Ask Questions for Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XVI! (The Future of FFXIV: ARR)

[coldreactive]

FFXIV: A Realm Reborn is approaching its official launch anniversary, but RMT spam seems to be a persistent, stubborn, extremely irritating, and still (!) unsolved problem. I realize it's an arms race, but is there any chance of winning the battle?

Are there any specific plans you can share about how you can rid FFXIV of the RMT spammer scourge? Perhaps automatically adding RMT messages to a training database? Maybe crowdsourcing? Honeypots? Leveraging the reputation system? Personal filters that people can share and vote on?

So far the main thing that has improved for me is that it's now slightly easier to blacklist people using /blist add <r> (which is good!) but I think that many other improvements are possible.

No, there is no conceivable way to get rid of Bots. Mainly because of one thing: 3D / Vectors. Even if you disallow a third-party program to use a hook (IE: Fraps, OBS, Autohotkey, etc.) A clever bot programmer will use vector tracing and matching rather than hooking. To do this, the program doesn't hook into the FFXIV Process, instead, it hooks into directX, OpenGL itself... and scans it for vectors, 3D and 2D Portions. Once it does this, everything else is easy to do. Even if you got rid of this method, there are other ways, such as hooking into the hardware abstraction layer, and doing key/mouse movements through that, as well as hooking into the GPU Drivers to get 3D Rendering data through there instead of DirectX and OpenGL. A botmaster also has the power of virtual machines, which can emulate 3D Rendering onto the host system. This will allow the botmaster to hook into this process rather than the FFXIV one, even if you disable the ability to use fullscreen borderless or windowed mode.

If, somehow, all software means are beat. The botter has two more ways they can get it done: A separate computer through network or Parallel Ports. As well as Hardware Filtering. These two methods are the most expensive for the bot master, but will destroy any attempt at anti-botting no matter even if you had a super computer defending one single process. Because, this will allow the botter to use key presses and mouse movements via emulation through a hardware filter before it gets through to the OS / Computer. As for the Network / Parallel bit, the separate computer can also send signals to the slave computer via the same means, especially through parallel port. This can be done by setting up a remote connection through the network as well, and the process for the remote connection program can be manipulated similar to the FFXIV Process.

So no, bots cannot be beat automatically.

[KaiKatzchen]

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Question: Will SE be making fish tanks again for Furnishing? I loves how you could catch fish and put them in a tank for your room in FFXI. I would like to see this again~!