QoL changes to Bot reporting

[alimdia]

Last I remember reading the special task force only had like 4-5 people, an easy way to report would mean 10x the number of reports they would get from over 60 servers. Not defending them or anything, just telling you why you probably will never see that option being added, it would be unsustainable with their small team, and since bots can be made as fast as they can be banned it's not worth to pay a huge team of people to pointlessly try to keep bots in check.

[Starvi]

Last I remember reading the special task force only had like 4-5 people, an easy way to report would mean 10x the number of reports they would get from over 60 servers. Not defending them or anything, just telling you why you probably will never see that option being added, it would be unsustainable with their small team, and since bots can be made as fast as they can be banned it's not worth to pay a huge team of people to pointlessly try to keep bots in check.

That's dumb way of prioritizing though seeing as those keysmash bots are feeding into the gil seller and market board pipelines. Also....some of them will be sold to players who want a high level char without the work.

And it makes me angry if I get a congested area warning when trying to port to Upper La Noscea and the first thing I see when finally porting there is a bunch of bots.

But you're likely right that things will not change if SE is not putting more ppl to work in that area.

[ElazulHP]

Last I remember reading the special task force only had like 4-5 people

They really should hire more people to the STF if that is true. I'd personally like to see 1 or 2 people on each server spot banning bots as they appear. Like make that their sole responsibility.

[KageTokage]

They really should hire more people to the STF if that is true. I'd personally like to see 1 or 2 people on each server spot banning bots as they appear. Like make that their sole responsibility.

Or they can just outsource bot enforcement to the GMs, who are a much larger team.

Their problem is that they think you need specialized "tools" to detect bots when a lot of them don't exhibit any abnormalities that can be detected from scanning the data a client is sending and such. Simply observing them is enough to deduce whether a real player is in control or not.

Also, they should have automated server-side auditing of character movement and detection of teleport hacking and speed hacking. That kind of thing should be considered a bare essential for any online game. WoW has had that for years, and don't recall ever seeing a teleport or speed hack in WoW, and I've played that since Cataclysm.

I was seeing tons of teleporting gather bots in early Cataclysm personally. I'd go to a seemingly unoccupied node to try to hit it, only get an "already in use" message due a bot underneath the ground using it.

It was scarcely an issue because reporting said bot after checking the combat log to get their name reliably got them purged by the GMs within the day, if not a few hours.

Meanwhile on the XIV side of things even the most obvious of gather bots are still around despite me reporting them since back in the HW days.