this guy. I find it extremely hard to believe someone would be so incompetent with their gearing; and besides, this guy would struggle with high end nodes so there clearly has been no attempt to aim for those stat requirements.

[1upAquarius]

I don't know how it is in other servers, a lot of gathering Bot(s) in Goblin will have a lvl 50 miner, and like most of you pointed out only one class upto 10 or 11, obviously so they can unlock and use other classes.
They use to just have basic lvl 1 gear, usually less than lvl 10 gear too at lvl 50. I've seen teleporting ones, under the map bot(s), bot(s) with tweaked super fast mining swings. I've reported, they disappeared; now they have more realistic names, they use sprint now before leaving a node, but still travel in a pattern (such as running towards an area then turning around, at the same point each cycle).
I too started seeing (I still call them "bots" you begin to recognize automated behaviors) with HQ gear, yet still a lvl 5 pickaxe. You can't tell me unless you're completely bored and have no job, that you can level miner to 50 and only play a DoW to 10?

[Naraku_Diabolos]

-Snip-

All of the bots I've seen have the same visual gear as the one you posted. They always wear that blue shirt. And yes, with 1upAquaris, I have seen them Sprint to node to node with going through even obstacles in their path as if they are a ghost. Plus I've seen one swing a pickaxe as if it were the Kraken Club from FFXI in four quick swings.

[Kiayin]

I think there are definitely characters out there who are involved in RMT activity who go against the grain of the observations that were noted earlier. Take this player I spotted on Wellwick Road farming fire crystals:

Clearly a bot/rmt farmer in my opinion. No significant character progress, no mount. He had no FC or GC affiliation.


And his gear. Note that he DOES have his pick and AF gloves; but there is no belt AND some of the gear is lv1/lv5.


Personally, I would have no problems reporting this guy. I find it extremely hard to believe someone would be so incompetent with their gearing; and besides, this guy would struggle with high end nodes so there clearly has been no attempt to aim for those stat requirements.

I have a set of low-level gear I use when I gather shards though...

[Discover]

I try to grind every craft and gatherer to level 20 for less leve consumption but along the way; I've noticed RMT's flying around swinging their pick at 90 times human speed and when reported it took SE atleast 20 hours to ban him because when i logged for the day and came back he was still at it. honestly SE needs to up security or are economy will be that of a F2P.
updates that need to be added -spam throttle so if someone sends way too many messages the server mutes them (crappy but effective) - X and Y cords to be monitered every so often (excluding cord Z because fall speed)

[Naberrie]

I have a character on his server. I've seen the lalafells he's talking about and they are suspicious. They run in a pack from FATE to FATE, all look identical, have what appear to be normal looking names but on closer inspection are patterned, wear only starting gear regardless of level, and use one skill over and over and over. I've contemplated myself that they might be a new RMT brand.

But considering all I see them do is run FATEs in bad gear, it's hard to know what to report them for. Bad taste? Despite my suspicions, I've not seen them actually do anything against TOS.

[Sparky]

In the case of the example pics I posted above, I did report him. I worded my report very carefully to emphasize that it was my opinion that something was amiss, and why I thought so. Then I stressed that it requires investigation and that I am not 100% certain of the activities that character was carrying out. This should be enough to cover him in the unlikely event he's legit, but also gives SE enough to properly investigate.

[Sparky]

I just want to add, it really is imperitive that you include as much info as you possibly can in your tickets. It's simply not enough to say "This player is botting" etc , you need to go way further, and include exactly what it is you observed, and why you think this is suspicious. I find that by my estimate, 90% of the time, a detailed ticket I send results in prompt action by SE. The botters I report that are still around a day or two later, usually because I did not have time to file a detailed report. It takes SE a lot longer to investigate if they are not given proper information.

Bonus tip: If you have space on your blacklist, add any players you report to the blacklist. You can them time how long it is for them to be banned, by checking to see if the are still there and not showing as <deleted>