Measures to counter botting

[TnTaLuS]

Hi,

I play FFXIV for like somewhat more than a year now.
The amount of bots I encountered and the blatant way they abuse the engine really surprised me.
I hail from other games so I can't really find channels except the forums and the Support Desk where I could get and give feedback on this issue. I reported some bots but considering the amount and the frequent action taken this is certainly a very useless endeavour. It just looks like alibi-action taken on SE side.
There what seems to me easy tools you could use to counter bots.
For one you might add a report-bot rightclick in the in the UI that prioritizes the report depending on some "if". Like if the name-pattern fits the typical botnames prioritize it to customer support for investigation and instant banning.

There is another very powerful and effective way to fight against bots but due to the history of FFXIVs engine and connectivity issues this might be rather hard to implement.
I know of some games that check the positioning of the client vs. the positioning of the server of the player character including some variables that force a disconnect if the data deviates too heavily on certain parameters. Especially for players with a high latency this would pose an insane risk of disrupted gameplay but you can finetune that. At last you can ofc. check hardware ID as well as connection identifications parameters such as IP. This might post problems for multiboxers.. or at least provide them with more effort if you go enroute with requesting a confirmation once several clients are connected with the same IP or hardwareIDs.

I wonder why not at least the report function is something that is implemented. Is there a specific reason for that?

If I went to the wrong forum or "address" with this please if you would be so kind to point me in the right direction where I would be able to provide this feedback.

Thank you very much for your reply in advance.

Daniel

[KageTokage]

I think it's a combination of them not caring and the bulk of the playerbase not caring enough for them to consider it a high priority issue. It took Yoshi P being bombarded by RMT spam just to get them to implement a quick report function for RMT (Which doesn't even matter since whenever a bot does actually get banned or muted a replacement just shows up almost immediately). It's extremely difficult to get any kind of response about the matter from them, and every instance where they did actually respond, it boiled down to "Just keep sending in reports" (Despite that clearly not accomplishing anything of significance).

Hopefully that will change once the abundance of DoL/H bots compromise the integrity of the Ishgard Restoration rankings since unlike their dominance over the economy that serves strictly to inconvenience legit players and thus is less likely to be ignored.

[Chrisnetika]

Word on the street is that SE staff have a hand in some those RMT sites, I mean look at them.. they all look the same pretty much lol.With that said SE will never do anything to stop bots as long SE staff gets their cut of it.

[KageTokage]

Word on the street is that SE staff have a hand in some those RMT sites, I mean look at them.. they all look the same pretty much lol.With that said SE will never do anything to stop bots as long SE staff gets their cut of it.

If the gil farm/RMT spam bots were actually paying for their accounts, that reasoning might be sound but it's fairly well-documented that RMT companies resort to methods like credit card fraud to skirt around the potentially heavy expenses they'd have to make for creating accounts.

It's a business they've been constantly refining since the earliest days of MMOs and finding loopholes to abuse is a large part of how it's able to thrive.

[DumdogsWorld]

[Goji1639]

It's unfortunate, but there's not much that can be done about it. Reporting is pointless because it's difficult to verify that someone is playing a bot to the point that they would be comfortable perma-banning; and the person REALLY REALLY looking like a bot doesn't count.

The amount of time it would take to confirm, coupled with the fact that people would be reporting basically everyone who doesn't respond to a /whisper, makes the entire proposition futile.

The only solution with a reasonable shot at success would be to allow SE to install spyware on all of our clients, and monitor everything we have running while in the game.

[frostmagemari]

<Image>

Sure, only WoW actually has actual countermeasures to deal with sellers; that's why they're a plague here and not on WoW. They have better filters in the chat system, they have a mailing system that filters out mails sent with the key words (along with other character criteria). It has been several YEARS since i have ever heard anyone advertising gold in WoW, and i had been playing since the game came out on the busier servers.

On XIV? I visit any world and the first thing i hear when popping into a world is "buy gil, yadayadayada".

[Kleeya]

The only solution with a reasonable shot at success would be to allow SE to install spyware on all of our clients, and monitor everything we have running while in the game.

Except that the RMT dont use legit clients with anticheats knowing they will get banned, they use modified ones to go around this kind of things. The only annoyed ones will be legit players dealing with your spyware bugs, false positives and more taxing hardware requirement to make it run in the game's background.

And i dont even talk of all the legal and privacy issues there would be with spying all that your customers are doing, and the huge backslash it could lead to on the internet with a community used to make a big fuss of everyting.

[LauraAdalena]

Word on the street is that SE staff have a hand in some those RMT sites, I mean look at them.. they all look the same pretty much lol.With that said SE will never do anything to stop bots as long SE staff gets their cut of it.

If so, SE should be arrested for fraud.

[LalaRu]

...the person REALLY REALLY looking like a bot doesn't count...

GM can question you, and ignoring GM is one legit reason for getting banned. Even if you aren't a bot.