Bots: Identifying a growing blight on the community and what needs to change.

[KageTokage]

Yeah, it's this topic again, but I really felt a need to raise awareness about this matter after realizing a lot of people aren't even aware of these problem players as well as considering the pathetic state of my server's economy (Where bot farmers basically own the market for the latest crafted gear and food/infusions due to legit players largely losing the will to compete with them). But in any case...


There are four major fields of activity bots are most commonly involved in, which are RMTing (Real money trading), gathering, crafting, and leveling. I intend go over each type one by one in following posts, as well as the lesser varieties that show up more rarely so others can identify them, report them, and/or avoid associating with or benefiting them should they feel it necessary.

I'd like to note that this should largely be viewed as a guideline for detecting bots, though, not absolute by any means. The more of the signs they're exhibiting, the higher the chances you're looking at a bot.


The RMT bot

By far the most common type of bot in the game, these guys can be split into two sub-categories: advertisers and farmers.

Advertisers are those annoyances you see spamming links to websites in capital cities. Some stand out in the open and spam shout chat, while others will use position hacks to lurk out of sight and spam say chat at places where players congregate (Which accomplishes little, as you can still report them by right clicking their names in the chat window).

While the Report RMT function usually gets them banned with a day, they always have replacements lined up, so it ultimately accomplishes little unless eventually SE decides to start acting against them quicker.


Farmers are those gibberish-named, identically geared players you may see either stacked upon quest NPCs or arriving in droves at an aetheryte, only to mysteriously vanish a moment later.

They're scripted to progress through the entirety of the ARR MSQ in parties most often consisting of three THM/BLMs and one CNJ/WHM, though variants using a SMN or BRD in place one of the BLMs show up at times.

Their goal is simply to rake in as much gil as possible by speed clearing quests using position hacks that allow them to simply teleport from one place to another including out of bounds, which is why you'll see them vanishing or at times falling through the floor.

Once they've finished the MSQ, they'll settle into entering Amdapor Keep, killing the NPCs prior to the first boss for their gil drops, resetting the instance, and repeating this endlessly until they inevitably get banned by SE.

These guys almost always get banned within the week due to how easily detectable their hacking is, but it takes them so little time to hit max level again (Less then 24 hours from what I've observed) that unless SE starts banning them on a daily basis, it again accomplishes very little.

They do have the potential to genuinely inconvenience others by hogging server space (I've seen upwards of 100 of these bots active simultaneously just on Cactuar alone) and in freak incidents it is possible to get matched with them via the Duty Roulette should one of their DPS get left behind and leave space in their party for a tank, which will likely force you to take a deserter penalty as their scripts can break if one of their designated party members is missing which will lead to them either dying or just not doing anything. They can also actually glitch out instances if they're able to kill a trial boss like Cape Westwind's before the entry barrier goes down (Which causes anyone still in the barrier to not get credit for the boss' defeat and again forces you to abandon the instance).



The gathering bot

These bots come in two flavors, the first being those who stay on DoL classes and go from node to node and zone to zone gathering resources constantly (Aethersands are by far their most common target due to the high demand for infusions), the second being those who farm materials drops from enemies (The Halgai and Manzasiri in the Azim Steppe and gazelles in the Fringes are the their most common targets, as those mats are used for scrip-farming fodder), however, there are tells that are shared between the two.

The most readily discernible red flag is their awkward movement pattern.

When they take flight in flight-enabled zones, a typical bot will do it from a standstill and then suddenly whip around to face the appropriate direction the moment they start flying. Normal players by contrast tend to turn towards their destination while mounting up and take flight out of a run as it's faster due to momentum preservation and what not.

They have a very stiff but precise point A to point B style of movement that tends to make sharp turns as they're basically playing connect the dots but with map coordinates, and will only deviate from their specific path if a node or enemy gets within their detection range.

When it comes to zones without flight, bots are allergic to the Z axis and will never jump unless they get stuck on terrain (Though they're generally so stuck that jumping won't free them when this happens), nor will they run off cliffs, even if it would get them to their destination significantly faster.

They will never move straight to an unspoiled node, and instead move to a central spot between all of its possible spawn points, then move to it from there. Sometimes, they'll even run straight past the node then double back to it. This is because they can't "see" the node until it's actually loaded into the game's client, unlike a player who can align themselves with it in advance due to it being marked on the minimap.

When multiple bots are in the same area, they tend to form a conga line and follow each other's movements due to using the exact same script/program to do their work. This is especially obvious when they first warp into a zone, as while they'll initially be scattered around the aetheryte, they'll quickly converge into a perfect line once they do start moving.


Aside from their movement quirks, some other ways to discern them are abnormally long periods of activity. If said bot is not an alt account, it's common to see them doing non-gathering activities in the daytime while they're actually playing, only to settle into farming materials overnight while they're sleeping.

Alts on the other hand are often gathering 24/7 which makes them conspicuous in their own way. It's also extremely common for alt bots to have the bare minimum put into their DoW/M classes, oft with only a single tank or healer leveled (For the faster queues, I'd assume), with SCH/SMN being particularly popular due to the whole "two jobs for the price of one" deal letting them both progress the MSQ quickly and farm enemies efficiently when needed. RDM is another common choice due to its ranged burst damage allowing them to burn down common farming targets quickly.


The crafting bot

While bot farmers oft do both their crafting and gathering on the same character, others try to take a more subtle approach by instead having their resources funneled to them from another account. In such a case, observing when they craft (People who regularly spend the entire night holed up crafting in their private housing/apartment after spending most of the day doing other activities are particularly suspect) and how they handle their wares on the marketboard can still give them away, though they're still probably the hardest to pin down out of all the types of bots if they're being smart about it.

It's not uncommon for gathering bots to be wearing gear made by their owners, so check any you encounter and see if they're wearing gear mostly/entirely made by the same player, as it's very likely their main account/character also bots if that's the case, especially if the gatherer has no DoH classes leveled.

Keep an eye out for players who list a huge amount of items, particularly consumables. Some players on my server don't even try to be subtle and keep several dozen stacks of 99 infusions listed at all times (Which when considering that it takes nearly a hour to craft one stack even with optimal gear/rotations is utterly ridiculous).

These players sometimes use undercut bots to keep their prices the lowest on the board. If that happens to be the case, they'll almost immediately undercut by at least one gil if you happen to list the same item at a lower price regardless of when/how often you do it, and the only way to get them to back off is by selling something below their designated minimum price threshold. One of the culprits on Cactuar keeps an alt account camped out next to a retainer bell in Limsa to do this while they endlessly spam crafts in their house.

The leveling bot

These bots exhibit much of the same movement quirks as gathering bots, though they also exhibit some additional oddities as a consequence of needing to adjust to whatever content they're in. They're present in literally all forms of content that yield EXP, however, whether it be FATEs, PvP, dungeons, and even Palace of Dead/Heaven-on-High and they perform passably enough that they oft just get ignored as really terrible players who don't know how to communicate.

Contrary to what one might think, bots CAN dodge ground AoEs, but they do this in a completely fixed and rather inefficient manner, running directly away from the target (They don't ever strafe) for circle/proximity AoEs and directly to the side of the target for cone/line AoEs. Multiple stacked AoEs can confuse them into just not moving at all.

Bots never do positionals. Ever. Even if their chocobo is set to tank mode and enables them to do so without True North. Not at all a behavior exclusive to them, but still something to look out for regardless, especially when paired with the other quirks.

When getting to critical HP in the overworld, some of them will sprint away to the exact same "safe zone" to lose aggro every single time and idle until their HP is at 90% or more before they run back to reattempt to do whatever it was they were doing. This oft happens in a loop with them repeatedly retreating from a FATE until they eventually complete it or it fails.

Healer bots will immediately heal/rez anything that's within range of them when applicable...even if they're idling in a city or out of combat. They also somehow utilize mouseover functionality for everything they do, meaning they'll have no issues picking you out from a huge crowd of stacked players. These are most commonly seen in/outside Eureka where they'll grind NMs by simply moving to the NM then spamming heals on everything that's damaged for credit.

FATE bots generally ignore boss FATEs and will become inactive if no FATEs they consider "safe" are available, either just standing around doing nothing until something does spawn or running back to an aetheryte and waiting there instead.


What I feel should be done


Make reporting bots less of a pain. Considering how rarely reports are actually acted on, there needs to be a less cumbersome method of sending them in. Simply having a right-click report option that's accessible from both chat and player search would be a boon.

Remove gil drops from ARR dungeons and replace them with items that have MB value, but little vendor value. These were already axed in HW and SB dungeons, so they feel like an archaic holdover that scarcely benefits anyone other then the RMTers who send in squads of several dozen bots to farm Amdapor Keep for tiny amounts of gil that add up EXTREMELY quickly due to their sheer numbers (To put it into perspective, they're getting 500ish gil per pack of NPCs they mow down, and there's 20+ groups of bots doing this every few seconds constantly). Chances are they would find something else to farm, but I can't think of any indefinite sources of gil that are nearly as good as what they're currently abusing.

Increase the size of the STF. You'd think a team responsible for handling all of the cheaters across an entire MMO would be huge...but it's not. According to the game credits. it's only three people, all of whom are based in Japan. Realistically, they should at LEAST have one team managing each data center, as these guys probably have their hands full just trying to keep the RMTers under control (Which isn't working at all because they only ban the gil farmers once a week when it takes only a day for them to hit max level and start farming) when they're just the tip of the iceberg,

Give the GMs power to punish cheaters. The GM force is a much larger team then the STF, and they're also extremely prompt in responding to reports, which is essential if you're trying to catch someone while they're actually cheating. All they need to do is attempt to contact a suspected bot repeatedly then ban them if they fail to respond for a prolonged period of time. Lack of active enforcement is easily the biggest thing keeping this problem from being controlled properly.


I intend to keep editing this if I see any other weird quirks, since I haven't run into some of the bot types often enough to say much about them specifically (Namely, the PotD and dungeon bots).

In the end, I seriously doubt this topic will change/accomplish anything terribly meanginful, but I figured some people would rather not benefit/associate with cheaters, nor have them weaseling their way into their FCs, so helping others to identify would help in that regard.

[Dagget]

The advertising bots stay in-game far too long. They are easily identified and reported but often stay active for most of a day, despite groups of us reporting them. Most other MMO's I have played do a much better job of flushing the advertisers. Even older, maintenance mode MMO's like Anarchy Online will mute bots within minutes of being reported, and remove them within an hour or 2.

I'm concerned with what % of the overall active population of a server the whole of the bots represent at any given time. Nowadays I routinely see short queues when logging in (quick cancel and relog solves) and I think SE needs to find a way to really stop those bot chars up front before we get to the 'real' queues with the arrival of Shadowbringers.

[Gula]

Growing blight? You mean fully grown over years of online gaming, has spread its seeds and is actually more like an impenetrable forest?

[Enla]

It bothers me a good deal that SE seems to take a laissez faire attitude in regards to their bot problem. Often banning in mass months after the bot was first reported and has long since already done more than enough damage. I get that it's not an easy problem to fix, but the slow and steady approach they take is mindbogglingly aggravating that is at odds with how I've seen other MMO's operate. It shouldn't take months to actually tackle the problem.

Frankly I wish SE would just take off the kids gloves and go after the people making and sourcing the code. WoW did something similar and successfully sued one of their biggest bot makers, so it isn't exactly an impossible situation to win. However right now I have a hard time not believing that SE doesn't see some benefit in the bot accounts repeatedly buying access to the game after their last accounts were finally banned.

[Gula]

It bothers me a good deal that SE seems to take a laissez faire attitude in regards to their bot problem...

Yes but does SE acknowledge how much bots are hurting their money and/or image? As long as people financially support bots, there will be bots. Blizzard takes good care of its money vacuums- so yes they would sue. But would SE? I'm not saying bots should stay, I'm trying to poke at what the people up top see and care about. This also seems to be more of a western problem since I've been on JP data centers and did not see a single RMT advert or masses of field bots. Or maybe I just got lucky.

[Krojack]

One major problem is trying to report non-RMT bots. There is no easy way to do this. I see them all the time and just shrug them off because it takes way to long to try and report them.

There needs to be another report option added called "Cheating/Botting" with the "RMT" and you should be able to get to it from right clicking on your targeted HP bar.

[Gula]

One major problem is trying to report non-RMT bots. There is no easy way to do this. I see them all the time and just shrug them off because it takes way to long to try and report them.

There needs to be another report option added called "Cheating/Botting" with the "RMT" and you should be able to get to it from right clicking on your targeted HP bar.

This. I see them often in literal droves (20 at a time sometimes) "talking" to momodi, turning, then zipping off into Copperbell. I don't think I should have to try to target each and every one of them, write down their garbo names to the letter, and report. Some people at desks jobs don't even do that much.

(People who regularly spend nights holed up in their private housing/apartment are particularly suspect)

I'm friends with multi gillionare crafters. Please don't spit on their efforts.

[Liam_Harper]

After midnight I notice them everywhere in swarms nowadays. Ul'dah is crawling with lv50 black mages in Ironworks teleporting between quests npcs and strolling outside you see clusters of them in the ground or walls killing mobs.

There are permanently RMT bots in every main starter city. Some of these hang around most of the day.

I'm fairly certain they just ignore them by now, or ban them after they've made enough profit to encourage them to resub and try again. There's just too much easy money in it for Enix.

[Gula]

As far as I know, some of those are fraudulent accounts. Or at least, that's what the announcements claim on lodestone- so it's not all profits. But given the cost of buying gil (especially depending on the World), that could cover the cost of several farming accounts.

[Kirika-]

One major problem is trying to report non-RMT bots. There is no easy way to do this. I see them all the time and just shrug them off because it takes way to long to try and report them.

There needs to be another report option added called "Cheating/Botting" with the "RMT" and you should be able to get to it from right clicking on your targeted HP bar.

^This....

It is very troublesome to actually help SE by reporting bots/cheats.
I can understand that they may want to cut down on false reports or miss-use of the reporting system by adding some hoops, but the current process makes it nearly impossible to provide accurate info due to generally what is observed to be reported happens so fast that by the time you get to the point of being able to create a proper report, you have lost/forgot some of the info or just find it too much trouble to make a report.
The bad guys win.

If a similar reporting option to the current RMT report is done for Cheating/Botting, and even so far as to add a few other common types of reports (Harassment, Language, Naming Violations, etc....), would make for a much more streamlined way for honest players to report bad things.
This process can be enhanced to automatically take a "system-log-snap-shot" of the targeted reportee to add to the report containing most all relevant data of the target during the time frame of the report, so the reporter doesn't have to fill out lines of Times/Areas/What Observed/Names Involved/Actions Observed/Chat Involved..etc... all on the back-end, much like other MMORPG titles already do.
That snap shot can then be used to validate the report for further action or dismiss it in case of an accidentally report or some player just using the report system to harass others (the latter meaning they get the strike/ban)