Okay now the botting is getting a little out of hand...

[KageTokage]

I don't usually double post, but I noticed something interesting on the JP side of things; namely that a representative from the STF actually responded to a thread bringing up the recent surge of air/wall-walking RMT bots.

...Unfortunately, it does not paint a very good picture of their competence when they claim to have "only recently" noticed this problem. If it takes them so long to pick up even on obvious bots like those it's no wonder the subtler types like the DoL/H bots virtually never get punished.

This whole situation really is not going to improve until SE beefs up the STF with more staff and they realize that how they've going about things isn't working.

[Tyrn]

When they bot so hard that they don't just noclip through terrain but they decide to become wanderers as well

[Nythia]

Could just go the same route as some other MMOs that essentially allowed it but let you buy/sell currency via them for example in WoW you can buy a token in their store that has a value of gold based on server economy. Post it on the AH and someone will buy it to redeem for their sub. The token costs more than a monthly sub so they technically make more from the rmt

This is a good idea overall, but I'd be nervous if SE went to implement it. The last thing players need is to be paying a subscription fee to a company that suddenly starts to question whether or not a purely cash shop financial model is more viable. The companies invariably try to squeeze as much money out of both sides as they can, while completely losing focus on actually providing a good game.

Having something that players can buy directly from SE in exchange for currency is not a bad idea, it just would need to be implemented right.

[Dagget]

Interestingly, I spent all day Sunday ingame and didn't hear or see any sign of a bot. 1st day in ages where I didn't get spammed by the callers the moment I zoned into a hub city. And unlike recent weeks I didn't see stacks of bots at the aetherites or air walking all over the place. Doing searches I find about 3 silent lvl 1's in each hub city, and maybe 10 across all ARR zones with the notable exception of about 50 lvl 50's churning missions from inside Waking Sands. This on a couple of EU servers and one US server today that I checked.

[KageTokage]

Interestingly, I spent all day Sunday ingame and didn't hear or see any sign of a bot. 1st day in ages where I didn't get spammed by the callers the moment I zoned into a hub city. And unlike recent weeks I didn't see stacks of bots at the aetherites or air walking all over the place. Doing searches I find about 3 silent lvl 1's in each hub city, and maybe 10 across all ARR zones with the notable exception of about 50 lvl 50's churning missions from inside Waking Sands. This on a couple of EU servers and one US server today that I checked.

Sunday is when they typically issue their ban waves so it's fairly normal to not be seeing them.

[Metallium]

Interestingly, I spent all day Sunday ingame and didn't hear or see any sign of a bot. 1st day in ages where I didn't get spammed by the callers the moment I zoned into a hub city. And unlike recent weeks I didn't see stacks of bots at the aetherites or air walking all over the place. Doing searches I find about 3 silent lvl 1's in each hub city, and maybe 10 across all ARR zones with the notable exception of about 50 lvl 50's churning missions from inside Waking Sands. This on a couple of EU servers and one US server today that I checked.

I'm sure if you checked today (Monday) you'll see a bunch running around Gridana

[Violet_Galaxy]

Goodness gracious. I was out in Central Shroud and seen about at least 20 of them going in some sort of circle which involved running through the ground on Balmung. It made me extremely itchy. Like watching an army of spiders or something.

[Pinen]

Just checked Diabolos mid-day, running a player search with no parameters shows 67% (or 2/3rds) of players are bots from a maximum result of 200.

[Kuroka]

I don't usually double post, but I noticed something interesting on the JP side of things; namely that a representative from the STF actually responded to a thread bringing up the recent surge of air/wall-walking RMT bots.

...Unfortunately, it does not paint a very good picture of their competence when they claim to have "only recently" noticed this problem. If it takes them so long to pick up even on obvious bots like those it's no wonder the subtler types like the DoL/H bots virtually never get punished.

This whole situation really is not going to improve until SE beefs up the STF with more staff and they realize that how they've going about things isn't working.

uhm... http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-hand.../page8

But yes they need to hire at least an equal english team, or even one for us and for the eu.

Oh and yeah atm Gridania on shiva is full of bard bots >_>

[worldofneil]

Thats why there are bans based on the mac address of the motherboard

I asure you there is no escape from ban like that.

I'm afraid not. Most operating systems, including Windows, will quite happily let you change the MAC address from whatever the default is.

The MAC address that a network card comes with isn't actually unique and the same address will get reused again and again. Because there are so many different MAC addresses even if you buy two network cards from the same manufacturer it's very unlikely you'll ever get two matching MAC addresses, but MAC collisions do happens so there is a necessity to be able to change them.

In more recent years it's also been a privacy concern about users being identified by their MAC address so recent operating systems even randomize the MAC address while looking for wireless networks to join.

Basically the MAC address isn't as fixed as it might appear to be, sorry!