What is being doing against botters?

[KageTokage]

This actually got Blizzard sued by the RMT companies for loss of profit, but Blizz won the lawsuit.

I'm curious as to what kind of argument they even tried to use in that situation.

Profiting off of someone else's product is kind of a generalized legal no-no, plus WoW's ToS basically states that absolutely everything pertaining to the game is their property, your characters and gold included.

[NessaWyvern]

That being said, the bot problem has two main groups causing it. 1, the people who bot to gil farm/sell characters, and 2. The people buying that gil/characters for real world money. Even if the bots aren't getting banned, I am hoping the ones buying the gil/characters are getting banned at least. (There wouldn't be gil farming bots if there's nobody to buy that gil).

[HyoMinPark]

but RMT are doing their work for free and that is really easy to stop: Prevent trial accounts from talking or remove trial accounts altogether.

The RMT bots you see are bought and paid for accounts—usually with stolen credit cards or account information, but they are still paid for. Attacking and limiting trial accounts will do nothing to solve this issue.

Another way is to ban the serial number of the game- so that players who are banned will have to repurchase the entire game on top of their new subscription price.

Since the accounts are already paid for and have a game registered to them, they have to rebuy the game again to set up another account. Again, this is usually done with stolen credit cards and/or account information. The people that sell Gil make a lot of money from it anyways, so finding discounted copies of the game and making an account does little to prevent their practices.

[Vhailor]

Is Square Enix doing anything about it?

"What are we supposed to use, man, harsh language?"

That being said, the bot problem has two main groups causing it. 1, the people who bot to gil farm/sell characters, and 2. The people buying that gil/characters for real world money. Even if the bots aren't getting banned, I am hoping the ones buying the gil/characters are getting banned at least. (There wouldn't be gil farming bots if there's nobody to buy that gil).

I am 99.9% certain they aren't. That, or they're outright lying to us, because supposedly the delay for banning RMT is so that they can 'track where the Gil is going'. That would illuminate buyers quite clearly, as well as the RMT networks themselves. I think if actual players were getting caught up in that, we'd have heard about it via Reddit and the like by now.

[KageTokage]

I heard reports that people were getting banned for RMT purchases that had occurred just prior to Shirogane's release along with getting their housing relinquished.

But really, they should be trying to harder to weed out the personal bots that are throwing PvP matches and controlling the economy because they're far more disruptive then any amount of hacking gil farmers will be.

[KisaiTenshi]

One way Blizzard is fighting it is that they recently contracted out to a company that writes really great detection software that was finally able to pinpoint Bots with pretty good accuracy.

I can pinpoint the bots without software, most players can too. I'm pretty sure SE could write their own data analysis scripts, and probably have.

However I also suspect that SE is cherry-picking what to spend time investigating. I've seen two patterns of "buttonmash" bots, I've seen a few that were not WHM/BLM, and at least two over level 50. The key place to intercept the bots to prevent RMT is the Waking Sands, because all the RMT bots has to pass through it to do the MSQ. But to catch who is actually "buying" the RMT, they need someone to log every player that targets the Free Company chest, and when players join and leave the FC.

The biggest way to destroy the FC loophole is by preventing players from being able to pull gil out until rank 5. However I don't actually know yet what the bots are doing yet at the FC chest because you can't target them by clicking on them. SE could "fix" this itself by making the FC chest only allow activation from the front.

[KageTokage]

The biggest way to destroy the FC loophole is by preventing players from being able to pull gil out until rank 5. However I don't actually know yet what the bots are doing yet at the FC chest because you can't target them by clicking on them. SE could "fix" this itself by making the FC chest only allow activation from the front.

Requiring the FC to be a certain rank wouldn't stop them, because they hit max rank from their dungeon spamming in the matter of a few days.

However, they could stop the gil farmers entirely if they imposed more strict LoS rules as they're abusing the fact that all terrain seems to have one-way LoS and won't prevent them from targeting something if they're standing under the ground/in a wall.

[KisaiTenshi]

Requiring the FC to be a certain rank wouldn't stop them, because they hit max rank from their dungeon spamming in the matter of a few days.

However, they could stop the gil farmers entirely if they imposed more strict LoS rules as they're abusing the fact that all terrain seems to have one-way LoS and won't prevent them from targeting something if they're standing under the ground/in a wall.

SE could change the FC requirements any number of ways to remove the FC loophole. Clearly there is a week cycle thing going on, so maybe not allowing access to FC chests until the FC has existed for at least two weeks, seeing as they seem to all be created on mondays.

As for LoS, the game doesn't take into account distance from ground for... anything really. Perhaps the game should rectify this so that NPC's, can only be activated when facing the 120 degrees in front of them, at least 1 yalm away, but no more than 3. Standing on top of a NPC should not activate it (and would prevent players from blocking NPC's.) The vertical height issue is an issue since Lalafells talking to Roe's would create the same problem. Simply being above the NPC's head or below the NPC's feet should also not activate the NPC.