Discussion: How Can We Handle Botting Better?

[KisaiTenshi]

I feel like they deliberately excluded whatever offense the gil farmers were being punished for from that chart because they'd easily have been at the top otherwise.

But yeah, I'm getting the impression they wouldn't do anything about the matter even if people complained about it as much as the whole housing issue.

Nah,

I've basically ranked bots like this:

A) Macro bots - Spammers, basically the only thing we can report. These require little more than open source macro tools to just paste things repeatedly. Downside, the only thing we can report.

B) Script kiddie bots (ones you buy), these ones are obvious because they all behave the same way, these are the rmt bots (not the spammers), and the auto-gathering bots, and the people selling them aren't even trying to hide the fact. They also sell the same bots for every MMO that is profitable, and are responsible for killing MMO's. Most of the hack-moving bots are these.

C) the "fake player" bot, I've seen less of these, but the give away is that they react before the thing they are supposed to be reacting to, so you're more likely to see them fate-farming, or being used in a dungeon/raid for whatever reasons. This could be considered the "expert parser" bot, as they are programmed to recognize packets and manipulate the client's internal API so the server only sees a player. The downside is that even if these could be reported, chances are it's someone's multibox and they could actually react to a GM. And since there's no client protection, someone has to be caught red handed (eg running several of them together.)

D) The hardest thing to detect are custom utilities/scripts written and used by a single player for any purpose. Unlike the others, these are specifically meant to do something (eg manipulate the market) that the player has an interest in doing, and likely won't be caught unless they accidentally show their cards (Eg streaming, sharing with a FC or Discord), and it leaks.

The stuff that is the easiest to report is A and B, because they're exactly the same on every server. Button mash names, hiding under floors and behind walls. All it takes is using search button in the game to find ONE of them, and you find all of them in the lodestone.

Go to the Community Wall: https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/community/ ( use this link, to search by most recently created FC )

Use the find tool to find the name of the button mash bot, or their FC, and you will get all the bots in the FC. Narrow it down by server. Then they can be reported without having to transcribe them directly from the game client.