Bots

[DBriggs304]

What\\'s up with all the bots in game? No matter which toon on the 4 servers I have played on, I always see these random lettered group of bots disappearing and reappearing all over the place.

Nothing seems to be done about that in game.

[Vidu]

https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...029fdb5ee12389

Here you go - those RMT-bots pop up faster than they can actually be banned. We still get those reports about every week, so here you go.

Can there be done more?
Sure - specially in regards to gathering bots.
But saying "Nothing seems to be done" seems a bit unfair to me - specially when it is in regard to RMT-add-spam-bots. The only way to block out those would be to lock the server for character creation (and transfer too, most likely)...

[Crystal_Raven]

The way RMT works, for every bot that's banned, 5 more show up. It doesn't matter how hard SE goes after them, the only way to permanently stop them is to effectively lock character creation, which is not something that's really actually useful.

[Nabril]

Why not lock character creation behind some "I'm not a robot" check?

Or better yet, put one of those checks behind account creation. You can put some serious capcha stuff in setting up your account. Then you can lock communication higher than "/say" behind level 5.

That would seriously slow down the bots.

[Okamimaru]

Separate server for free trial accounts... once you pay you can access the real servers... as of now most bots are free trial so they don't worry about bans... new people can still try it out, bots can't sell gil to free trials... those pay account botters then can become a real focus

[Nabril]

Separate server for free trial accounts... once you pay you can access the real servers... as of now most bots are free trial so they don't worry about bans... new people can still try it out, bots can't sell gil to free trials... those pay account botters then can become a real focus

This! I didn't know that these guys were using free trials. It's so simple! Do this and you really put a hurt on RMT!

[Crystal_Raven]

Separate server for free trial accounts... once you pay you can access the real servers... as of now most bots are free trial so they don't worry about bans... new people can still try it out, bots can't sell gil to free trials... those pay account botters then can become a real focus

The problem with this is that the game may seem dead because there will be next to no one on those servers, leading to believing the game is dead and not purchasing it.

[Okamimaru]

The problem with this is that the game may seem dead because there will be next to no one on those servers, leading to believing the game is dead and not purchasing it.

Depending on your server most overworld maps are either dead or filled with new/free players... especially the starting areas...

[KisaiTenshi]

What\\'s up with all the bots in game? No matter which toon on the 4 servers I have played on, I always see these random lettered group of bots disappearing and reappearing all over the place.

Nothing seems to be done about that in game.

Last report I made, roughly 30 bots.

What can be done? Well, some way of copy-pasting the names for reports. Manually typing these bots out take too much time. What SE needs is to bring up a "bulk report" that brings up the player search and tick boxes beside players that are obvious bots. But then again, these bots are so obvious it seems like SE should just be auto-killing them the first time they enter the The Waking Sands. Normal players actually move through the doors. These bots just teleport directly to the door.

I was standing there watching for the bots outside the Waking Sands, and literately there is no intermediate movement. They drop directly on top of the NPC's. Does Japan not have any of these stupid bots? Do the Japanese team have no idea these things exists?

[KageTokage]

Japan does have bots, but it's limited to the occasional gathering/leveling bot, not the painfully obvious, mass-produced warp hacking bots you tend to see in droves on the western servers. It wouldn't surprise me if they have stricter laws in place that prevent things like RMT from thriving over there.

They seriously need to step it up for both the gil farming bots and the personal gather/craft/leveling bots, in any case. The former should not be allowed to persist for months on end despite reports with how easily detectable their behavior should be, and the number of the latter type on Cactaur just continues to swell as time goes on.

Sadly, from a business standpoint, the bots are almost strictly beneficial to SE, as people are oft willing to pay for extra accounts to bot with (I can think of at least three people on my server who own one or more alt accounts for botting), plus all of those bots being created allows them to make those claims about the game having 10 million players when in all likely hood only a fourth or so of those accounts belong to actual players.

Separate server for free trial accounts... once you pay you can access the real servers... as of now most bots are free trial so they don't worry about bans... new people can still try it out, bots can't sell gil to free trials... those pay account botters then can become a real focus

This wouldn't actually fix anything as all of the gil-farming bots are paid accounts, due to needing to be able to get level 50 to reach the best spot for gil farming. Whether they're resorting to credit card fraud or simply stealing accounts to produce that many paid bots is what I'm curious about.

They need to prevent them from hacking in the first place or at least implement countermeasures against the methods they use, such as making enemies reset if they're being attacked from locations they're unable to path to (The bots need to float out of bounds to kill anything as their standard party composition is three BLMs and one WHM).