Square-Enix, please, do something about the bots

[Alestorm]

Honestly would like at least a system to detect people glitching the maps or moving at impossible speeds without teleporting constantly and ban them. There HAS to be a way to tell from data if someone is either somewhere they shouldn't be or faster than what is possible for players.

Getting tired of bots advertising underneath the Aetherites. Maybe also implement a system that kicks you for inactivity after 2 hours of doing nothing. (I know they had this at Stormblood's launch and it did cut down the RMT advertiser bots)

[Claviusnex]

Maybe also implement a system that kicks you for inactivity after 2 hours of doing nothing. (I know they had this at Stormblood's launch and it did cut down the RMT advertiser bots)

The only problem with this is the bots are running a script and it wouldn't be that hard to modify it to give them something to reset the inactivity timer.

[aesteval]

Unfortunately, all that does is start an undercut war. Remember that most of the people doing the gil farming are doing it in unpaid sweatshops with fear of torture or even execution if they don't farm enough gil. It's basically done via trafficking and hostage taking, in countries that don't care for it and allow it to happen. So sure, SE could sell gil for a reasonable price, but then the gil buyers will just undercut, and then it just becomes a war of undercutting if you want to try and stop them.

OR it could be getting done via botting...

[aesteval]

Ye sadly even if we do know who the bots are I think we mainly dont do anything bout it hence SE doesn't do anything bout it either. Even if you report a Bot who got something wrong in their botting script and so something weird doesn't affect hence SE rather checks them by Chatlog only and not the vids/pics we send them cause it "might be edited".

Maybe it is good to adress this Issue within the Liveletter which will come incase they may wanted our Questions again. or we really cry loud about it like we did with housing...

There was a gathering bot that I reported during Heavensward. It did eventually disappear. Took a while, but it is gone.

[reiichi]

Honestly would like at least a system to detect people glitching the maps or moving at impossible speeds without teleporting constantly and ban them. There HAS to be a way to tell from data if someone is either somewhere they shouldn't be or faster than what is possible for players.

Getting tired of bots advertising underneath the Aetherites. Maybe also implement a system that kicks you for inactivity after 2 hours of doing nothing. (I know they had this at Stormblood's launch and it did cut down the RMT advertiser bots)

Server-side checks for movement hacks and glitches would require validating movement every poll which can cause some pretty crazy stress on a server when you take into account it'd have to happen for every player in every map. At the same time, those players/bots are also modifying the game as it runs to achieve such a state.

I'm with you on the AFK timer. It should just be kept on always.

[Luna_Ariana]

Be surprised but... in one of the latest Live Letters (I think it was before SB hit) the very first Posts contained that Question.
It had over 100 Likes if not even more so yet ... has been totally ignored.

As you can probably think, Glamour Questions were more prioritized...

What? Wow that's really not cool from them. Still hope they reconsider this issue. <___<

There was a gathering bot that I reported during Heavensward. It did eventually disappear. Took a while, but it is gone.

If many more people report a specific bot think it can disappear. So ye it could work.... maybe.

Also may I ask to people who play other MMOs: How do they get rid of them? Speaking of both RMT and Gatherer Bots from actual active people.

[Cakekizyy]

God no on afk timer, I hate those.

[HaelseMikiro]

There was a gathering bot that I reported during Heavensward. It did eventually disappear. Took a while, but it is gone.

The legitimate player who was running the bot probably just quit the game

[Shouko]

Almost every single online game that has a market will have currency sellers, if there's a crafting/gathering side to it, you will find bots. So unless you get every single game (some which don't have the staff to do so) to get rid of every single bot, and put in counter measures to prevent them from coming back it's literally impossible to get rid of bots. Even then when you put in counter measures, they find a way to get past them. It's no different from DDOS, Hacks, Scams, Fraud, etc.

I remember when I got tells from the gil sellers all the time, haven't had a gil seller send a tell to me since i've been back in the game, so them getting banned in waves is probably having an affect it's just very long term.

[Moonlite]

snip

The lack of rmt spam is a result of the player base being vocal about them actually building a decent filter into the game. It was something they should have launched with and instead had to be bombarded to get fixed.

Or they could have a system that bans bots in a more timely fashion. Instead of letting them put tens of thousands of items into the game. Most reasonable people would agree that bots are never going away. But as an MMO company keeping your game clean in a timely fashion is also reasonable.

Multiple posts over the years have shown SE does not react as if this is a threat to the integrity of the game. While allowing it to grow before getting around to removing it. Here is a little experiment I tried way back in 2.X days. Some of the shard sellers were bots they could not humanly possible provide the amount they had on the AH. So I removed all the wind shards I had onto a retainer. Bought from a "Supposed" bot, put those new shards onto a different retainer and watched the ban waves. Eventually they got removed. The shards I had bought from them did not. So how many billions of shards do you think they put into the game before a timely response happened?