100's of level 25 botters teleporting from behind Twin Adders desk to Aetherye. Why?

[Limecat]

Considering there's no shortage of RMT going on and prices in the shouts are dropping, I'd say that the ban waves and SE's policy of catching "the big fish" do exactly jack besides kill old farming bots that were probably already abandoned. If they're serious about ever stopping it, they're going to have to place 24/7 teams of GMs in stealth mode on every world watching the hot spots with the tools to hoover up any bot they see during their shift. They could even add achievements for the GMs; ban 1000/5000/10000 bots, that kind of thing. Or an inverse of Honest Gillionaire, "remove 10 million gil from the economy by banning bots", hahaha.

[KisaiTenshi]

There is no reason we shouldn't have right click report for anything that can be reported. The function could auto-fill the standard information so all the player has to do is complete the subject and description. I don't understand SE's reluctance to do this other than they don't want to be bothered with problems and would rather ignore them.

It probably goes to a ticket queue or a mass-data-entry system. That's the kind of thing we had at the auction website, where any properly formatted message would be processed by the item removal queue, and the tool for that would literately be a series of check boxes, and it would keep track of the violations. After X violations it would just ban the seller, and the seller would think they're sneaky and create another account, and that would be justification for immediate ban.

If that's the kind of thing SE has going on for reporting, then any kind of bulk report, by the user, is basically useless, as they would only be able to understand one report at a time. And if that's the case, being able to report from the search window or FC list, or even from the lodestone (which you can do, but can't report the FC, and you have no idea if the player has already been actioned.)

The pattern, if you watch, is that these bots only appear for about 3 seconds, just long enough to do whatever they do with the FC chest. And then they disappear, and they go, alphabetically. That's how you know the cycle is repeating. One day you'll report all the button mash bots from c-f, the next day you might get e-j, and so forth. There is probably hundreds on every server that they just cycle through until they're suspended, and then start over. With the same pattern.

[Canadane]

From what I remember, only the STF deals with this, and I recall the credits showing the STF has about four people to the team.
Imagine four people and lists and lists of account names being made faster than you can count.

Really what we need is an anti-RMT team. The STF deals with other issues beyond this already.
Problem is, Japanese servers have next to no RMT, so developers and others in charge may never see how big the problem really is. Even with the report numbers.

[SigmaOZ]

So what's the business in gil farming!?...


I really doubt they buy thousands of new game copies (accounts) just to farm gil no one buys, because if you buy gil you get banned so there's really no one they can sell the products of their bot farming!...


So whom the hell would buy accounts just to lose them sooner or later!?... Well, I guess they could sell those accounts to new players just the way potions work so they skip the boring parts and get straight to the latest action, a name change and a phial of fantasia would make it viable, maybe!...

[DrWho2010]

most gil buyers IF they get caught only get a slap on the wrist. They don't get banned. S-E wants them to keep playing after all.

[Ilan]

Bots are the greatest immersion breakers for me and directly impacts the length of subscription I have with MMO.

If these are bots of gold/gilsellers, SE can't do anything because they will always get their bots back up and running. Not a single mmo, which is not dead, is bot free and never will because goldselling brings a lot of money.
It is not the fault of the publisher if there are bots, this is player made because as long as people buy gil the sellers will earn money and keep going and SE can't do anything besides the stuff they do already.

[lockey_breezewalker]

There is no reason we shouldn't have right click report for anything that can be reported. The function could auto-fill the standard information so all the player has to do is complete the subject and description. I don't understand SE's reluctance to do this other than they don't want to be bothered with problems and would rather ignore them.

Sounds great, except you roughtly have 5 seconds before they disapear.

Easiest way to deal with their teleportation abuse is to put an instant kill zone beneath the surface and something similar for skyboxes in instances and no fly zones. (Watching tons of WTM/BLM falling dead on the ground after teleporting into the sky of ARR zones would be quite hilarious. Its raining bots! Allehluya!)

[Hasrat]

If they're serious about ever stopping it, they're going to have to place 24/7 teams of GMs in stealth mode on every world watching the hot spots with the tools to hoover up any bot they see during their shift.

This sounds great, until you consider just how much you'd have to pay such a team. Forever. Because if the botters ever caught wind of "they stopped paying attention because there weren't as many bots," they'd be right back at it.

[KisaiTenshi]

Sounds great, except you roughtly have 5 seconds before they disapear.

Easiest way to deal with their teleportation abuse is to put an instant kill zone beneath the surface and something similar for skyboxes in instances and no fly zones. (Watching tons of WTM/BLM falling dead on the ground after teleporting into the sky of ARR zones would be quite hilarious. Its raining bots! Allehluya!)

It doesn't work that way unfortunately. The only effective means of preventing bots requires full time no-opt-out PvP with no safe zones. Players love ganging up on bots when they're in the way. However this isn't a self-fixing problem even with PvP, it's just a means to get them out of the way. There's often a huge surge in bots in safe areas (see Archeage), and no way to report actual bots in any quantity. Game devs are too worried about a reporting tool being abused that they don't consider the possibility that the server will be overrun with bots if reporting is limited or non-existent. Version 1.0 was overrun with bots within days of release, and part of the reason I gave up on it, and why I didn't play 2.0 for months after completing ARR, because a bot presence means the developers don't care about the integrity of the game.

The bots that fall out of the air or underground, are simply being told to go to a location that isn't even inside the game's collision box, and rely on the game correcting it. Like if you watch them port in front of the Waking Sands around level 25-35 to do the "pick up the dead scions", you see exactly how the game interprets it. You see the shadow move from the entrance of the waking sands, then the bot, and then drop onto each target. They all move exactly the same way. The bots that are behind the FC chest are not below the chest, they're standing in an empty void with a floor as far as I know because of where the FC tag pops out of the wall.

Maybe a better fix to kill those bots would be to just have a server-sided negative space database, and any character that is spawned or despawned at those coordinates is sent to jail instead. Effectively it's a trap that uses the bots own laziness against them.

[Moonlite]

Considering there's no shortage of RMT going on and prices in the shouts are dropping, I'd say that the ban waves and SE's policy of catching "the big fish" do exactly jack besides kill old farming bots that were probably already abandoned. If they're serious about ever stopping it, they're going to have to place 24/7 teams of GMs in stealth mode on every world watching the hot spots with the tools to hoover up any bot they see during their shift. They could even add achievements for the GMs; ban 1000/5000/10000 bots, that kind of thing. Or an inverse of Honest Gillionaire, "remove 10 million gil from the economy by banning bots", hahaha.

They don't do nothing. They allow them to flood the game with items for weeks at a time. So not only do they facilitate gil to lazy players. They facilitate lazy players by providing insane amounts of tedious items. Which in turn makes the game easier for them, making them feel more accomplished. Also creating a larger financial investment, creating an artificial attachment. Win for sellers, Win for buyers, Win for SE, only a loss for players who think of the integrity of the game.

This sounds great, until you consider just how much you'd have to pay such a team. Forever. Because if the botters ever caught wind of "they stopped paying attention because there weren't as many bots," they'd be right back at it.

Or they could start developing some actual automated tools. It is like this is an MMO from a basement in 1999. Who am I kidding.