Teleporting Group of Bots

[MsQi]

If that teleporting thing is real that's an exploit.

Multi-boxing, as far as I tell, is not against the rules. This is where multiple characters from multiple accounts respond to the same manual input.

Botting is when there is no human input; it's just running a script, usually repeating. if they are turning in one time quests it's probably not botting. I suppose one could script repeating leves, but those change from time to time.

[KisaiTenshi]

If that teleporting thing is real that's an exploit.

Multi-boxing, as far as I tell, is not against the rules. This is where multiple characters from multiple accounts respond to the same manual input.

Botting is when there is no human input; it's just running a script, usually repeating. if they are turning in one time quests it's probably not botting. I suppose one could script repeating leves, but those change from time to time.

Teleporting is just how it looks to the client. What's actually happening is the bots are moving without sending the movement vectors (the actual animation.) So they go from X/Y/Z to X+Δ/Y+Δ/Z+Δ without going "I'm moving at Q rate of speed on Axis T, rotated by R degrees"

There are about 200 active on Excalibur alone. They start creating new bots on monday morning, and then they run all week until next maintenance, which is when I assume the bots are actually banned, but they've already laundered the gil through the FC and market by then.

[KageTokage]

Stopping the gil farm bots would honestly be as simple as changing boss AI to auto-reset if they're being hit from a location that's impossible to reach legitimately.

They break the boss AI by hacking to float above them at max casting range which makes most of them do nothing.

[Omegabear]

If that teleporting thing is real that's an exploit.

Multi-boxing, as far as I tell, is not against the rules. This is where multiple characters from multiple accounts respond to the same manual input.

Botting is when there is no human input; it's just running a script, usually repeating. if they are turning in one time quests it's probably not botting. I suppose one could script repeating leves, but those change from time to time.

It can't be a human input. These bots are basically "flickering" in and out of existence right in front of me, every 2~3 seconds, btw groups of mobs and NPC's. You can't control 10+ characters to do that with human appendages lol.

[MsQi]

It can't be a human input. These bots are basically "flickering" in and out of existence right in front of me, every 2~3 seconds, btw groups of mobs and NPC's. You can't control 10+ characters to do that with human appendages lol.

You seem to be mixing up what I said. The point is exploiting, multi-boxing and botting are three different things.

[KisaiTenshi]

You seem to be mixing up what I said. The point is exploiting, multi-boxing and botting are three different things.

As far as I know, the bots are operating by manipulating the game client's own API. However the fingerprints show through the server's own data, hence why they appear like they're teleporting.

What is very likely going on is that groups of bots are running on a single machine via sandboxing tools that allow multi-clienting. That's of course different from multi-boxing. There are also tools you can use, legitimately to control two or more machines from one input source. So it's absolutely not a stretch that one tool at the end of a multi-tool is controlling multiple machines and multiple game clients.

Though the occam's razor is really that the spammers are just common macro programs that have been used to torment MMO players for years because they allow arbitrary clipboard or keyboard API input. They could disable clipboard paste into the game client and it wouldn't stop them.

The bots that are "teleporting" however are probably easier done by packet hacking, but that would raise flags when checksums and timestamps don't match. So it's more likely they're just manipulating the "move to x/y/z" instruction without the actual "animate" instructions, and hence why they appear the way they do.

You can see the bots FC tags in both Gridania and Ul'dah sticking out from behind the FC chest if you stand between in the fountain (Ul'dah) and the pillar and zoom out most of the way. Gridania you just stand on the rocks outside of it, and you'll see the tag stick out.