Teleporting Group of Bots

[Omegabear]

They used to be able to spam /tells as well. It was so bad that I knew plenty of PC players that actually downloaded a third party program known as Guildwork to completely block tells if they contained certain keywords or phrases set by the player. Shortly before Stormblood release, the SE staff disabled the ability for trial accounts to send /tells, which appears to have completely destroyed that intrusive advertising method. The creator of Guildwork hasn't updated the program since (and it no longer works for FF14 as far as I know), likely because the primary function is no longer needed.

I think that recently, the devs might have disabled their ability to send messages in /say as well, judging from the amount of players in Brayflox and below dungeons who don't type back when others ask them questions/try to give them advice regarding their skill usage, but the players are clearly behaving/gesturing as if they are listening. I haven't actually seen any bots advertising /say messages in Limsa as of late, unless they stopped advertising in Sargatanas entirely. These days, I only ever see adverts from trolls/moles in novice network inviting advert bots in before said bots are swiftly booted out.

/Say is definitely possible during trial and I've seen advertisements on /Say before.

[Iscah]

I think that recently, the devs might have disabled their ability to send messages in /say as well, judging from the amount of players in Brayflox and below dungeons who don't type back when others ask them questions/try to give them advice regarding their skill usage, but the players are clearly behaving/gesturing as if they are listening.

I'd certainly hope they don't disable /say for trial accounts! It's prettymuch all they have. It was terrible as a new player not being able to respond to people who sent me tells. (Even /r to reply is disabled.) I'd have to try to find the person in-game so I could speak to them within hearing range.

People "listening but not responding" might just be PS4 players without a keyboard connected.

[REPROBEAN_CHILD]

So few days ago I found a group of maybe 10 bots completely breaking the rules of the game. They've clearly hacked the game in a way that allows them to instantly move from one place to another, repeatedly (every few seconds), to any place the desire without casting anything.

The bots were found inside a cavernous area in Central Thanalan in "The Clutch" area. The bots would appear above a group of monsters, kill, disappear, then appear above another group of monsters. The bots were also seen in Ul'dah, zipping in and out of thin air en masse. I'm assuming they are turning in quests.

Oh nO! ThAt roBoT iS a GhoSt!

[ImDingDing]

That's common and they don't care (bots pay sub too) even on the ghost JP server (we still have large house spot) here, there are lots of BLM bots.

[MsQi]

If that teleporting thing is real that's an exploit.

Multi-boxing, as far as I tell, is not against the rules. This is where multiple characters from multiple accounts respond to the same manual input.

Botting is when there is no human input; it's just running a script, usually repeating. if they are turning in one time quests it's probably not botting. I suppose one could script repeating leves, but those change from time to time.

[KisaiTenshi]

If that teleporting thing is real that's an exploit.

Multi-boxing, as far as I tell, is not against the rules. This is where multiple characters from multiple accounts respond to the same manual input.

Botting is when there is no human input; it's just running a script, usually repeating. if they are turning in one time quests it's probably not botting. I suppose one could script repeating leves, but those change from time to time.

Teleporting is just how it looks to the client. What's actually happening is the bots are moving without sending the movement vectors (the actual animation.) So they go from X/Y/Z to X+Δ/Y+Δ/Z+Δ without going "I'm moving at Q rate of speed on Axis T, rotated by R degrees"

There are about 200 active on Excalibur alone. They start creating new bots on monday morning, and then they run all week until next maintenance, which is when I assume the bots are actually banned, but they've already laundered the gil through the FC and market by then.

[KageTokage]

Stopping the gil farm bots would honestly be as simple as changing boss AI to auto-reset if they're being hit from a location that's impossible to reach legitimately.

They break the boss AI by hacking to float above them at max casting range which makes most of them do nothing.

[Omegabear]

If that teleporting thing is real that's an exploit.

Multi-boxing, as far as I tell, is not against the rules. This is where multiple characters from multiple accounts respond to the same manual input.

Botting is when there is no human input; it's just running a script, usually repeating. if they are turning in one time quests it's probably not botting. I suppose one could script repeating leves, but those change from time to time.

It can't be a human input. These bots are basically "flickering" in and out of existence right in front of me, every 2~3 seconds, btw groups of mobs and NPC's. You can't control 10+ characters to do that with human appendages lol.

[MsQi]

It can't be a human input. These bots are basically "flickering" in and out of existence right in front of me, every 2~3 seconds, btw groups of mobs and NPC's. You can't control 10+ characters to do that with human appendages lol.

You seem to be mixing up what I said. The point is exploiting, multi-boxing and botting are three different things.

[KisaiTenshi]

You seem to be mixing up what I said. The point is exploiting, multi-boxing and botting are three different things.

As far as I know, the bots are operating by manipulating the game client's own API. However the fingerprints show through the server's own data, hence why they appear like they're teleporting.

What is very likely going on is that groups of bots are running on a single machine via sandboxing tools that allow multi-clienting. That's of course different from multi-boxing. There are also tools you can use, legitimately to control two or more machines from one input source. So it's absolutely not a stretch that one tool at the end of a multi-tool is controlling multiple machines and multiple game clients.

Though the occam's razor is really that the spammers are just common macro programs that have been used to torment MMO players for years because they allow arbitrary clipboard or keyboard API input. They could disable clipboard paste into the game client and it wouldn't stop them.

The bots that are "teleporting" however are probably easier done by packet hacking, but that would raise flags when checksums and timestamps don't match. So it's more likely they're just manipulating the "move to x/y/z" instruction without the actual "animate" instructions, and hence why they appear the way they do.

You can see the bots FC tags in both Gridania and Ul'dah sticking out from behind the FC chest if you stand between in the fountain (Ul'dah) and the pillar and zoom out most of the way. Gridania you just stand on the rocks outside of it, and you'll see the tag stick out.