Phoenix is overrun with Monday Morning bot herds

[Pintsized]

In the last hour or so I have reported around a dozen bots in Thanalan, level 1-20, and Player Searches using the first three characters of their repeatitive names showed about another 30 in Thanalan and the Shroud: try COC as one example.

More than that, I saw the names of two FCs each of which showed 24/24 online, and not all the bots are in those FCs, so a conservative guess would mean well over 60 bots, all created today (the FCs were created today); the FCs have the same kind of generated names as the bots, the tags are HMVR and XR .. no this is NOT name and shame, I'm not naming specific characters!

They're all in parties, mostly mages, all 'popup' from below ground to interact with NPCs then instantly vanish (many back to Walking Sands), occasionally they 'fly' to an NPC.

After 3 years SE clearly have utterly failed to even begin to deal with the 'bottability' of the game, I assume they've given up and are content with legit players being screwed over by this scum.

[Pintsized]

Another FC these bots are using is VWT, currently 16/16 online, player search on HEH.

[Kosmos992k]

SE killed something like 50,000 RMT accounts in the last two weeks, about 46,000 of which were not for advertising, in which case they will be bot accounts or bankers. Culling that many existing bots means that any RMT organization around will have to sprout a lot of new accounts and characters to rebuild their bot population in order to keep their gil coming in. So, in a sense this sudden rash of bots you are seeing may be a reaction to the large wave of perma-banning for RMT that SE has done.

Keep reporting, the huge uptick in RMT perma-bans has only come since the easier RMT reporting began. Reporting the pernicious little roaches obviously works.

[UnstablePersonality]

Oh yeah it's been working great, haven't an RMT tell in like a week.

[Pintsized]

Keep reporting, the huge uptick in RMT perma-bans has only come since the easier RMT reporting began. Reporting the pernicious little roaches obviously works.

True, chat spam reporting is easy now (of course one could say it was far too long coming) but bot reporting is no easier than it's always been, there's no 'report bot' mouse click for that you have to spend a lot of time filling in the 'Report Cheating' dialog, as well as capturing the names via player search (they disappear often too quickly to be sure of the full name), each report takes 2-3 minutes to complete.

I still wonder where RMT get their vast number of accounts, I've never believed SE's assertion they're ALL stolen!

More Player Searches: PAP and KUK

[Raynar]

I still see bots like OP is saying in Sargatanas they Most hang in Ul'dah Nald as THM/BLM around the Late overnight hours and Spam in Say Thal Normally spawn then zip across the map and disappear below the floor. Just keep reporting them and they're gone.

[Kosmos992k]

True, chat spam reporting is easy now (of course one could say it was far too long coming) but bot reporting is no easier than it's always been, there's no 'report bot' mouse click for that you have to spend a lot of time filling in the 'Report Cheating' dialog, as well as capturing the names via player search (they disappear often too quickly to be sure of the full name), each report takes 2-3 minutes to complete.

I still wonder where RMT get their vast number of accounts, I've never believed SE's assertion they're ALL stolen!

More Player Searches: PAP and KUK

Keep reporting the tells, they can trace some of the others through those. The more reports of bots and other RMT the better, anything that helps trace the networks is what results in 50,000 accounts getting banned in 2 weeks.

Yeah, I don't believe it's stolen accounts either. A long while back I counted up all the RMT action reports and it was over 500,000 accounts banned since ARR started, I'm sure it's a lot more now. There is no way the majority of those are legitimate user accounts that were hijacked.

[Frowny]

Keep reporting the tells, they can trace some of the others through those. The more reports of bots and other RMT the better, anything that helps trace the networks is what results in 50,000 accounts getting banned in 2 weeks.

Yeah, I don't believe it's stolen accounts either. A long while back I counted up all the RMT action reports and it was over 500,000 accounts banned since ARR started, I'm sure it's a lot more now. There is no way the majority of those are legitimate user accounts that were hijacked.

That and many have nonsensical names.