Does SE actually ban botters?

[Atoli]

So what would you make of all the R20+s still using a R1 tool and starting gear?

There are other tools but R1 tools? Woha, really? Awesome!
I'm just around lvl 19 though, but I think I should really start to search for those awesome new tools so I'm not considered a bot user when I lvl up

Lots of people just don't know better, so please don't jump to conclusions because of something like that.


Oh, and about the calculation Hotohori did:
960 Levequests in 36h?
That would imply they only take 2.2 minutes per levequest, including getting the levequests, running to the location, starting them, getting rewards, etc.
TWO minutes. Even if bots are able to run over hills I'm not able to, this is just impossible.
So please tone your calculation a whole lot down, bots' influence is not nearly as bad as your calculation makes it seem to be.

[Req]

They ban botters that get properly reported @ http://support.na.square-enix.com/co...hp?id=902&la=1

A full investigation is obviously required. However it really seems they are only taking action against characters with frighteningly similar first or last names or they've been sitting in the same spot for a week while desynthing fish into wind crystals while at the same time having a bazaar with 8/10x999 wind crystals, making them an R20+ alchemist wearing the main-hand and clothes they spawned with, or no clothes at all.

Edit: added "properly" and a link to open up a submission form.

Where u be son?

You people seem to mistake the term botters for RMT quite often. I have yet to see anyone that blatantly bots get banned other than the ones that were position hacking to kill marmots, on the other hand, I have seen the same people that run the rmt parties and kill all the level 30 mobs on their undergaeared level 50 jobs running around for months now. I am not sure if they actually ban the ones that sit at the aetheryte or not, but it doesnt seem like they are banning anyone at the moment that is an actual active player.

[TheVedis]

Where u be son?

You people seem to mistake the term botters for RMT quite often. I have yet to see anyone that blatantly bots get banned other than the ones that were position hacking to kill marmots, on the other hand, I have seen the same people that run the rmt parties and kill all the level 30 mobs on their undergaeared level 50 jobs running around for months now. I am not sure if they actually ban the ones that sit at the aetheryte or not, but it doesnt seem like they are banning anyone at the moment that is an actual active player.

they are
they just dont do it one at a time, they hit people in waves once they investigate

ive seen several active "players" who bot(not rmt) banned already, inlcluding 1 in my own shell i reported

[ClashBlades]

I'm more worried about the higher ranked players who have botted their way there than the randoms. I've seen many people discouraged when they look at those players and know that they botted almost all of their 50's. I am not saying that all players with max 50's have botted. I know there are some legit people who have played non-stop and more power to you if you did. The sad fact is several of the top ranked people on the servers have botted without consequence. We even had some video of the top 100 players botting. That is quite discouraging to all the players who played the game properly. Hopefully they have logs and records to refer to once they start getting serious about botters.

[TheVedis]

I'm more worried about the higher ranked players who have botted their way there than the randoms. I've seen many people discouraged when they look at those players and know that they botted almost all of their 50's. I am not saying that all players with max 50's have botted. I know there are some legit people who have played non-stop and more power to you if you did. The sad fact is several of the top ranked people on the servers have botted without consequence. We even had some video of the top 100 players botting. That is quite discouraging to all the players who played the game properly. Hopefully they have logs and records to refer to once they start getting serious about botters.

yeah i feel ya on the botters going up
im trying to keep up with some of them now that more people are doing it, and its just not possible, and i play ALOT
but when i see them getting 2-3 times the ranks i can per week even at the top, it sucks, and i wish some of them would get caught

[Sepix]

In fear i get banned now i will post it anyways to put up some clarification on your Bot Stories:

Since i worked for Burda:IC in the Anti Cheating Department for their MMOs i decided to check out the "Bots" people use in this game. I got my hands on them and actually tried them out just to see if all your horror stories are really true. If you dont believe me that i only tried them but used them to level be sure to check my Lodestone page with the achievements because i was at my levels way before this test. I also hope the moderator lets this post through or at least sends it to the dev team if he decides to delete it. Actually this here is something the dev team should have done long ago by themselfes.

Crafting Bots:

The standard version of this has about 20 lines of code and not a single one more. Of course its stupid and cant do much in this basic state but it can repeat the first recipe in the list of the recently made recipes. To be exact it isnt even a bot. Its a combination of simulated keystrokes every macro script for windows can do. Send down, send enter, send enter, send enter, send enter ... and so on. These bots scan the clock icon at your crafting window beside the timer bar to see if the craft is still ongoing. If that is the case the script hits enter and rechecks after that. When the clock is gone the thing hits enter again and then restarts the loop to pick the first in the recent recipes list to continue. The newer versions also scan for the scroll bar as soon as a skill pops up and navigate to the skill by sending up followed by sending enter. Thats the whole trick to it. Same thing works for NPC navigating and everything else to sell stuff.

Solution 1:

Change the clock icon to a random generated picture or remove it entirely as well as the timing bar. If there is no way for the bot to scan if he is still crafting or not even the most advanced one that is currently available on the internet will die out. That change takes a total of 10 minutes to implent.

Solution 2:

Remove the menu like UI for the PC version and make it Mouse navigated. Hotkey scripts can simulate mouseclicks but thats alot harder to achieve. Currently every 12 year old script kiddy can bot in this game.

Solution 3:

Randomize the "recent recipes list" so the last crafted recipe isnt always on the top. let it variate between the first two for example and that would be enough to stop most of the bots while being almost no nuissence for the players. Some smart people might catch on with a solution but you can at least give them a huge bump for some time. Best solution in my opinion.

Gathering Bots:

I didnt really stumble upon any usefull ones here. The ones found work the same way the crafting bots do which makes them rather useless. They can harvest completly on their own by scanning the screen for certain keypoints again but their problem is that they cannot run around between trees and probably wont be able to do it in the future because SE did a good job with the games memory. I wont tell what they did exactly but i can say that it makes it currently impossible to create a bot that completly emulates the client which is a very good thing. I doubt these bots are used much because it just doesnt make sense when you have to run in between trees anyways which is actually the most boring part in gathering. People who use bots are lazy and want to be AFK while it happens which definitly isnt the case here.

Guildleve Bots:

Despite all the horror stories i didnt find a single one of them and if you look at what i just said in the gathering section it is currently impossible to make a bot navigate on its own especially to random spawning locations and monsters. If you see a group of people auto following each other you can be sure the first guy is actually playing. There is a reason why bots usually camp in a cave or any other location where they dont have to navigate which brings us to the next type...

Leveling Bots:

These required some actual skill before the target changes i bet. Remember the time when they followed you when you got near them and no mob was close? Those times are over after SE revised the target system. By making it possible to target only enemies they pretty much enabled them to make their new toys. All you need is a hotkey script again that hits tab , locks on, presses forward for a few secs and then spams enter. This will be even worse after auto attack comes into play because they dont have to do anything anymore beside targeting and pulling their weapon. These kinds of bots also cant reclaim your claimed mobs. If they do than it is a hack that i have not encountered yet. They can however jump on cliffs you cant that is totaly true. There are position hacking tools available.

Solution 1:

Remove the lock on key and make it auto lock on after hitting the monster the first time. That makes it impossible for most bots to reach the monster because all they can do is press towards the locked mob they are facing. Also encrypt coordinates in the memory!

Solution 2:

Remove the enemy only target system again. Create an algorythm to switch the values between x, y and z coordinates in the client so botters cant read them out. Switching them around between locations doesnt help to much when the tool always checks right before its usage.

Well than. I hope i brought some light into this topic and enjoy my time in the forum until i get banned.

[ClashBlades]

Gathering Bots:

I didnt really stumble upon any usefull ones here. The ones found work the same way the crafting bots do which makes them rather useless. They can harvest completly on their own by scanning the screen for certain keypoints again but their problem is that they cannot run around between trees and probably wont be able to do it in the future because SE did a good job with the games memory. I wont tell what they did exactly but i can say that it makes it currently impossible to create a bot that completly emulates the client which is a very good thing. I doubt these bots are used much because it just doesnt make sense when you have to run in between trees anyways which is actually the most boring part in gathering. People who use bots are lazy and want to be AFK while it happens which definitly isnt the case here.

What makes it so that gatherer bots can't run between trees and nodes? The points are not random and they only change every couple hours to another set of non-random points.

A1, A2, A3, two hours pass, B1, B2, B3, two hours pass, A1, A2, A3

I'm no expert on botting, but it seems like that wouldn't be difficult for people to program. By the way, I highly doubt you will get banned. You should be ok.

[Sepix]

What makes it so that gatherer bots can't run between trees and nodes? The points are not random and they only change every couple hours to another set of non-random points.

A1, A2, A3, two hours pass, B1, B2, B3, two hours pass, A1, A2, A3

I'm no expert on botting, but it seems like that wouldn't be difficult for people to program. By the way, I highly doubt you will get banned. You should be ok.

To navigate on the map they would need a seperate programm emulating the client. Which means it would have to run while FFXIV itself is off and only simulates the packet exchanges. SE has a good security system for these kind of things because they switch the saved information in your memory around at certain amounts of time.

With hotkeys alone its impossible to navigate. You cant really scan obsticles in your way because they change size appending to distance and so on. There is no way for the bot to tell if there is a tree blocking its way or not. He may be able to scan big walls to teleport up to but thats about it.

[Nipa]

Change the clock icon to a random generated picture or remove it entirely as well as the timing bar. If there is no way for the bot to scan if he is still crafting or not even the most advanced one that is currently available on the internet will die out.

There will always be something distinctive to craft mode in the interface. At the very least you have to have an option for your next craft action. Even if you were to randomize the crafting button, there has to be some on-screen indication that we are currently crafting. Having an obscure interface will impact the players.

Remove the menu like UI for the PC version and make it Mouse navigated. Hotkey scripts can simulate mouseclicks but thats alot harder to achieve.

Way too much impact on the players. Some people do like to play with their keyboard or gamepad. And anyway, simulating a mouse-clic is not much more complicated than a keyboard key. One crafting bot use mouse clics for FF14.

Randomize the "recent recipes list" so the last crafted recipe isnt always on the top. let it variate between the first two for example and that would be enough to stop most of the bots while being almost no nuissence for the players.

Again, it's a solution that impacts the players. Those are not real solutions, because they don't address the real problem, which is not "anyone can make a bot for the crafting" but "the crafting is so mindbogglingly dumb that using a bot is more rational than playing it".

The core problem is the fact you have to grind 50 levels with less than 10 recipes and basically no need to make any choice during that progression. It's yelling "AUTOMATIZE ME". It's obvious that with so much repetition people will code bots. In fact, the weirder people here are those who grinded 50 levels by hand, spamming the same recipe all over again and again.

To stop crafting bots, the only workable solution is to rework the crafting system, so that it either involve a lot of player interaction (thing of Vanguard) or is totally automated (think of Eve). But you will get nowhere trying to mess with the players.

Remember that people will always be able to code bots, however complicated your system becomes. Are you aware that in some games, bots are so sophisticated that they can nearly run dungeons by themselves? In comparison with this FF14 crating bots are a sad joke.

As for FF14 craft, bots are not the problem. The bad game design is and you won't cut around it.

The reminder of your post is constructed around a false assumption, so I'll simply quote it:

it is currently impossible to make a bot navigate on its own especially to random spawning locations and monsters

This is obviously false. As long as you can get from the game memory the character position and his target and send keys to the game, you can make a fully automated bot, walking and killing monsters as he encounters them. You don't need anything else.

Of course finding the target and position in memory is more tricky than making an AutoHotKey script, but it's not a real feat. It's only a matter of finding the right bytes in memory in the end.

More precisely, in FF14, you can get much more from memory (available skills, cooldowns, HP/MP), which allows to make pretty decent bots.

And as for the higher level part of the bot software (to make the decision on which spell to use at what time, or to record a walking path), they are common to every MMO, so they can be easily reused from a previous bot. So it's really not a problem to do.

Of course those bots can be detected (if they are seen running around in short paths and using the same skills all day long) by some humans, so there is no need to fight them by complicating the game usage. It wouldn't work much anyway. Having an easy to use reporting system and active GMs is way enough for most games.

But again, detecting them automatically is really hard: we need human intervention for this.

[Sepix]

The problem isnt finding it. The problem is the algorythm that switches the bits around in the memory. Just because you can read the position out one time doesnt mean you can a second time which makes it almost impossible to create a bot that runs around on its own. At least until you crack the algorythm behind it which i dont think anyone has done yet and if he did this bot is not public. Otherwhise AHK scripts wouldnt be so popular at the moment.