Zonureskin map bots: The latest blight on the economy.

[Packetdancer]

why is it every time someone expounds on the potential of false flagging I see someone likely going to be banned for botting?

Sometimes, that certainly might be the reason. Other times, it might just be a software engineer (or systems engineer) who's dealt far too often with incorrectly-flagged data due to criteria that don't actually properly define the bounds of the scenario a system is trying to flag.

Which is, among other things, a problem I am dealing with on a project at work right now.

(Please send help; I am in an AWS-hosted version of hell.)

I actually wouldn't be altogether surprised if they've actually done studies of this behind the scenes, though; it's not uncommon to test such things by setting up the system and have it 'dry run' rather than actually acting on results, and then see what the results were and try to hand-check them. And if the numbers were too skewed towards false positives—whatever 'too skewed' is by Square-Enix's reckoning, be that 10%, 1%, or 0.1%—most folks wouldn't push a system live.

Mind you, I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't done any such tests, either; there's also a tendency in my field towards overengineering solutions sometimes, which can lead to a sort of paralysis where you spend so much time trying to plug potential flaws in a system design that you never actually settle on a final design and make the system.

They could even just have decided the entire thing is a mess and not worth dealing with because it will effectively get into an escalating state of open warfare a'la email and text-message spammers, where the botters are constantly finding ways around the system and so the system needs to be redesigned every so often. Which would definitely be disappointing, but "this will cost too much to keep constantly updating a solution, so just ignore the problem and hope it goes away" is also an approach I've seen a non-zero number of times.

A depressingly non-zero number, at that.

[Floortank]

Not to mention, these types of bots are typically ran by players who otherwise actively play the game. We both know the infamous one on Cactuar. If SE actually did something, it would certainly have an impact. Hell, I know people who freely admit to botting/zone hacking and etc. Why don't they care? "Because SE never does anything anyway. You're more likely to get banned for parsing." It really speaks volumes to how poorly they handle player bots, and their lackadaisical approach is why we've seen such a huge increase going back to Stormblood. No one is remotely worried they'll get in trouble because, frankly, they likely won't.

Report them or you have no right to complain.

[KageTokage]

snip

The fact that they've yet to take any more permanent measures against the speed-hacking gil farmers that have been around since the early days of ARR confuses me especially.

They're clearly able to detect/ban them, but they seem to either not be aware of or not care about the fact that it accomplishes basically nothing as by the time the bans happen, the bots have already made millions of gil and either sold or transferred it off to a different account, plus it takes them less then a day to get replacements to level 50 to start farming again.

A start would be to just remove the gil drops from the ARR dungeons and replace them with additional gear from chests and other stuff that has similar value, but not in a form that the bots can abuse easily.

Report them or you have no right to complain.

People wouldn't be complaining in the first place if SE actually responded to the reports with some semblance of reliability.

I've tried reporting the same bots on my server at staggered intervals for years but they're still alive and kicking to this day.

The only time I've actually documented anyone on my server getting punished was during the second Ishgard ranking season where a few people in DoL rankings were both removed and slapped with a temporary ban. This was most likely a result of their bots bugging out and behaving too strangely for anyone to reasonably dismiss it as normal behavior as the Diadem bots were initially prone to having issues due to the unpredictable spawn times on the clouded nodes which would throw their scripts off and result in them getting stuck until the instance timed out.

[Jijifli]

Report them or you have no right to complain.

You're right. I haven't been reporting.

Because all the bots I had been reporting effectively weekly for the entire first year of this expansion alone are still active AT THIS VERY MOMENT gathering levin aethersand and such. And that statement isn't even counting the reports before ShB too.

If square doesn't want to enforce their ruling, the least they can do is tell me. These aren't false positives I'm reporting, there are 100% way too obvious.

Square's system is setup that it requires an extreme amount of evidence for someone to be banned, hence why things like stuff said in text chat is so easy to get banned over compared to botting, due to text chat being concrete evidence on their server logs. It doesn't matter if it looks like a duck, if it sounds like a duck, Square won't ban them unless they 100% know for sure it is a duck

Let's not pretend Square already does false positives potentially with their own confirm chat channels by the way. (TL;DR, I was almost given a 3 day suspension for someone spamming my whispers, because they thought I spammed.)

So if the concern is they might "false positive" big advice, you shouldn't do anything, because they already proved that's NOT the concern.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

Let's not pretend Square already does false positives potentially with their own confirm chat channels by the way. (TL;DR, I was almost given a 3 day suspension for someone spamming my whispers, because they thought I spammed.)

So if the concern is they might "false positive" big advice, you shouldn't do anything, because they already proved that's NOT the concern.

No matter how sophisticated the system, no matter how intricate you set up the rules, there's always going to be false positives, its a simple fact.
The main thing in any support system is to mitigate the -chance- of false positives. After all; in a highly competitive field such as video games or even in MMOs, banning an innocent customer would just as easily lead them to not come back, losing them money. Kage's very broadly worded example of 'a GM can ban anyone if the person they suspect doesn't reply within x attempts' is an example of a system that has an extremely high chance of generating false positives without pairing it with a huge ton of restrictive rules, settings, scrutinized processing, etc. Plus, especially in moderation settings, giving extreme amounts of power to individuals rather than a team of different minds opens the potential for a lot of abuse and exploit.

Even at my current company, reports of accounts abusing certain things of our web hosting services forum, no matter how obvious they are, has to be reviewed and approved by at least 5 different members of the moderation team before we can terminate the account.

Square's reporting system is fine in regards to structure and the ability to supremely mitigate false positives; I've worked with plenty of software companies that use similar tight restrictions on their support side to determine cases. Square's issue is that their system lacks the manpower to actually enforce it (Last I heard the STF is like less than 10 people? which is insanely criminally low for something like this.), so no doubt a huge amount of reports are lost to decay or smothered below an ever-increasing pile of newly opened tickets, many of which I suspect are just auto-deleted with a decay system.

[KageTokage]

I feel like the STF is probably wasting significant amounts of their limited manpower on trying to keep the mass-produced gil farmers in check when it's ones like the mentioned they should be focusing on as they're likely involved in RMT and manipulating the economy at the same time.

Ultimately, though, it really isn't hurting their profits to keep the team so woefully understaffed as long the level of cheating in the game isn't to an extent that it's making tons of people want to quit and/or completely ruining a significant aspect of the game, so change is unlikely to ever happen in that regard.

[Shibi]

snip the GM messing up completely

You should have asked him for free stuffs!

[Packetdancer]

(TL;DR, I was almost given a 3 day suspension for someone spamming my whispers, because they thought I spammed.)

Uh...



...yikes.

I now have new process-related concerns.

[Toffa]

I'm convinced by now that it's going to take the botting situation to turn into some kind of PR event that threatens brand damage for them to start taking any kind of measures against this, like online articles or a streamer or youtube personality making disparaging videos about the situation, like wow players tend to do.

[Jijifli]

Square's reporting system is fine in regards to structure and the ability to supremely mitigate false positives; I've worked with plenty of software companies that use similar tight restrictions on their support side to determine cases. Square's issue is that their system lacks the manpower to actually enforce it (Last I heard the STF is like less than 10 people? which is insanely criminally low for something like this.), so no doubt a huge amount of reports are lost to decay or smothered below an ever-increasing pile of newly opened tickets, many of which I suspect are just auto-deleted with a decay system.

If it truly is due to manpower (which, tbf, I thought the number was still only 3, which is way way WAY too little), then yes.

Part of the problem too though is they aren't increasing it. They're currently satisfied with the amount of push they give, rather than wanting to actually make an impact on it. It's not like I'm saying "Throw all your money at it" but... Ignorance is the same as acceptance.