And the dominant population on Spriggan so far is....Bots!

[AlliciaCapulet]

My point was more you can have lots of reasons for someone not answering ^^ Like watching a movie and don't really be looking at the chat because the thing you are doing is boring and repetitive (which is something I will do really soon with ShB, when it will come to run over and over the same macro to level my crafters), and yeah even if I understand that it's polite to answer, it's still not everyone who is polite. Or sometime you don't feel to be polite because it's not everyone that will be polite asking you.

But anyway, I was not attacking you, I was just saying that you can't really uses this as an argument. Having someone who do the exact same path, with the exact same glitch at the same place every time (because lots of gathering bot have obvious glitch when they are moving), and for a very very long time, all of those are good arguments to have suspicions.

[Halivel]

Lol, I'm not subjecting them to 20 questions or anything like that, just a simple "hi" or "hello". Even using the /wave emote. Sure they don't owe me a response, but at the same time it's considered courtious to say "hello" back and most people understand that word. I'm as introverted as they come when it comes to social interaction, but if someone is addressing me then I respond.

Silence is still not an argument, though. In my country people often do not know even "hello" so they will not answer you. And, for example, I personally ignore people who uses emotes on me in 95% of cases (mostly because I don't read chat and when I focused on something I also ignore players around me).

Moving on sircles could be an argument or could be not, it depends on how chracter behaves. If there are some noticeable glithces, yes, it's most likely a bot.

[Joven]

Silence is still not an argument, though. In my country people often do not know even "hello" so they will not answer you. And, for example, I personally ignore people who uses emotes on me in 95% of cases (mostly because I don't read chat and when I focused on something I also ignore players around me).

Moving on sircles could be an argument or could be not, it depends on how chracter behaves. If there are some noticeable glithces, yes, it's most likely a bot.

My point was more you can have lots of reasons for someone not answering ^^ Like watching a movie and don't really be looking at the chat because the thing you are doing is boring and repetitive (which is something I will do really soon with ShB, when it will come to run over and over the same macro to level my crafters), and yeah even if I understand that it's polite to answer, it's still not everyone who is polite. Or sometime you don't feel to be polite because it's not everyone that will be polite asking you.

But anyway, I was not attacking you, I was just saying that you can't really uses this as an argument. Having someone who do the exact same path, with the exact same glitch at the same place every time (because lots of gathering bot have obvious glitch when they are moving), and for a very very long time, all of those are good arguments to have suspicions.

I guess I should have specified at the start that I don't just walk up to someone who's mining, try to start a conversation and then report them for not answering. I watched them long enough to see a pattern then go about my business. When I come back through that area after being gone for a good while and see that they're still there I'll watch to make sure the pattern is still there. I only approach and try to engage them in conversation just to see if any may respond. By that time I'm already 99% certain they're bots and was going to report them anyways.

[Dagget]

They could at least find a way to take away their pseudo-gm abilities like insta-teleporting to precise coords or hiding underground. I understand it's essentially the same code as used for the EB rings that allow ppl to tp to their mate but SE needs to think a bit out of the box to find ways to at least disrupt the bots - substantial cooldowns on any precise tp's, unusual offsets for arrival that may put them out of chat range of the next npc, etc.

For example, no char in game should be allowed to insta-tp to within chat range of the Adventurers Guild Key NPC's (Baderon/Momodi/Miounne). If a valid EB partner TP's to mate standing in front of one, it's no great loss if their arrival point is a random point in the room a bit out of chat range, but it would add a great deal of work or coding for bots to compensate for arriving 10 meters from where they intended.

[Dagget]

I also wonder if perhaps the bots are winning the war against the security team. 2 years ago this month SE banned far more bots but my sense of the bot population now is that it is worse than 2 years ago:

Data:

Time Period: Jun. 8, 2017 to Jun. 14, 2017

・Participation in RMT/illicit activity
　・Accounts receiving permanent ban: 34,460
　・Accounts receiving temporary ban: 8
・RMT Advertising
　・Accounts receiving permanent ban: 120

=====

And this month:

Time Period: Jun. 13, 2019 to Jun. 19, 2019

・Participation in RMT/prohibited activities
　・Accounts terminated: 5,959
　・Accounts temporarily suspended: 12
・Botting activity (Using any number of third party tools that allow for automation)
　・Accounts terminated: 6
　・Accounts temporarily suspended: 15
・RMT advertising
　・Accounts terminated: 2,051

===

8k now versus 34k then?? I think I would sense that much of a decrease in bot activity.

[Liam_Harper]

A lv50-50 player search on Zodiark revealed about 320 bots at any one time. That's just the lv50 bots and doesn't count the ones already in dungeons. Which means there's probably a thousand or so on average per world, perhaps a lot more.

Another thing is there must be enough customers to justify this surge in botting. Thousands of players out there are buying gil all the time.

[KageTokage]

You'd think it would be laughably easy for SE to just trace the flow of gil from the farmers to the ones buying from them in order to issue bans to all involved parties, but the fact that the business is evidently thriving is making that seem doubtful.

I've kind of suspected that the STF doesn't actually conduct proper investigations and simply runs some kind of automated test to detect unusual activity such as the teleportation from the gil farmers then issues bans because they should be catching more of the DoL/H bots if that was the case.

Do these RMT all BUY the game for their accounts? I mean, free playtime, sure, but wouldn't they still have to buy the game to advance to level 50?

They do, presumably via credit card fraud or some such. I've even seen ones that buy the job/story skips (Which is evident by the gear they have equipped).

Silence is still not an argument, though.

Ironically, speaking is also not necessarily an indicator that someone isn't botting. I know from experience that a lot of bots are being monitored by their owners while they do their thing (Particularly if they're multi-boxing) and it's extremely simple for them to respond to get people off their backs.

The key things you should be looking for are awkward, repetitive movement patterns and abnormally long periods of activity.

8k now versus 34k then?? I think I would sense that much of a decrease in bot activity.

I think what's actually going on is that SE now only bans the bots in weekly waves as opposed to constantly because I used to see low leveled bots a lot more often then I do now.

Their scripts are set-up so that they'll create replacement bots literally the instant the original ones get banned, so trying to ban them constantly is fruitless. However, their current rate of banning is not actually preventing them from farming enough gil to make sizable sales, so they really need to find some kind of alternative solution to this.

[NekoNova]

only solution is people not buying this shit

[HyoMinPark]

I came across one RMT bot on Twintania. Nothing else at the moment.

But I bet they're going to invade us soon enough :c

I’ve been playing around on an alt I made on Twintania, and it’s astounding the amount of THM/CNJ/ARC bots I see just running around rushing the MSQ on her. Even when Cactuar wasn’t that high pop back in early HW, I never saw this many bots around on there. It’s probably because of the free 1,000,000 gil you get for hitting 30 tbh. Easy earnings for RMT, sadly.

[KageTokage]

Stopping RMT entirely would require removing all types of bots, so yeah, it is pretty hopeless.

Even if you curb the bots that rely on hacks for their gil farming, there's a new type that does MSQ progression/farming "legitimately" without use of hacks, as well as who knows how many that exploit the market board for their gil instead.

Even MMOs that are a lot stricter about banning people who choose to buy currency still struggle, so I don't think SE taking a harder stance in that regard would change anything either.