Zonureskin map bots: The latest blight on the economy.

[KageTokage]

Well, it's been over a week now and these clowns are still going at it, so I'm assuming that they're being ignored as per usual.

Being a legitimate player honestly feels really discouraging sometimes between the RMT farmers controlling the marketboard and conventional players just using bots to do damned near anything they consider too tedious, whether it be grinding the Ishgard rankings and farming memories for the new relics.

[SecretIsland]

....

By "exposing" what the bots do you basically taught people how to exploit this game even further. I'm not sure that's the right move, chief.

[KageTokage]

By "exposing" what the bots do you basically taught people how to exploit this game even further. I'm not sure that's the right move, chief.

If people can't identify a problem in the first place, they can't report it.

Bots are also just fundamentally unable to behave exactly as an actual player would and always have quirks that will make them noticeable; particular when it comes to movement. At best, they could iron out some of the obvious and pointless behaviors like their healers indiscriminately healing anybody in the vicinity who's missing HP, but you'd still be able to immediately tell what they're up to once they start moving and get into combat.

[KageTokage]

I don't normally bump threads, but after doing a little tour of the Aether data center, I've realized that this problem has only blown up since I last checked on it.

The zonureskin maps are being bought out by the same few people in even larger quantities then before, and the treasure map farmers are present on at least three other servers now (I saw groups on Midgarsormr, Sargatanas, and Siren); exhibiting all the same quirks as the group I described from my server.

One of the "suppliers" mailing out the maps was even using teleport hacks to make their rounds between the post moogle and marketboard faster (They were under the ground, but /icam can find them regardless).

[ItMe]

The zonureskin maps are being bought out by the same few people in even larger quantities then before, and the treasure map farmers are present on at least three other servers now (I saw groups on Midgarsormr, Sargatanas, and Siren); exhibiting all the same quirks as the group I described from my server.

Zonuskin Map prices here have been steadily rising on Sarg, though the timestamps show that maps aren't really being bought any more frequently than normal. Perhaps the bots have other botrings gathering maps?

[Jijifli]

Zonuskin Map prices here have been steadily rising on Sarg, though the timestamps show that maps aren't really being bought any more frequently than normal. Perhaps the bots have other botrings gathering maps?

I can't show it, because it'd have a name and I'd get banned for it.

But the same level 2 alt bot had been buying up zonureskin maps every 5 minutes yesterday on Balmung, and mailing them to the map bot train.

[Catwho]

I noticed the zonureskin map prices doubled on Primal data center lately as well. Since I'm usually a seller of them myself (my friends and I will do a map party every couple of weeks, but it's easy to stock up 3-4 ahead of time and then just sell them daily) I was pretty surprised to see them jump from 30K to 60K out of the blue.

[KageTokage]

There is now presently three different groups of these bots on my server alone.

One of them actually appears to be a group of "normal" players trying to make some easy gil judging from them actually having glams, titles, and other things typical bots tend to lack...though they're still obviously bots judging from the conga lines and instantaneous heal spamming they engage in if I switch my jobs from DoH to DoW so I'm missing HP in their vicinity...

I really do not want to go into 6.0 with this kind of activity being so common place but with SE's track record, that's liable to end up being the case.

[LianaThorne]

Like someone else said, I doubt they'll do anything massive about this unless this thread completely blows up or it affects them in the real world (youtuber, streamer, news, etc.). Could try sending the info to some popular people and see if they'll do a story on it. I've reached out to a couple non-FF youtubers in the past to cover stories I thought would be good for public knowledge and one took me up on it. Just depends on who it is.

[Jijifli]

I don't normally bump threads, but after doing a little tour of the Aether data center, I've realized that this problem has only blown up since I last checked on it.

The zonureskin maps are being bought out by the same few people in even larger quantities then before, and the treasure map farmers are present on at least three other servers now (I saw groups on Midgarsormr, Sargatanas, and Siren); exhibiting all the same quirks as the group I described from my server.

One of the "suppliers" mailing out the maps was even using teleport hacks to make their rounds between the post moogle and marketboard faster (They were under the ground, but /icam can find them regardless).

Guess what's still going strong.