The bot problem is rising and real.

[LalaRu]

Ask a unique validation (credit card, or anything else that can play the scope) of the user before create a free/trial account. Problem solved.

[Ticks]

Surprising that RMT is still a thing in FFXIV - there's nothing to spend gil on.

[WalxAtNite]

Botting has always been a thing as far as I can remember while playing this game. But it just got to a whole new level, and someone needs to fix this once and for all. They've gotten better and smarter, they don't instantly teleport across the world now, you can see them walk in the sky, basically flying, or walk through walls and underground. They SWARM ARR areas at this point, reporting does nothing, they ban one and 20 more come out. I can't stand around Ul'dah 2 damn seconds without seeing 3 or 4 of them flying over my head. It's not a single datacenter or server problem anymore it's all over and it's getting bad, real bad. If I open the player search and look for people from lvl 1 to 50 in ARR areas, 85% of the results are bots. Is that the "new playerbase" that the devs want? All it would take is a lil surface detection check. A real anticheat. Please.

Here's some screens I managed to capture in just five minutes of looking during the day
https://imgur.com/l6chwlK
https://imgur.com/6t8MDn5
https://imgur.com/KJfjnuo
https://imgur.com/4hzJFuD
https://imgur.com/W86dx66

I'm from EU, but it seems like it's a heavy issue even on US, give a watch to this video and see for yourself https://youtu.be/p01FTSHNQz0

If we don't give a damn about it and just accept it like it's an impossible thing to resolve, we normalize the problem and it will only be worst as time goes on. We need more people talking about this. Not just a handful while the rest looks the other way "cause it's just arr".

Couldn't say it any better myself. I'm a new player... just hit 64. I almost gave up altogether. Got to a point around level 30 that I couldn't complete quests because of the dozens of bots everywhere. I'd go out to kill mobs and people would be under the ground one-shotting them before I could even target anything. For HOURS this went on. Couldn't do MSQ for two days.

There has to be a better way to deal with this that doesn't interfere with the legit players.

[KageTokage]

Honestly, they could probably put the RMT bot problem on ice by just observing where they go then adding kill zones to out of bounds areas in both dungeons and the overworld.

It's essential for their functionality as they need to be able to avoid being hit by enemies in order to not die.

While there are "legit" bots that progress the MSQ without hacking (They queue with random players for the MSQ dungeons) it takes them so long to get it done that it's not even a fraction as efficient, plus they still get banned quickly once they go into farm mode.

[ICountFrom0]

Ask a unique validation (credit card, or anything else that can play the scope) of the user before create a free/trial account. Problem solved.

The bots arn't on free accounts.

They are on real accounts with stolen credit cards, a few hundred years bought all at once, turned into accounts, and used before the card company catches on

[Dagget]

Just some observations on recent reports by SE on how many bots they have been killing off:

Time Period: Aug. 29, 2019 to Sep. 4, 2019
・Participation in RMT/prohibited activities
　・Accounts terminated: 8,033

Time Period: Sep. 5, 2019 to Sep. 11, 2019
・Participation in RMT/prohibited activities
　・Accounts terminated: 8,763

Time Period: Sep. 12, 2019 to Sep. 18, 2019
・Participation in RMT/prohibited activities
　・Accounts terminated: 7,627

Time Period: Sep. 19, 2019 to Sep. 25, 2019
・Participation in RMT/prohibited activities
　・Accounts terminated: 6,130

=========
Despite the bots having a more and more visible presence in recent weeks, it looks like an overall downward trend in the number of them that SE kills off. That would seem to suggest that the bots are winning the war. Perhaps they were flagging them more from the insta-teleporting they do so the bot owners said "Ok, fine we'll visibly run everwhere if that circumvents your detection measures" making things even more distracting to the player community

[KageTokage]

I think the decrease in numbers can likely just be attributed to the RMTers adjusting their number of bots to account for the size of the playerbase (Which naturally has started to shrink due to the pre-patch lull) because my server at least seems to consistently undergo a total purge of all obviously RMT-related bots by the end of the week.

It would be nice to see some actual results with the non-hacking bots though, because no small number of them abuse the market board to make their gil, plus actual players botting and selling surplus gil to RMT websites at a significant markdown isn't unheard of, either.

[LalaRu]

The bots arn't on free accounts.

They are on real accounts with stolen credit cards, a few hundred years bought all at once, turned into accounts, and used before the card company catches on

Card is used to buy account time, it is charged back, and account goes banned automatically, without even the need to run a bot over it.

I don't think a resource so (illegally) valuable as a valid (stolen) credit card is being wasted to just create a bot on an online game. Whoever gets that resource will use it for more profitable uses imho.

[GenBroadaxe]

It may also be worth mentioning that if botting is an issue you really want to see addressed then it is worth reporting it through official channels. I keep seeing people saying that the STF is a joke, that they need more people, ect, but then some these same folks don't report because they don't think it's worth the time. Well, if you don't take the time to report through the official channels then the STF doesn't have data that they can take to the folks who over see budget and department sizes to show that they need more people to appropriately address the issue. Companies aren't going to increase head size on a department unless there's a documented reason to do it. They thrive on numbers.

So if these bots are something you really want to see action taken on, you need to report it.

[Kurando]

To be fair though, who has time to be reporting every single bot they come across. I know any report is better than none at all, but I think the frustration is when you do report and think you did something good, suddenly a ton more bots appear floating around like Houdini magic and you're back to square one, at least it can feel that way.

I've noticed a number of bots in duties, automated tanks which you can tell are running on script. Pretty much the only thing I bother to report these days, so Ckfjfshj Sbvditb and Oebkrnf Dhcrltg of the FC GMHDV farming mats in the field are safe for the time being...

(Those are not real names, or are they....)