Bots at the Bard trainer

[Frizze]

They have a few character types that they use. Youll see armies of black mages too if you hang around the right parts of Ul Dah. I think they use PAL and WHM for tank and healer, but i personally run into those less. And if i remember right, they dont do a pre-set character. They just do default. I dont think they use the free trial though. Cant trade items, can only earn so much gil. They tend to use actual accounts paid for with stolen credit cards or fraudulent charge-backs.

[Jojoya]

They have a few character types that they use. Youll see armies of black mages too if you hang around the right parts of Ul Dah. I think they use PAL and WHM for tank and healer, but i personally run into those less. And if i remember right, they dont do a pre-set character. They just do default. I dont think they use the free trial though. Cant trade items, can only earn so much gil. They tend to use actual accounts paid for with stolen credit cards or fraudulent charge-backs.

As far as I can tell, they mostly use Bards and Thaumaturge because of the ranged attacks (Summoners would be less effective because of the pet though there would be the advantage to having access to Scholar for dungeons past 30). They still need the tanks and healers to meet role requirements to enter dungeons but not as many.

They actually could make use of the free trial at first. Set up free trial account, run bot until it hits trial gil cap (300k). Switch account to paid using stolen/fraudulent payment information and move the gil. Keep running bot to earn more gil and move it until SE bans the account.

Do they do it this way? Maybe? It's going to depend a lot on speed of bot detection and ban processing versus speed of chargeback notification and ban processing.

The number of bots being run at one time affects how fast SE can process all the bans (unless the ban system is 100% automated, which would scare the crap out of players paranoid about false positives).

Look at last week's ban notice. 4818 accounts banned for RMT related activity and another 2172 accounts banned for RMT advertisement. If each ban requires 1 minute of an employee's time to process, that's 116 man hours or 3 full time employees (by US standards).

Chances are good that what the employee is processing today are the bots that were initially detected yesterday. That gives the bot a probable average life span of 18 hours before getting banned for detection.

How fast does the chargeback take? Payment request gets sent through clearinghouses to the payor that identifies it as fraudulent and sends the notice back thru the clearinghouses. I have no idea how fast it is anymore, I haven't worked in banking in over 20 years but I would hope that time is down to hours instead of the days it used to take.

If it takes less than 18 hours for a chargeback to get received and processed, then it's better to use the free trial at first to gain a few extra hours of gil farming on the bot then upgrade to paid. If it takes more than 18 hours, then it doesn't matter. The bot will be banned for detection before the chargeback is received.

Yes, those numbers involve a lot of guestimates because we don't know what is actually happening behind the scenes but it should help to demonstrate why bots don't simply disappear immediately after being reported.

As a bit of trivia, if those 4,818 bots banned last week each made just 300k gil, that was almost 1.5 billion gil generated. I have no idea how much gil players tend to buy at a time. If it's 5 million, that's about 300 customers served. It goes to show how a small number of cheaters can ruin things for the rest.