Too many bots, too few bans: The Shadowbringers edition.

[Sarevok_Thordin]

I really hope that SE gets the finger out and starts nuking all these bots.

Make it easier for us to tell you about them like with RMT bots, issue bans for people who BUY the gil and ruin their customer base.

[SamSmoot]

-After mounting up, they almost always take flight from a complete standstill, sometimes running a short distance then abruptly stopping to do so (As opposed to taking flight out of a run as normal players are prone to doing).

You can mount up while moving?? I guess I'll have to try this. (Ex-WoW, where movement interrupts mount cast)

-FSH bots cannot distinguish tugs and will waste their time/GP reeling in everything they hook even if the target fish is readily identifiable from it.

Distinguish fish from tugs? How?, and how not to hook? Just wait for the fishing cast to time out? Since I have no idea what I'm about to catch, I just pull everything and toss the ones I don't want. [/QUOTE]

[Xieldras]

Distinguish fish from tugs? How?, and how not to hook? Just wait for the fishing cast to time out? Since I have no idea what I'm about to catch, I just pull everything and toss the ones I don't want.

Yeah, you have small tugs, medium tugs and big tugs. There are specific fishes for each tug, plus a time window. Going for a specific fish, you distinguish the tug you need and Hook.

[CorbinDallas]

You act like I've never been accused of botting. :P I've been playing MMOs for over 15 years. I've been there and done that.

And again, it's really not that hard to say no.

edit: As an addendum, if, say, an officer walks up to me and asks me if I'm doing something illegal, I'm not just going to stay silent and walk away. That's completely asinine and only makes it all the more likely I'll be arrested. Or shot, since this is American police we're talking about.

Obviously regular players don't hold the same amount of power, but they still have the ability to report you. And you're a lot more likely to get reported for botting if you stay quiet and continue acting like a bot. If you don't wanna get reported, do the thing that makes you not get reported. It's so easy.

If a GM sent me a tell of course I'd reply, but I'm not obligated to reply to a no mark like you who has a chip on their shoulder who just wants to, as another posted so eloquently put it, wave their pretend police badge around. Get out of my face, if you want to report me for ignoring you then go right ahead I'm sure the GMs will get a good laugh out of it.

[KageTokage]

You can mount up while moving?? I guess I'll have to try this. (Ex-WoW, where movement interrupts mount cast)

Nah, the moving then suddenly stopping thing happens after they mount up.

On its own, it wouldn't look that suspicious but coupled with the awkward, but consistent pauses it makes it really obvious that they're running a script.

[Starvi]

Besides all the standard effects they have like pricing at the market board or gil/character selling, they also congest the servers. If I still get login queue in the middle of the night on a european server then something is not right. Even for an immensely popular game like FFXIV.

Considering that they pop up in groups, someone is likely multiboxing. Just stand next to the BLM NPC in Uldah and count the bots popping up out of nowhere and then vanish and not in the normal "I teleport away" manner. It's crazy these days and it is affecting my game experience.

I have to move my butt when fishing at one location for too long because the game wants to prevent botting but so far these measures seem to affect only normal players and not the multitude of actual bots.

[KageTokage]

The RMT/gil-farming bots are using a modded client that basically is only sending the signals needed to move their characters, which makes it possible for them to be running hundreds of accounts off just a single PC.

Makes me wonder why they can't have some manner of authentication to ensure that the official client is being used.

[KageTokage]

The amount of cherry-picking that seems to go on in terms of what the community reps do/don't recognize as something that should be relayed to the devs as an issue is...troubling.

The RMT bots are so insanely high in number on the new servers that they're clogging up the queues and making it impossible for people to progress the MSQ whenever a new wave is passing through each week.

The economy is slowly but surely being taken over by the DoH/L bots as legit players start to lose interest in selling items, while others are just AFKing their way to the Amaro mount using FATE/trust/PvP bots.


It's honestly getting maddening to me at this point, but I don't have any intention of letting this topic die until something productive actually happens (Which will likely be never).

[EaMett]

I think part of the reason SE don't really crack down on it that hard is because crafter/gatherer mains are such a small part of the player base and they're really the only ones that get screwed over since it really devalues their time. Everyone else sadly benefits from it more than they would get screwed by it. Cheaper prices on everything, etc.. the whole thing.
Actually dedicating devs towards eradicating it is probably counterproductive for the business, especially considering it's a constant chase between recognizing patterns and then bots changing those patterns and so on and so forth. Instead they mostly focus on RMTs that do affect the game way more directly.

I could be completely wrong, but that's always what I thought when the topic of them doing nothing popped up. I figured they could put some measures that would keep third party software from attaching to the game but because FF14 doesn't have a good macro system and doesn't have an add-on system at all it would be detrimental to do that as it would lockout a lot of beloved 3rd party software.

[AnimaAnimus]

There were so many blm bots sitting inside the company chest in Ul'dah at Sapphire Ave the other day that if you clicked anywhere near it, you targeted a bot. You had to hit your nearest non pc target button to get the actual chest.

I actually played around with it to see how far away I had to click to not target a bot and it was surprisingly far. There was some warping in and out but mostly they just sat there unmoving.