Is there any better way of reporting Bots?

[Dustytome]

Wipe out their stock and that really sets them back, kill off their farming bots, or the spam bots and it does nothing to them.

They have to be able to track the teleporting don't they? Surely they could just automatically toss someone in the hold for that and a gm can verify if needed, then the top level never gets its goods and they're just stuck in a never ending loop of gaining nothing. The fact that they're still doing it means they're still profiting off it and the current method isn't working. We've sat for how long now with the city aetheryte being spammed by essentially the same keywords for months? They can't block keywords server side for trial accounts or let us just block messages client side containing keywords? It feels like they fixed one issue and just stopped innovating.

[Akamadoshi]

First time, I experience a healer bot in Tamtara Croft dungeon who is settled following tank - not protecting - when tank runs in odd cicle, it follows. It does nothing but heal once in long while the tank, it has nothing set. Please help how to report these bots.

Scholar: pet does healing, the actual avatar remain stoic, still, follow tank set, pet auto-heal tank, no interaction. I do not know how the West can destroy a game so much -_-

[KageTokage]

I'm not sure how they go about banning non-RMT bots when they seem to ignore even the most obvious of bots present on my server.

I could understand them having trouble if the players only botted occasionally, but some of thes guys are at it virtually 24/7 and exhibit extremely obvious signs of scripted behavior, such as repeatedly running to their deaths if their gear breaks or if the FATE spawns too close a pack of enemies or hunt mark, and they also form conga lines while moving between FATEs/gathering nodes due to shared scripts.

I'm feeling like they rely entirely on their detection tools to determine whether or not someone is banworthy and aren't allowed use their eyes to determine whether not someone is suspicious, though that still doesn't explain how even those dozens of gil farmers hiding underneath the floor in Ul'dah manage to evade bans for months on end, because I'd think they would have to be detectable...

First time, I experience a healer bot in Tamtara Croft dungeon who is settled following tank - not protecting - when tank runs in odd cicle, it follows. It does nothing but heal once in long while the tank, it has nothing set. Please help how to report these bots.

Scholar: pet does healing, the actual avatar remain stoic, still, follow tank set, pet auto-heal tank, no interaction. I do not know how the West can destroy a game so much -_-

If you encounter a bot in a dungeon, your only option really is to just kick them. Even if you reported them to the GMs, they'd likely just tell you to kick them rather then bother to conduct an investigation.

I have seen people mention freak occurrences where they ended up in a party of gil-farming bots and their only options were to either abandon the duty (And suffer the penalty) or call a GM, and in that case, they did do something about the bots as they were actively disrupting someone in a way they were otherwise powerless to act against.

[KisaiTenshi]

...

If you encounter a bot in a dungeon, your only option really is to just kick them. Even if you reported them to the GMs, they'd likely just tell you to kick them rather then bother to conduct an investigation.

I have seen people mention freak occurrences where they ended up in a party of gil-farming bots and their only options were to either abandon the duty (And suffer the penalty) or call a GM, and in that case, they did do something about the bots as they were actively disrupting someone in a way they were otherwise powerless to act against.

I actually have to wonder if the bots ability to finish MSQ (because of apparently the large gil reward) is crippled at all by the cutscene forced watching changes.

It seems like for those bots, they could just prevent MSQ progression on purpose. I did note that last night, many of the level 50 gil farming bots were in "waiting for duty" status. Like I never see a tank for the parties, which leads me to believe they are doing the duties by 1WHM+3BLM configurations, and that should be a red flag for SE to trap them.

[KageTokage]

The bots never use tanks because they aren't needed when they can avoid all melee damage and targeted ranged attacks by floating out of bounds. I assume the WHMs are there to keep them alive for the few attacks that can reach them, such as AoEs that ignore LoS.

But yeah. They could easily thwart them in a number of ways, such as making a boss reset if it's unable to attack its target for a prolonged period of time, making out of bounds areas killzones, putting on LoS on floors, or forcing a standard party composition for the first completion of a dungeon. Or they could just assign a single GM to purging them on a daily basis, because it's not like you can't just do a player search and pick them all out just from their names.

[Akamadoshi]

On the bright side, the way healer bots function brought me to idea to put myself on follow to tank at beginning of instance since that is where tanks rush in like headless chickens awaiting for death (or testing the healer! Pft!) however it is also hard to 'proof' whether it is bots when individuals... while it can be obvious like I experienced... it could also be actual players. New report system, hopefully suffice.

[KageTokage]

Welp, that was a nice bot-free three days of gathering (Or at least that's how long it took the ones on my server to come back).

Whatever it is they do the game's base coding whenever they have a major update, it breaks all of the bots temporarily. I honestly wish they'd do it more often.

[KisaiTenshi]

Welp, that was a nice bot-free three days of gathering (Or at least that's how long it took the ones on my server to come back).

Whatever it is they do the game's base coding whenever they have a major update, it breaks all of the bots temporarily. I honestly wish they'd do it more often.

Every time they update the game, the bot/tool people have to re-discover all the memory addresses to hack and network packet id's. Like SE could "break" all the bots and tools by building a new game binary every week, but that doesn't ultimately solve the problem. A specific application of ASLR would need to be applied at runtime to make reading the memory useless between executions of the game client, and the packet numbers would need to change over time, by using the server's boot time or something similar, so that even if a tool manages to read the game memory, it won't work more than once.