Botters

[Armok]

To be able to auto-ban botters you have to find a footprint that it leaves.

If you ban someone because they craft non-stop for 10 hours, that doesn't always mean they are a botter. You would then be banning people who actually did craft for 10 hours.

A lot of games suffer from this problem.

A footprint typically has to be very logically deep. To get a footprint that deep though, you need time and data.

Look at All Points Bulletin. They have actively said they have been monitoring and ALLOWING aimbots, purely so they can create a footprint for bot-detection.

[Vahzl]

This thread took a very ironic turn, however it wouldn't matter what I said, cause you wouldn't believe it

[twinkles]

Yeah when i grind crafts/synths i hardly respond to random people ranking up or saying hey that i don't know. The reason for this is A) chatting while crafting is very clunky, B) crafting takes long enough as it is without adding additional time having to stop and talk to random people.

This does not make people bots it simply makes them efficient crafters.

[Kaisersose]

HI TWINKLES!!! that is all

[Poppa]

well just reported some bots to a GM and guess what..... I get an automated response basically telling me that i have to do their work for them and fill out ANOTHER stupid form. Here's a solution SE, hire me to do this work. currently i am unemployed and i wouldnt mind the work. So from now on to report these (explict verbage) I have to write down all 10 names and report it to them via the site. If SE wants to crack down on these guys why dont they just hang around the r20 camps that I see these violators at every freakin day.

[Enfid]

I'm an honest crafter who enjoyed the crafting grind to an extent, though it is still categorically a chore. I'm now approaching rank 35 Goldsmith and I'm quite proud of that. However...

When I see people who have the characters sitting and crafting for hours on end, THEN sit there for another full real-life day or two without doing anything, I just know that it's a person using a bot. Then I go on forums and see people's signatures with Rank 50 craft all round in almost every craft. Is there a way to do that without a bot? Possibly, but I'm not certain someone can devote 24/7 of their life grinding; I mean at least they need to sleep.

As an honest crafter, I feel cheated. It's like you know the store opposite you use artificial additives (if not something downright illegal) in the food they sell, while you work hard to make sure everything you do is proper and right, but there is no law or regulations to do anything to the cheater opposite of you.

Not only that, I think this will be detrimental in the long run. In World of Warcraft, Blizzard allow the use of mods freely, and some come close to cheating the game. In fact, several respectable gamers in the community had pointed out that some boss/raid systems became obsolete as the mods were used, and some are even rendered pointless because of it. By allowing players to add their own systems to an MMO game, the company is limiting themselves as what they can develop.

I have not reported any botters yet, seeing as SE is not doing anything about it, but I'm becoming increasingly concerned about this aspect of 'cheating' in an MMO. When I heard that the same thing happened in FFXI and SE did nothing about this, it just killed me as a crafter.

[Rinsui]

Report them on the task force page
people are getting banned, just not fast enough

?

well just reported some bots to a GM and guess what..... I get an automated response

...is more what I recall from my experience.

In all likelyhood SE doesn't even want to ban the botters, because they
help with keeping up the illusion that the cities are alive and populated.

[Peregrine]

To give you an idea of what I had to do to get a gatherer and two crafters to 50:
Netflix burned while being there for every single synth:
1. 9 seasons of X-Files
2. 5 seasons of Dexter
3. 6 seasons of Mythbusters
4. 3 Mythbusters specials
5. 1 season of original Twilight Zone
6. 3 Seasons of Arrested Development
7. 2 Seasons of Archer
8. 3 seasons of Chapelle's show
9. 4 seasons of Heroes
10. 1 season of 24.
11. 2 seasons of merlin
12. 3 seasons of Death Note

...and about 15 movies.

They just set it and forget it. As some of the cheaters took to botting way back in November and have been doing it ever since, I figure the biggest cheaters on the server have put in a quarter of the time I have and still have me beaten by an average of 1 or 2 more R50 crafts.

It's already too late. They've gotten so far ahead of the group by cheating that they'll stop soon just to protect the ridiculously bloated asset, and unless SE retro-bans them they'll be the kings of the game forever, illegitimate.

When the level cap raises they'll set their bots overnight to ride the bubble of 3 and 4 crafts at once and garner even more money and power, then use that to dictate who can afford high-level crafting grind mats (them, not you) and then use that monopoly to jack their selling prices up. They'll be the only people who can afford functional amounts of everything. They'll take all the gold. All the mahogany. All the steel. Everything needed to level in any craft, they'll be the only ones with the money for.

They have this all planned out, and it's going like clockwork so far. They are jockeying for a position so that they bot through 10 levels of every craft for a profit, and by the time they're done you're doing the same thing they did through one craft for a loss.

Square's got to wake up and realize what a generation of leeches are doing to their game.

[Dubont]

Honestly, botters don't bother me. Maybe it's just because I dealt with it for years on Remora (FFXI) and got used to it or what...but it's really not a problem to me. Yes, they have tons of gil and can "try" to manipulate the market, but so far, I have yet to see an impact from botters.

[Shinigami]

Honestly, botters don't bother me. Maybe it's just because I dealt with it for years on Remora (FFXI) and got used to it or what...but it's really not a problem to me. Yes, they have tons of gil and can "try" to manipulate the market, but so far, I have yet to see an impact from botters.

Ask a fisherman what he thinks about botters