100's of level 25 botters teleporting from behind Twin Adders desk to Aetherye. Why?

[Iscah]

They're using the FC's to launder the money, otherwise why would they spend so much time behind the wall of the FC chest?

You can’t join an FC with a trial account either.

[KageTokage]

Yeah. Every single account that's in on the RMT scheme is a paid account; the sole exception being the bots that spam /say instead of /shout.

If you ever see a gibberish named level 1 player by the FC chests, I'm pretty sure that's the account they use to conduct the RMT transactions.

[KisaiTenshi]

You can’t join an FC with a trial account either.

Yet, all the bots doing the RMT are in a gibberish FC. So they're either paid, or fraud.

[Iscah]

Yet, all the bots doing the RMT are in a gibberish FC. So they're either paid, or fraud.

Exactly, which is why I was confused that you seemed to be responding to my quoted comment that trial accounts can't accrue a lot of gil, by saying that they're doing it through the company chest - without mentioning you were now talking about paid accounts.

I do realise that I never actually said "therefore the bots can't be trial accounts", which is what I was implying in the first place.

[KisaiTenshi]

Exactly, which is why I was confused that you seemed to be responding to my quoted comment that trial accounts can't accrue a lot of gil, by saying that they're doing it through the company chest - without mentioning you were now talking about paid accounts.

I do realise that I never actually said "therefore the bots can't be trial accounts", which is what I was implying in the first place.

This point gets brought up a lot because every time this topic comes up, people are talking about "bots" but then when the FC is brought up, they have to be paid. I also pointed out a few times that some of these gibberish name bots are level 60.

Without SE throwing some kind of roadcone at level 30 to block them from getting any farther, they are generally unimpeded going through the MSQ. One bandaid solution there is to change how some of the MSQ quests work to have RNG employed. However based on just what the game client does, the reason the bots can operate at all is because the LUT's for all the quests are in the game client, so no matter what is thrown in front of the bot, the bot simply reads the next step in the quest. Something has to be thrown at the bot that isn't in the game client to trip them up, that a normal player would just see as optional. In Mabinogi they had "harder" monsters in sets of easy monsters because the bots just tab-targeted everything and you could easily get the bots killed by spawning a harder monster with the same name. The problem is that the network data actually says this monster has more HP, so it would likely just ignore it. But perhaps the solution would be change the AI of that monster to "persue mercilessly", ignoring resets and enmity. So if the monster can't hit the bot, then bot goes to jail, where as a player would undoubtly be hit, even if they were on a mount.

[Claviusnex]

Sounds great, except you roughtly have 5 seconds before they disapear.

Easiest way to deal with their teleportation abuse is to put an instant kill zone beneath the surface and something similar for skyboxes in instances and no fly zones. (Watching tons of WTM/BLM falling dead on the ground after teleporting into the sky of ARR zones would be quite hilarious. Its raining bots! Allehluya!)

Some yes, some no. I've seen them running quest chains where I could follow or waiting around for DF. Even for the ones that disappear quickly right click report would at least give us a fighting chance to catch a few.

[LalaRu]

I'm still up for the idea that free accounts must be limited to a number of servers of choice per datacenter

Who then goes to pay the sub, let him/her have a free transfer to wherever s/he wants.

[HyoMinPark]

I'm still up for the idea that free accounts must be limited to a number of servers of choice per datacenter

Who then goes to pay the sub, let him/her have a free transfer to wherever s/he wants.

That wouldn't solve the issue this thread is addressing, which are the RMT Gil farming bots. Those aren't trial accounts.

[Kaliesto]

Alright here is a alternate idea, what they can do is have a instant death mark be placed on any players that appear to be going beyond the normal means a player can actually do, and the best way to do this is having a Instant Death Mechanic when a account appears to be going beyond normal walking or running speed that was never implemented in the game.

Just takes a few coding to do.

As I recall these accounts go Super Sonic Speed, so this is best method to me to stop RMT accounts in their tracks.

[KisaiTenshi]

Alright here is a alternate idea, what they can do is have a instant death mark be placed on any players that appear to be going beyond the normal means a player can actually do, and the best way to do this is having a Instant Death Mechanic when a account appears to be going beyond normal walking or running speed that was never implemented in the game.

Just takes a few coding to do.

As I recall these accounts go Super Sonic Speed, so this is best method to me to stop RMT accounts in their tracks.

I'm not sure you understand what's actually going on here. Bots come in at least three varieties:
1) Game Hacks (which manipulate the game's internal API), which inject code into the game client to make the game client have additional features that bots scripts (b) can utilize.
2) Game Macros (which are scripts that operate blindly), which just blindly do things that the game client can do (like paste spam)
3) Packet hacks, sometimes combined with Game hacks, where the "bot" changes a value in the outgoing network buffer to bypass any client-sided sanity checks

The spammers are always #2, they're just a script someone wrote to copy paste things into the client. During some analysis, the spammer bots tend to just stand in the first available crowded place they get to after getting out of the tutorial instance. So that is generally Limsa Lominsa in the area you have to go through to exit the market area on foot.

Hacks to the game's own api, rely on triggering things in the game client that aren't sanitized, like skipping through all the text for a quest and just accepting it, and then moving directly to where the leve or quest is on the map because the game client provides it. Or this could also be arbitrary locations set using way points in a script. Who really knows. The gist of the problem is that this bypasses any client-sided sanity checks and allows the bot to look and behave like a player, but may not allow the bot operator to "speed hack" without changing values in the game client.

Packet hacks, packet editing, also commonly known as aim-bots and wall hacks, change the packets going to or from the client in transit, typically done to bypass client-sanity checks or cheat-detection. These can be run on entirely different machines, even linux-based routers, and the game client and server can't detect it except by mistakes made in packets. This is what I believe "falling out of the air", underground and "teleport"'ing are, and the server isn't doing any kind of sanity check for OOB or invalid range. Instead it accepts values that wouldn't ever make sense, and then "corrects it" which is why you see the bot suddenly be on the ground.

No movement vectors are being sent to the server. So the most likely reason for that is packet hacks, however it could also in theory be done if the game client allows arbitrary position setting (like when you exit a cutscene in a new location) and just sends it to the server before doing a collision test. The server clearly isn't responsible for doing collision tests, it relies on the game client to tell the server where it is.

The gap-closing "disconnect" bugs in PvP also show us that SE is capable of breaking this kind of activity.

SE clearly can tell when the bots are OOB, because they are spawning and despawning in locations that stand on top of each other, where as no human player would ever be capable of doing that. Floating point numbers have at least 6 decimal places, so we're talking about how 20 bots stand on top of each other and all stand on the exact same grain of sand. Even the Leve's they're doing would have this pattern of the bots standing in the same positions every time they start.

Like when we see lists of bots suspended, it's likely those ones, but those bots get to operate with impunity for a week, and it takes them only a day to get to level 50. SE should be killing those bots when they get to the Waking Sands as that's pretty much the choke point they all have to pass through.

For all other existing bots, or player characters that players just run in a semi-automated state, requires players to report them, and right now few people can be bothered to report bots that aren't actively interfering in their own quests.

Yet when you hear about people wanting to streamine the MSQ... you know what else gets streamlined? RMT bots.

Like, in Archeage, players could mark other players as cheats, and when they get ko'd by another player they end up in jail. That would be a useful mechanic to use against bots that aren't dead obvious, however trying to use it against bots that are dead obvious, results in using up your report limits (aka abuse throttle.) Mabinogi had the "bot bomb" that would throw a captcha up, and the bots would be stalled for at most a minute. These kind of things take a naive approach that the bot's are type #2 (macros) and not type #3 where it doesn't actually matter what the game client is doing.

There are of course other kinds of theoretical bots, but most of the bots out there for MMO games that RMT's use come from the same hacking group that don't care if they destroy the game in the process.