Discussion: How Can We Handle Botting Better?

[JackHatchet]

I'm guessing that Square-Enix enjoys all the money the get from botting. I remember a few months ago they had a live-letter where they listed the type of infractions and how servere they were with a chart--and botting didn't even make the top 5 list. god, I wish I had a link to that live letter anytime mentions botting. Square-Enix don't care.

[KageTokage]

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.

[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.

[KageTokage]

I locate the button-mash name gil farmers by just restricting my player search results to sprouts.

I don't even bother reporting them anymore, though, because while they get purged regularly it only takes them about a day to come back afterward. They'd need to purge them literally every day and prevent them from ever reaching the point where they can create a FC if they wanted to make any meaningful headway in preventing RMT without resorting to a more permanent fix, as they store their gil in the FC chest prior to making transactions. They don't care if they get banned since if they manage to go even a day at 50 they'll already have plenty enough gil to make a sizable transaction.

I really doubt they actually care about the RMT and just ban to save face at this point because refusing to pursue a lasting solution despite years of this going on using almost the exact same methods just doesn't make any sense.

[MrMagic]

I had an encounter with a human player using a botting program in Kugane near the Eureka NPC, when there were dozens and dozens of players next to it. I would change class from DoH to DoM and I would be instantly targeted and cured. I changed classes a few more times, and I even left and came back to check. I was instantaneously cured every single time with zero delay and I concluded that no human could have those reaction times.

I guess the player realised their character was making a lot of noise in a town because after a few moments they started moving around and stopped curing me (I was standing right beside them). The player had all lvl 70 jobs and I reported them to the STF.

Not sure if the player was banned or even punished. It was just interesting to note that this was an actual player, not one of these auto generated, random name bots. I guess if you are going to risk your account being permanently banned and losing everything by using one of these "undetectable" programs that is up to you. They are not undetectable and you are cheating to gain an edge.

[KageTokage]

Eureka bots aren't that uncommon and are generally used to farm the crystals from NMs (I've been able to pick some of them out by simply observing which people are perpetually staying at the top of the mentor list for Novice Network). It's typical of them to be on a healer class as they have an easy time getting full credit from NMs by spamming heals on people and it's unlikely they won't be revived in such a crowded place should they die. They're usually seen in the lower level areas where they have no risk of getting proximity aggro from mobs and dying in places where they won't be seen easily.

I've seen some more sophisticated stuff like an entire party of players from my server botting (Who unsurprisingly, can regularly be seen gather/craft botting as well) on week one of Pagos to level off of weak enemies they had no risk of dying from. I have zero doubt they'll be pulling the same stunt when Pyros comes out, too.

But overall, there are a lot more "normal" looking bots around then people are likely aware of. It's simply a matter of recognizing the signs (One of the most obvious being the "Jump in place, then suddenly turn and fly" behavior gather/FATE bots use every time they move to a new spot with a flying mount).

[Vnolan]

I had an encounter with a human player using a botting program in Kugane near the Eureka NPC, when there were dozens and dozens of players next to it. I would change class from DoH to DoM and I would be instantly targeted and cured. I changed classes a few more times, and I even left and came back to check. I was instantaneously cured every single time with zero delay and I concluded that no human could have those reaction times.

I guess the player realised their character was making a lot of noise in a town because after a few moments they started moving around and stopped curing me (I was standing right beside them). The player had all lvl 70 jobs and I reported them to the STF.

Not sure if the player was banned or even punished. It was just interesting to note that this was an actual player, not one of these auto generated, random name bots. I guess if you are going to risk your account being permanently banned and losing everything by using one of these "undetectable" programs that is up to you. They are not undetectable and you are cheating to gain an edge.

That would be a Eureka bot. The ones I saw were a healer paired with a tank. They automatically cast heals on any low health players within range and they automatically cast raise on any players at 0% health. The raise really gave it away in Anemos, because when releasing to the aetheryte a player is at 0% health for a second or two while in the raise animation, so you would see the bots at camp immediately target and cast raise on someone as their body entered camp.

Player bots are rather common, and the STF rarely takes action against them. The first-time penalty for botting is a 72 hour temp ban, by the way. To give you an idea of how ineffective the STF is, there has been someone running a gathering bot while advertising RMT sales across the data center. A quick search of the info provided in the ad shows they also sell PVP wins for money. To top it off, this is not recent, and the STF knows about it.

I guess if you are going to risk your account being permanently banned

You would have to do something really bad to get permabanned for a first-time offense. It's a part of why so many players utilize cheats for a personal edge or for money. The STF likely won't catch them, and if they do, they won't receive a permanent ban.

[KageTokage]

I had a thought that it's possible that some bots might actually have some kind of countermeasure in their script that triggers if someone on the STF/GM team contacts or approaches them, since I've seen it done in other MMOs where the staff were more...active in trying to punish cheaters. All it would take is one person getting caught by them to gather the data necessary to do so.

While GMs and other staff members can make themselves invisible, they still exist in the game's world and thus would still register in the game's memory and the bots in some games would actually DC or log off if they approached them due to them having a unique memory signature they could be scripted to detect. They can be also be scripted to offer a canned response to specifically named individuals, IE, anyone with the word "GM" at the start of their name, which would protect them from getting purged if the ones contacting them aren't smart enough to do more then simply ask if they're a bot.

[Dustytome]

While GMs and other staff members can make themselves invisible, they still exist in the game's world and thus would still register in the game's memory and the bots in some games would actually DC or log off if they approached them due to them having a unique memory signature they could be scripted to detect.

That sounds like bad programming from companies in those situations. There shouldn't be anything sent/accessible client-side to notify someone of their existence when a gm is set to 'invisible'.

[KageTokage]

XIV is like an open book to cheaters because of how heavily client-sided it is on top of having seemingly no encryption/protection on data being received from the server, so I'd be surprised if they actually took measures to make it so players can't know if a GM is stalking them or some such.

Unfortunately, with how dated the server structure is they're probably legitimately incapable of increasing the security without impacting performance negatively somehow.