There's a Literal Army of RMT BOts Doing the MSQ

[hynaku]

Should seen guild wars 2 and blade and soul when they first came out. guild wars 2 had huge trains on ranger bots that killed everything in sight and left you with no mobs to kill for quests. blade and soul saw trains of 60 summoners all together killing everything in sight. One thing don't remember was seeing many bots when played ffxi and elder scrolls online. should when played it killed off 99% of the bots by banning all ips from china, india, and I think Russia.

[SturmChurro]

I have the solution in three words.


Open world pvp.


Gate the msq behinde a open world pvp area, and watch the magic happen. Put in rewards for actual players to body gaurd friends and low levels through the "Dark Forest". Best part... If anyone ferries them through, they can out themselves as rmt... You only get to show off that they are in your party.

Yeah right. I wonder how many reports the devs would have to go through on the hourly. It would be hilarious though.

[Berteaux_Braumegain]

The bots are part of the new Nier Raid. Once you unlock the third level of it, every bot in the world will suddenly become an aggressive mob and attack you on sight.

[apothecaria]

Open world pvp.

I cannot conceive of a worse solution.

[Khalithar]

I cannot conceive of a worse solution.

That was one of the nice things about designated PVP servers when they still had them on WoW. Open season on RMT bots and farmers with no restrictions.

[apothecaria]

That was one of the nice things about designated PVP servers when they still had them on WoW. Open season on RMT bots and farmers with no restrictions.

I played on Frostmourne. It's still a terrible idea.

[KageTokage]

I really do think they could make a significant dent in their profitability by taking a targeted approach to interfering with their farming.

Even something as simple as creating in a kill zone in an out of bounds area they need to pass through for MSQ progression could potentially stop them as they need to do that to avoid death in pretty much all instanced content.

[Halivel]

I have the solution in three words.


Open world pvp.


Gate the msq behinde a open world pvp area, and watch the magic happen. Put in rewards for actual players to body gaurd friends and low levels through the "Dark Forest". Best part... If anyone ferries them through, they can out themselves as rmt... You only get to show off that they are in your party.

Thanks, but spare us from open world PvP in this game. Its community already can be surprisingly toxic as it is, no need to make it even worse.

[Pintsized]

Botters can spam them out faster than SE's task force can ban them. It's fully automated for them, whereas the task force has to do it manually.

Yes, I realise it's automated, however:

1) How to RMT get so many accounts and continue to do so for years? How come SE haven't closed down their major sources of accounts?

Yes, SOME are stolen, however the numbers of bots are way more than is beleivably due to such theft.

2) Given that they're so damned obvious, with their key-mashed names, totally conformant builds, etc, writing an AI to detect them (or at least flag them) would be easy if SE had the desire.

3) The fact that SE have refused to provide a right-click method of filling in the 'report cheating' dialog with even just the name means it's a real PITA to report them .. seems to me SE are at best half-hearted in their protestations of their desire to eliminate bots as much as possible.

4) SE were able to eliminate pos-hacking is FFXI because it's EASY .. the server knows how fast characters can move, add on a cushion and it's EASY to detect if a client has moved a character beyond what's plausible .. again, lack of desire is the only reason I can SE for SE not doing it.

Yes, bots are perennial, and some of their techniques are sophisticated but the vast majority of bots are simply pos-hacking around the world and following their scripts to talk to NPC and kill mobs .. hell, the fact that bot herds are now botting the entire MSQ including dungeons is IMO a damming indictment of SE's lack of effort or will, or their inability to write code that isn't trivially subverted.

[Kleeya]

Imagine banning thousands of accounts weekly (https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...4e153f03e21396), and still having some people saying that you dont care making any effort about it. Sometimes i understand that Yoshida looks very, very tired.

If things were so simple as using a random two lines solution from a forum post, MMOs wouldn't have been plagued by bots for so long. Flagging gibberish names and similar builds ? What will you do when two days later bots will be back in full force using more commons names, and random builds ? Flagging pos hacking and MSQ botting ? What will you do when bots will start to use legit pos, and include random changes in their way of doing the MSQ ?

The real problem is that there is players buying these things. Even if there were to be zero transaction ability between players, you would still see some bots spamming their "all savage/ultimates sales ! Get your weapons/mounts now for cheap on this trusted website !" adds in town.