Level 70 gathering bots go unpunished

[Krojack]

Why is it that the same gathering botter, gathering level 70 aetherial reduction nodes, can continue with breaking the rules for at least a month after I and many others have reported it? It is the old "it's only a gathering bot. It's doing something no one else wants to do and keeps MB prices low" excuse again?

[Bourne_Endeavor]

To an extent, yes. Although, it has more to do with SE severely underestimating how bad botting is getting outside Japan because it's far less common there. That, and to some degree I wonder if they even want to ban these accounts since it's money at the end of the day. No matter how you slice it, their inaction has led to more and more botting because everyone knows they won't do a thing about it unless you're an idiot and say something in-game.

[Vnolan]

Why is it that the same gathering botter, gathering level 70 aetherial reduction nodes, can continue with breaking the rules for at least a month after I and many others have reported it?

They can't detect the bots.

[Krojack]

They can't detect the bots.

Don't give me this. Players see bots teleporting all over cities every day. You can follow a gathering bot for a few minutes and see that it follows the exact same path every time as it loops around.

[DeaconMoore]

Well to be fair they may be observing the bot so they can figure out how to detect it, or maybe it's not a software bot at all. Maybe its a legobot playing the game...

[MicahZerrshia]

SE hasn't done anything about bots since 2010 when it was originally launched so don't expect anything to be done. XI even had a bunch that nothing was ever done about. Bots are something you need to just live with in FFXIV. V1 was horrific in the amount of bots there were and no matter what you did, how many times you reported them, nothing was ever done. There was one at each sheep camp in Coerthas farming wool just about from launch, til final save. We would often try to gather the sheep up before the bot could and lead them away or kill them before the bot could get them just to get wool ourselves. Was so frustratingly bad.

I actually went on /follow with a bot one day, just for fun, no real reason, and starting just talking away to it. Asking it questions about why its name looked like someone slammed their head against a KB to just making up random stuff about my day. Telling it a whole big story about some made up romance I had and yada yada yada. Took about 30 minutes before they went private so they couldn't get tells, so I switched to /say and about 10 minutes later they started all caps screaming at me in very very broken English telling me to leave them alone and that I was harassing them and how they were going to call a gm on me. It was hilarious.

[KageTokage]

I feel like the biggest issues are that their whole manner of handling bot reports is needlessly convoluted, coupled with the fact that the JP side of things doesn't seem to be aware and/or care just how bad the issue is outside of their country. The only response they could offer to the outcry they addressed in a Q&A was "Keep reporting the bots" (If that was actually working, the same ones wouldn't be here still since the ARR days...).

This is the only MMO I've ever seen where the GMs need to forward reports to a separate team that goes through some manner of extensive and evidently faulty screening process before they even try to investigate.

The way things usually go is:

1. Player sends GM report that they suspect someone is botting.

2. GM goes to observe said player to see if they're suspicious and sends them a tell to see if they respond.

3. If no response, they drop the ban hammer. If they do respond, they just leave them be.


It's quick and efficient, and with how swift the GM response time is coupled with 24/7 service, it's easy to get them to show up at a time where you can be relatively certain the bot is truly AFK and not being monitored by its owner. I don't know why they need go through this extra hurdle of having the STF handle things (Particularly when their team is MUCH smaller then the GM team, if the credits are anything to go by).

The STF supposedly have special "tools" they use to investigate/detect bots, but I get the impression they're ineffective to the point where only the really poorly programmed bots that do things like spam the server with an unrealistically high number of commands in an attempt to work faster ever get caught by them. They evidently are catching some of them if the weekly illicit activity reports are to be trusted, but they might be under the mistaken impression that these super obvious bots are the only ones that exist when the majority of them are slipping through the cracks.

The thing that bugs me the most, though, is the uncertainty about whether the reports are even getting through to them in the first place, because considering how slowly even a major exploit like the Ungarmax issue was handled they seemed to have some serious issues when it came to communicating things between their different teams and I don't doubt that they still do to some degree.

[JackHatchet]

bots that do things like spam the server with an unrealistically high number of commands in an attempt to work faster ever get caught by them.

I can't tell you how many times I'm sitting there waiting for an ability to come off global cooldown and I'm just spamming the heck out of the key just waiting for the action to go through! Dang PvP can get intense sometimes!

[KageTokage]

I can't tell you how many times I'm sitting there waiting for an ability to come off global cooldown and I'm just spamming the heck out of the key just waiting for the action to go through! Dang PvP can get intense sometimes!

There's a limit to how hard a player can mash a keyboard (Even with a turbo function installed). However, the bots skip controller interfaces and send commands directly to the game client, so the only limitation is basically their computer's processing power.

Most users of them are script kiddies who let the developers do all the work, but some people try to use custom scripts, which if not handled properly (IE, accidentally putting a "0" before the value for the interval at which they want a certain action or sequence of actions to be repeated) can make them even more obvious then normal bots already are on a visual and/or server-side level.

I've seen them try some cute things like pretending to be AFK by unspoiled nodes and not gathering from them until a while after they've actually spawned to look less suspicious, except after I noticed they were consistently moving to the nodes at the exact time according to the Eorzean clock, it kind of fell apart. Most of them are totally shameless, but some of them try to (Unsuccessfully) conceal their activity in such manners or by only doing it on an alt (Who oft conveniently happens to be wearing only gear made by their main character).

[KisaiTenshi]

I've seen them try some cute things like pretending to be AFK by unspoiled nodes and not gathering from them until a while after they've actually spawned to look less suspicious, except after I noticed they were consistently moving to the nodes at the exact time according to the Eorzean clock, it kind of fell apart. Most of them are totally shameless, but some of them try to (Unsuccessfully) conceal their activity in such manners or by only doing it on an alt (Who oft conveniently happens to be wearing only gear made by their main character).

Most are shameless really. The crafted gear is one example. Now if someone were logging what everyone was wearing as you stand around a crowded area, you would eventually find the player who owns that crafting alt, if that is indeed a crafting alt and not the player themselves. Too much work for a player, but I'm sure the STF does something like this.

The thing with gathering bots is that even if a human was using website to check the timing of the nodes, there would be seconds, before the character responds, and they would actually move towards the node as though the keyboard or game controller was used, and the timing would be inconsistent (eg they'd miss some times if they went to dinner or something.) A bot however never misses, reacts within 500ms of the node appearing, and if they aren't already in front of it, move linearly to it (mounts help this since they can summon, go straight up, go to the target, go straight down, and then select the node without unmounting) it's that "too accurate" aspect which gives them away, and even a bot designed to mimic a player as much as possible (eg only sends input via Keyboard, Mouse or Game controller) is still going to read the network data to know where the node is, and where the character currently is. Close the gap between the player and the node, and then activate. The most obvious bots are the ones that simply have those nodes set as waypoints in their script, and thus they always move in exactly the same manner.

The STF could catch both by exploiting the fact that they're not humans and can't actually see what's on the screen. Throw obstacles in the way so the "waypoint"'s are blocked, put aggressive monsters in the way that blockade the node and respond to "smell", so they can't simply walk around the monster, they have to wait for the monster to move. If the monster can't attack them (the player is underground, behind an obstacle) then that alerts the STF of "unreachable" players.