FFXIV: Cheat 2 Win - The New Norm?

[ApolloGenX]

People botted crafts like crazy.. bot harvesting, bot killing npcs... the game has been infested with bots and gil sellers since it started. FFXI was the same way.

Ultimately, these games end up feeling more like F2P cash shop and grind based games then sub games, because they are so out of control.

FFXIV has limited this somewhat by making everyone the same and giving out skills at level up, and by hiding gear behind token grinds.... so... all the nonessential stuff (housing and vanity) is owned by the gil sellers/bots...and all the gameplay stuff is earned on the hamster wheel.... or was... until hunts =/

[HaelseMikiro]

necro'd ><

[NolLacnala]

Any particular reason or just too much free time

[Zigabar]

necro'd ><

... I'd say.

[HaelseMikiro]

Surfing old forums posts trying to find something specific (not this thread) but I happened to click on this one and read the entire first page, and kinda blew my mind that almost everything there was something relevant enough that I wouldn't be surprised to see a brand new post about it weekly. Just curious if people could see it and start adding to it again. If the OP didn't have 178 likes already I might not have bothered, but people always say '1 strong thread is better than many repeats"

[Kosmos992k]

Edit : Well, it's alive! Not my fault someone applied the defibrillator, but what's done is done.

I happened to click on this one and read the entire first page, and kinda blew my mind that almost everything there was something relevant enough that I wouldn't be surprised to see a brand new post about it weekly **snip**
but people always say '1 strong thread is better than many repeats"

It boggles my mind that SE has thus far (2 and a half years later) found it impossible to filter teleport requests based on source and target coordinates - even if all they did was trace telemetry off-line, they'd at least be able to Identify cheaters using teleportation hacks. The same goes for all position and speed hacks, some simple offline scanning of game server logs should immediately throw up some potential candidates for action; and that's just position and teleportation hacks.

[Khalithar]

Banning bots isn't that easy. A dev for wow addressed this issue and basically said that it's a constant arms race. Even if they ban the botters, a lot of them will just make a new account and continue their nefarious activities.

On the other hand, if they break the bot, someone will just develop a new one and it goes on forever.

[tymora]

To be fair, it is hard to come up with content that DOESN'T promote cheating...because cheaters will cheat, regardless the content.

[JunseiKei]

Having worked as a GM where finding, reporting, gaining evidence and then enforcing bans with a tertiary part of my job (my primary was actively bug testing while secondarily answering customer support), it's not easy to ban. Take this bit of information with a grain of salt because I don't know how SE operates.

Anyone using a VPN can avoid an enforced IP ban (banning accounts works far better, but no idea how SE does banning).

That does not include time taken to trace reports sent in by players to support cheating. I found more reports that were simply lacking information (time, date you saw cheating occur, what happened, players in question, screenshots, videos, combat logs- anything) and combing logs in the system was often time consuming, even with tools while still meeting quotas. Yes, there are ticket quotas (or at least where I had worked did. Again, I don't work for SE, so I don't know if they have a similar system). The game I worked on was far smaller than FFXIV and things easily backlogged. I can only imagine with how many servers there are and players with... how many staff?

Running after bots is often an endeavor in futility, as frustrating as that is. For the time taken to track down a cheater (like botting done by RMTs), several more have already been made. Investigations have to be done; banning is never done blindly. It's worse to ban a player that someone reportedly maliciously (people will find excuses to witch hunt those they don't like) or accidentally (gatherers do often look like botters or even a simple misclick) than to leave a bot grinding away. A player will rage and make a scene. RMTs stay silent and just start from scratch. However, while futile, rule enforcement is still done; it just takes longer than what most players are willing to understand and often stop sending in reports [with actual valuable information] because they see no change within a certain time frame. The more reports sent in on specific people or groups, the more likely they will be pushed up over other issues (and why certain characters may go unpunished for months).

As for cheaters, a lot of people mistake a lack of understanding of skills or mechanics and think there are exploits when there are none to be had. In this case, not only are there reports being made with lacking information, done out of spite or even accidental, but there are many with simply wrong information. The more serious the reported exploit or cheater, the more likely it will be looked into faster. Companies have no obligation to let players know if things are being looked into or worked on. Mostly, this is to not let an exploit spread to those that don't know there is one currently (think at the time of writing this, using pomanders outside of Palace of the Dead is a thing) as well as protect the staff or company. Nothing will be seemingly done about the issue, or said about it, until an effective fix is found. Then there are simply exploits that are simply hushed, hoping that it will go unnoticed (like that world #1 BLM on FFLogs who had logs that made no sense unless they were using spell speed/ casting hacks- this was addressed after someone reported them with quite a large amount of data as to why their logs made no sense). :P Then a fix is made and servers are taken down for emergency maintenance, if the exploit is severe enough, and players complain. /laugh Can't win.

All in all, nothing is ever as simple as a majority of players think they are.

[Beckett]

necro'd ><

I read 10 pages of posts trying to figure out why people were talking about Hunts like they were relative content until I looked at the post dates.