Botting

[Lasada]

Even now months in I am still seeing the same people running around using bots.
I am not going to throw any names down, I put those into reports. Honestly though, the real problem I am having is, what is the purpose of filling out those reports?
Every day it is the same characters doing it. They clearly aren't being punished for it, if anything rewarded for it because they control all the money. I read that square was going to look into things like company housing to see if it was bought using gil obtained from methods like this. I have seen a few companies that openly use these methods and have houses.
I understand that the underlying issue is the program they use to bot with and the purpose is trying to catch that, but if you aren't banning the people using it you aren't going to ever stop it. They will always find a new exploit.

[Xystic]

I understand that the underlying issue is the program they use to bot with and the purpose is trying to catch that, but if you aren't banning the people using it you aren't going to ever stop it. They will always find a new exploit.

Even if you ban them, they just come back. If you take out the underlying problem, they just find a new way to exploit it.

Its an ongoing problem that goes in circles. If they weren't doing anything at all like some claim, we'd be flooded beyond our imaginations.

By reporting we help speed it up for them a bit.

[Ravno]

If they are still here after few month, are you sure, they are bots ? Not a multiboxer or a dude who spam a '/tenemy /ac "spell" <t>' macro while actually sitting behind his desk ?

[TrystWildkey]

If they are still here after few month, are you sure, they are bots ? Not a multiboxer or a dude who spam a '/tenemy /ac "spell" <t>' macro while actually sitting behind his desk ?

99.99% sure the ones I've been reporting since before Christmas are bots.

They follow the same movement pattern, wear hq crafted gear, no af or anything higher than 49/50, their chocobos are named Asdad, and they're in the same spot every time I check. Though the 3 I'm talking about do have a FC, it looks like the entire FC (about a dozen) are bots of some sort. A few characters with a level 50 war/magic class, a few with one level 15 war/magic class and one or two crafting classes. The crafters don't even have melded or hq gear. They don't respond to tells, or even alter their pattern if other people are in the same area trying to kill the same mobs.

Yeah, everything about the group I'm seeing screams 'bot' or gil-farmer. And my server can't be the only one with groups like this.

[MicahZerrshia]

We had this issue since v1. There were the exact same rmt in the exact same areas for the entirety of v1's life with 7 lalafel cnj in starter gear and they would do nothing but spam leves for fleece or gather up large groups of sheep in coerthas and aoe them down (back when you could easily gather 20 mobs and aoe them in a move or two).

Nothing was done then either, no matter how many pics and reports were filed. I still have screenshots of my char standing in the middle of about 30 rmt around a node in la noscea. At that time I thought maybe SE was just undermanned, then once I heard they were deleting 90% if our gil I thought they let em keep farming so they could delete their gil and give them a big middle finger. Now I just think they don't take rmt and bots seriously, esp since we had the same issue in xi and some bots were around for literally years.

[mmcsky]

The bot problem has been an enigma to me, perhaps because I do not believe in buying make believe currency trough my hard earned money or because my pysche just does not allow me to destroy the soul of competition by cheating my way in.

I have also wondered how many people are actually silly enough ( here I use silly to be kind to those poor souls,but you know what adjective truly applies /wink) to waste their money in buying currency. I really wonder what the heck do people use their money for? We can use the excuse of housing, but is housing even worth it now? I have not found a single use for housing besides a nice place for crafting or placing the FC chest and the aetheryte, which are no more than minor conveniences that can be circumvented with Limsa Lominsa :P.

The big question remains, what fuels these people to spam the game with obnoxious messages that only help to alienate any would be customers? I used to think that Chinese farmers maybe had it that bad in their country that they had to do this, but now I think it's just a tradition and a culture for gold farmers to do this to MMOs.

I would then say that Bots will stay in MMOs regardless of demand on said MMO, we can only hope that Developers create better tools for us to keep ignoring them without worrying for our blacklist to run out of space.

[Otho]

Maybe SE "owns" the bots? Would that possibly explain why I've seen the same bot in South Shroud farming level 45 bats in the tunnel for well..since September?

[CHunterX]

Maybe SE "owns" the bots?

We have a winner. It's basically free money for SE without the need to implement a cash shop, and you skip past the bad press and negative consequences. Why wouldn't they do this?

[Niqote]

We have a winner. It's basically free money for SE without the need to implement a cash shop, and you skip past the bad press and negative consequences. Why wouldn't they do this?

What?? Hahahahaaaahahah

Why would SE want to ruin their own game's economy and ban their own paying customers?

Besides... If SE wanted to sell their own gil then they would not use 'bots' they can just assign max gil to any account they want.


Oh I do remember a thing they did in XI you know, they said they would purposely let a RMT go on for a little while, but when that account they are watching suddenly has lots of gil transferred to it or... reaches a particular achievement that needed a lot of time THEN they would include it in the ban sweep, because the loss of so much is far more devastating then say, banning 10 new baby bots. It was a long time ago and I forget the exact details... but its worth a thought.

Course, in the end if people stopped buying things from the RMTs then they would of course go out of business. it really does seem that NA servers have a plague of bots - perhaps the NA servers offer more business?

[Tupsi]

What?? Hahahahaaaahahah

Why would SE want to ruin their own game's economy and ban their own paying customers?

Because SE can't ruin what other players already ruined long before botting became common place. Bots aren't the ones constantly undercutting items into oblivion. Also, didn't yoshi say recently to be discrete if you're going to use addons and 3rd party tools? I know he was talking about the parser and FFXIVAPP, but a lot of the bots out there are 3rd party addons to XIVAPP..so...