Discussion: How Can We Handle Botting Better?

[Jijifli]

They do have very obvious, almost unmistakable tells that can be noticed once you become aware of them, though, and they're mostly related to their movement patterns. The things I look for are:

-How they behave after gathering from a node. In flight-enabled zones, they always jump in place, then abruptly veer towards their next destination the moment they take flight (Even if it's directly behind them), which both looks unnatural and would be clunky/impractical for an actual player to imitate, let alone constantly due to the camera shenanigans that would be involved.

-Jerky "Point A to point B" style movement reminiscent of how one would move in a point and click game. More noticeable in ARR areas, but also applicable in HW/SB areas if they don't move directly to the node before dismounting.

-Inability to path to unspoiled nodes in an efficient manner. Since they can't "see" nodes until they actually register in the game's memory via proximity, they'll path to a central point between all of the possible spawn points for a node then move to it from there, even if means going around or straight past the node in question.

-Repetition. If you feel any doubts still after noticing any of the previous red flags, just take note of whether you see them doing the same weird things over and over again or not while you're gathering.

Yep. I try to pay attention to them for these. And while you did mention the "listing a lot" i wanna mention a little thing.

It alone is not how you tell, but I did watch a bot farm what I couldn't tell at the time, was Yanxian Parsley. I already knew this person botted, but usually it was just unspoiled nodes. There were other factors I tended to notice, in this situation.

Strangely, they never used an action to assist the gathering, such as increasing the amount they gather. Seems like a good idea to use if you're mass farming for hours rather than wasting it. They also, like up here, were moving very perfectly to the spots, never correcting their flight, outside of changing vertical. And what was strangest, was every 6th node, they'd start to fly over, but then suddenly appear above it. Even my girlfriend watching said that the teleport was too much for the game to just be "having issues with placement".

What I did in this case, since it was spammable node, was I gathered one of each item. I was in the area originally for tea mats. When the bot finally stopped, I saw 20 listings of 99 Yanxian parsley's up for sale suddenly. Nothing changed for the rest of the mats. Really strange.