What is being doing against botters?

[akenatoth]

The situation with Bots on Lich is just crazy.

I've been afk in Bronze Lake for about 1h and I found the notification, in chat, of around 60 bots all dinging lvl 35.

Clearly someone has industrialized the whole botting process, and they're not even trying to hide.
Is Square Enix doing anything about it?

Edit: I counted them, but they were getting more... 87.

[TaranTatsuuchi]

Probably RMT bots...
All jibberish names?


You can't really get rid of these, they're recreated as fast as they're banned.
The important thing in the fight against rmt is to get the accounts holding the money, depriving them access to their stock.

These farm bots aren't important to the rmt.
They are easily replaced.

[akenatoth]

Yeah, I tried to post the names but I was 1k characters over the allowed limit.
If they're all lvl 35 I guess they're not disappearing all that fast.

Can they get this far with a trial account?

[TaranTatsuuchi]

Yeah, I tried to post the names but I was 1k characters over the allowed limit.

First, even though they may be obviously RMT bots, there's a no names rule on the forums.
So you shouldn't post names.

Second, you can edit your post to bypass the character limit.
Just write it out, copy and then paste while editing.

[StouterTaru]

When you see bots leveling, that means several were just banned. They have it automated, do it en masse, and will often warp to/through out-of-bounds areas.

[Enla]

Honestly at this point I wish SE would just change their approach and go after the people supplying the code for the bots, rather than take months to a year to go after the users. Blizzard took their own cheaters to court and won a fairly hefty judgement against them, and I don't see why SE couldn't try to as well. Instead of just banning them, go after their livelihoods. You'd have to find some of them of course, but SE likely has enough money and a good enough legal team to eventually do it.

[CuteMoonMoon]

Even they Do the BANs, it take several months to ban 1 by reporting BOTs almost every day, Make the BANs not effective.

[MageBlack]

"Cut off one head, two more will take its place".

- Hail Hydra!

[Endeleon]

It's hard to control when they just steal more credit cards to pay for more games/services. These bots aren't using their real money, it's not like they can just ban Joe Schmoe and be done with it. They are like flies on poop.

[Vidu]

https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...87766240bee683

We're getting a post like this roughly every week on the Lodestone.

To quote from the last one (the one I linked):

Time Period: Jun. 7, 2018 to Jun. 13, 2018

・Participation in RMT/prohibited activities
　・Accounts terminated: 3,334
・Botting activity (Using any number of third party tools that allow for automation)
　・Accounts terminated: 4
　・Accounts temporarily suspended: 16
・RMT advertising
　・Accounts terminated: 409

And as far as I can tell those are typical numbers - which shows only what other people already stated: They cant ban as fast as those people recreate accounts.
Its like my dad loves to say: "Kill one fly and seven come to the funeral" (its a german saying, not sure how well it translates, but you get the idea...)
So while there is stuff being done, this isnt something they can get rid off completly, without shutting off servers from character creation (Hello, Balmung!).

If its any consolation: Since they've locked HW and SB areas behind 200+ hours of mainstory, you see basically no bots there - except for "legit" people using a bot to gather mats, I guess... but no RMT-spam in Ishgard or Kugane, no people teleporting in Rubysea...