Something strange in frontlines...

[Kathiri]

EDIT: yes I am now aware this was for an event I didnt know anything about it so made an assumption


http://i.imgur.com/ERXCoPa.png

I just went to check the weekly standings (10/06/2014 - 10/12/2014) for frontline matches on Exodus and saw that almost the entire list were bots; there's only 4 actual players on the list of top 100. It seems like this only started this week on just our world, but I haven't checked all of the other servers.

I'm sure it goes without saying that these are bots considering the nearly identical names and identical appearances. But it's not quite clear what exactly their purpose is of getting max rank pvp and tons of wolf marks. They're making an average of 300 wolf marks per game, with at least 72 bots and around 80 games that's a minimum of 1,728,000 wolf marks for the bots all together in one week.

part 1

[Kathiri]

Presumably it's to either trade the pvp materia into mutamix for more valuable materia or to sell the wolfmark gear to vendors, after all efficiency doesn't matter to bots who can do this kind of thing all day. Maybe the owners are even going to sell the accounts.

Regardless this is severely congesting the servers and contributing to long ques if they are getting around 40 more games than the highest real player.

Perhaps restricting players from joining as an alliance would help stop these bots? I'd love to hear some more constructive suggestions. Has anyone noticed noticed something like this before?

Here's a link to the weekly standings:

http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...=&match=&gcid=

part 2

[Ultimatecalibur]

I don't think those are bots... I think those are the characters for the PvP Fan Fest events.

[JimmyBarracuda]

SE made characters for a PVP Fan Fest event? These "characters" are taking over the leader board rankings, and they are ONLY on Exodus?

PVP queues take FOREVER to pop for my friends and I on Exodus. Hell, one of my mates fell asleep in queue, came back, and found it at 450 minutes and still queued LOL!

I guess it could be for the fan fest, but I find it strange that SE would do something like this..

[Ultimatecalibur]

There are exactly 96 characters, 72 of those are likely for the "72 Player Frontline LIVE" event, while the remaining 24 are likely for the Special Battle Challenge which may be an 8v8v8 PvP Battle called "Meteor."

[Vaeria]

Seen this problem in Wolves Den too and was simply under the assumption SE was assisting so that matches could continue even when the required jobs werent available from players. Not sure what your data center's pvp acyivity is but to some extent..those bots may be allowing matches to pop still.

[Zagam]

tinfoil....tinfoil hats everywhere......
This is for fan fest, its blatantly obvious and has been done before. They are not taking up queues or gil selling anything, the ranks/gear/level are all turned on with a push of a button.

[Buff_Archer]

Yeah it's fan fest related, I was at wolfs den discussing strategy with a friend and best way to gear up and I saw people in ALL Soldiery gear with one person per class. Names were based on class, last name EVENTJ and I bet a different letter on each server. Bots don't really do soldiery gear. Also, bots don't typicaly react to my glamour that looks like I'm wearing only a set of chaps from the waist down or join me in dancing on the Aethyrite railing. We didn't speak however because based on the nature of the competition it probably wasn't allowed, and I didn't want to risk anything that could cause a disqualify for them. I hope that group won.

It's neat that they had the event, I enjoy Frontlines and I wish I could queue more often- if the player base could queue more frequently, there would be more people who knew what they were doing. The reason the people you see made the leaderboards is in part because they were able to queue a lot and we weren't at all. I wasted over an hour trying to do one match (Twin bAdders where queue is not as bad as Mael) with someone and we gave up; meanwhile the fan fest party probably ran 5 matches during that time and only reappeared for a few minutes at a time. My friend and I didn't even get a time estimate in DF. I don't hold it against the people participating of course, it wouldn't do for fan fest panticipants to be in queue the whole time, but that does expose how flawed it is for the rest of us pretty much all the time when we could be running more instances. So I am not happy that meanwhile i wasted my own time trying to get in when my access was apparently hindered in some way. Did anyone else experience this? I could have used my time doing other things if I had known the queues were reserved for this event. I'm not holding my breath for an acknowledgement of the queuing situation or minor gesture of apology but it would go far. How about an afternoon/evening where we all get fast queues, even if that means 3 opposing parties of 8?