Anyone think the bot problem was this bad?

[Melichoir]

Unless, as has been suggested here of late, nothing is actually ever done about even super obvious bots. In which case, what do they care? Clearly this represents a scripting flaw since nothing useful is being accomplished, but if there's no danger of real consequences, why would they care?

Because its a faulty assumption that a lot of people have that there are no consequences for botting. If SE did nothing about bots, and I mean nothing, there would be more bots than players by this point. We would see bots that were here day 1 still here. But we dont. We dont see every single chat spammed to the max with RMT spam. We dont see them every 5 seconds no matter where we go. Do we see them? Sure. Is there some RMT spam? Sure. But people seem to be thinking that this game is flooded wit bots and theyre everywhere. The oddity of seeing them is proof enough. If bots were everywhere, this wouldnt be a spectacle. This would be "Its another day on FFXIV." The fact people pause and go "Oh that must be a bot" denotes that it is not a common occurance. It's an oddity.

So yes, SE does actually take action against them. How harsh or proactive is debatable. I would imagine the best way to get bots is to have them purchase an account and pay for a sub then find and ban them after 24 hours. Punishing bot players shortly after they activate their accounts allows SE to pull money from them while dealing with the bot issue. It becomes not as profitable to be a botter as a result. That is how I would look at it, and would make sense in that light as you are more likely to see low to mid level bots, not max level bots (typically).

TLDR though: SE does take action and its a player base 'myth' that SE doesnt do anything about bots. They do. That is simply the fact of the matter. How effective they are is a different question, however.

I'm watching it right now. They go down stairs early twice, so their pathing on the map is obviously off from the server's side. They get just before the zone divider and don't make it far enough to cross over.

You assume that people trolling cant set up bot scripts themselves or make mistakes. If it is an RMTer, then thats bad news bears for them, but Im still more of the mind set that its not. Particularly since bots can zone out of cities and maps via teleport or other means. Just color me as skeptical.

Consider that if this is a bot net for RMT, thats how many bots? 40? 60 maybe at most? On a server pop of what? A 8 thousand? 10 thousand? 16 Thousand? Thats is a drop in the bucket in that case, and all youre seeing is a hard concentration of them. Makes it easier for them to be banned, but again, this goes back to the what I was saying: This is not as bad as people think it is, and saying SE does nothing about bots is a myth. I will guarentee that every single one of those bots will be banned within 48 hours. Every single one. That doesnt stop a RMTer or Troll from making more. But that then gets into teh discussion of how effective SE is, not whether they take action or not.

[Dustytome]

You assume that people trolling cant set up bot scripts themselves or make mistakes. If it is an RMTer, then thats bad news bears for them, but Im still more of the mind set that its not. Particularly since bots can zone out of cities and maps via teleport or other means. Just color me as skeptical.

I'm going for the offset map for RMT, but either way it makes SE look bad when the only thing region based staff can do is point people at the bot report form. Some of them went offline a bit ago and just came back on. Those that went offline are now making it through the zone divider, hovering over the arena inside and then floating off to wherever their next destination is.

[Hash_Browns]

Yep all the "refugees" who only care about end game content went and bought a bunch of gil so they can skip content, like they do in their old games.

Please tell me this is bait.

[Moonlite]

This seems so wrong. But not in the RMT sense. They don't move like that. They teleport to the point complete their goal and teleport to the next point. So I am siding with the trolling idea.

[Arthem]

Punishing bot players shortly after they activate their accounts allows SE to pull money from them while dealing with the bot issue. It becomes not as profitable to be a botter as a result.

I dunno, I'm pretty sure the people/company/whatever running these bot armies don't pay anything for them, or at most pennies on the dollar, for the same reason SE doesn't want people buying mog station items from RMT websites. There's a reason they're able to sell them much cheaper than SE does on the official store, and it's not because they get discount for bulk purchases. They're either stolen credit cards or, for mog station items specifically, many are charged back against SE, costing SE twice for each fraudulent transaction they make and the RMT getting essentially free inventory to sell at 100% profit.

There's no way in hell that selling gil can pay for THAT many subs, even without being banned, and still make a profit to keep their business running and pay overhead and whatever else their expenses are.

This is the same reason indie developers have actually asked people to just torrent their games instead of buying from websites like G2A if they really can't afford to play their game at full price and are going to get it cheaper anyway because they can literally sink an entire indie studio because there's nothing you can do to refute a chargeback, let alone thousands of them.

[Savagelf]

I seen bots move half away across the area in mid-air

one would hope the devs figure out how deal with them

[Rasikko]

Spriggan has like several Bot 'hive minds' with New Gridania seemingly being their main hub. They pack themselves up in the chamber that the CNJ quest giver is at, and they walk through walls, etc.

[KageTokage]

It seems like when the bot density hits critical mass their teleport hacks stop functioning or something.

I've seen them doing this in Gridania to a lesser degree on other servers but it only ever happens when there's several of them present simultaneously.

[ValyrianBlood]

I have no knowledge abt stuff like this whatsoever so I just hope the redditor pixiekatt521 has it right:

Believe it or not I consider this a sign that botting really is being countered. Do you know why you didn't see all these bots before? They were hacked to move under the map and instantly teleport from objective to objective. The fact that they are actually being seen outside of giant stacks suggests the scripts no longer work like they did. Yes, the amount of botting is still an issue, but all that's really changed is the size of the issue has been brought to the surface, literally. And now that they're in plain sight, they're much easier to see and recognize, and that means much easier for their activities to be recorded and taken down in the next ban wave (and before people say they don't ban bots because of the official report numbers, I want to respond that I doubt there are nearly 9k accounts shouting about rmt websites, and that most of the "rmt/prohibited activities" bans are probably these bots. The note for specifically bots is probably just for those that aren't banned for any other higher reason)

[Makeda]

Can free accounts trade goods, sell in the MB, or join FCs?

If not hiw could these bots even be used by RMT companies?

Historically RMT companies have preferred to hack accounts and sell the goods to get their “product” because that can be traded and sold and a lot of people have very insecure accounts...
(An example was the launch of Guild Wars 2. A few days into launch 15,000 or 30,000 accounts got banned. I forget which number as it’s been a while. The reason was they got hacked. A third party fan forum had it’s database stolen and kept the news secret until ArenaNet noticed a pattern and went asking around... turns out roughly 30,000 used the same login credentials on a random bulletin board as they did on their game accounts. They were lucky... they got banned before most of them were used. Many accounts are hacked like this months or years before the hackers step in and loot them... They just sit on a list if accounts and use them slowly over time.