Suspicious Characters

[Nero]

Lets face it, the way things were set up to counter RMT is not exactly working.

There is only ONE thing which works against RMT: Do NOT BUY THEIR GIL. End of the Story, for everything else rmt's will find a way around mechanics to achieve their Goal. As long as people buy gil, because they are either to lazy, stupid or spoiled brats or w/e reason, so long we will see RMT's, regardless of the Game.

[Naberrie]

Bonus tip: If you have space on your blacklist, add any players you report to the blacklist. You can them time how long it is for them to be banned, by checking to see if the are still there and not showing as <deleted>

Unfortunately that's incorrect. The (Deleted) names you see are not deleted by SE nor even banned by SE. RMT have begun deleting their own characters and remaking them to get around blists. SE has confirmed that they are not deleting characters when banning.

What I frequently do is check my blist at the end of each day. I typically find that one of the RMT I blisted that day for an unwanted tell deleted their own character.

[Kosmos992k]

You know, folks need to be careful about reporting others as possible RMT. A group of my FC members and I were running a treasure map party and working through several maps, so we were group teleporting to the next map zone after each one, and of course riding our mounts as a group to the next map location. Well, on one of the maps in Eastern Thanlan we all arrived on our mounts from Drybone, dismounted, and got ready for the map and as we found the chest and got ready to open it, someone gathering at a near by mining node used say to ask another player to report "these bots". None of us were in the same gear, there were a couple of players playing WHM, but other than that we were a good spread of classes, mostly with relics +1, differing mounts, obviously individual names and appearances. Yet someone thought that because we arrived together, we must be a 'bot' party. No, just a group of 8 friends running treasure maps to boost their housing fund actually.

Has the suspicion of RMT grown to the point where any group of players working on a common activity is seen as suspicious? That's ridiculous.

[LeonBlade]

I think it's fine to report suspicious characters, but INCLUDE why they are suspicious and why you assume they are a bot of some sort.

Here are some of my suggestions to break certain bots that I've used in my tests.

1.) Check character/lodestone - Check out their lodestone page. Do they even have their job? For example, are they ONLY a level 50 archer/arcanist (not bard/summoner)? Do they have GC affiliation? Do they have the default character appearance of their particular race

2.) Try communication - You can try emotes or /tell messages to grab their attention. One time, I actually contacted this "bot", and they responded saying to mind my own business and things like that, after I called them out for using a bot of some kind. They tried to deny me, but when I pointed out various aspects about them that clearly showed some form of auto-macroing bot like behaviour, they didn't respond.

3.) Try to kill/break them - Often times, you can interrupt a bot's behaviour depending on what they're using. Lots of times, I'll try to kill the person I suspect being a bot to see if they react in any way. If a legit player sees you trying to get enemies to AOE them and kill them, they're likely not to just do the same thing they've been doing for the past hour.

Personally, I've witnessed an arcanist farming out in La Noscea somewhere, maybe EXP grinding with some auto-macro thing... I noticed that if I used "trade" with them, they couldn't execute any more actions, and the only thing keeping them alive was their pet's agro. I eventually rounded up a lot of enemies with AOEs to come in, quickly traded with them before they could try to stick their pet on them, and had them all AOE and kill the guy.

I have lots of funny stories of my encounters with bots, yesterday I actually saw 4 identically geared level 50 archers all spawn in by the repair person in Mor Dhona convert what felt like 1,000 items into materia one after each other like a perfectly choreographed dance routine, and proceeded to all disconnect from the game simultaneously, AND later when they came back, all queued for a duty together.

Here are the four characters:
Easy Recovery
Ubki Ubknwu
Nijnren Nijnren
Liutingy Liutingy

Notice the naming convention here except for our friend Easy Recovery... they have a more unique name, they're part of an FC, they have some minions and their GC mount. Is this a victim of RMT scammers stealing someone's account? Or, perhaps it's just one of the more used characters from this particular botter.

Anyways, maybe some of this will help with people looking to confirm a bot, I always love finding new ways to try and break them.