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.

[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.

[DumdogsWorld]

[frostmagemari]

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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".

[Feronar]

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".

Keep in mind WoW also has the WoW token system which is basically legalized RMT through official Blizzard channels. Not that I would necessarily be opposed to SE implementing a similar system in FF14.

[frostmagemari]

Keep in mind WoW also has the WoW token system which is basically legalized RMT through official Blizzard channels. Not that I would necessarily be opposed to SE implementing a similar system in FF14.

First, it is not legalized RMT, if you think that, you don't know how the system works...
Second, i said years. The tokens have only been in since legion, and i hadn't seen a gold advertisement in several years before that. The last gold advertisement i've seen in game was at the end of vanilla (or there abouts); since then they have actually made a good filtration system.
So it's not the token system that kept it out of people's hair, it was actually actively working on the issue.. finding keywords and filtering the chat when they would attempt to spam their advertisements, etc. Whether its bots or real people, advertisements get caught in the net and filtered out so people don't hear them. It doesn't matter how many people are selling if no one hears them.

So we don't need some fancy solution like teleporting people with repetitive play style to mini dungeons, or spyware or getting GMs to talk to each and every person after a report is filed. All SQEX needs to do is stop people from hearing the advertisements, all this requires is a more robust chat system; and when no one hears their advertisements and it impacts their bottom line, the gil sellers will interact less with the market because less customers mean less profitability. After that, then SQEX can start going after the large currency trades as well.

[Jojoya]

First, it is not legalized RMT, if you think that, you don't know how the system works...
Second, i said years. The tokens have only been in since legion, and i hadn't seen a gold advertisement in several years before that. The last gold advertisement i've seen in game was at the end of vanilla (or there abouts); since then they have actually made a good filtration system.
So it's not the token system that kept it out of people's hair, it was actually actively working on the issue.. finding keywords and filtering the chat when they would attempt to spam their advertisements, etc. Whether its bots or real people, advertisements get caught in the net and filtered out so people don't hear them. It doesn't matter how many people are selling if no one hears them.

So we don't need some fancy solution like teleporting people with repetitive play style to mini dungeons, or spyware or getting GMs to talk to each and every person after a report is filed. All SQEX needs to do is stop people from hearing the advertisements, all this requires is a more robust chat system; and when no one hears their advertisements and it impacts their bottom line, the gil sellers will interact less with the market because less customers mean less profitability. After that, then SQEX can start going after the large currency trades as well.

I'm guessing you didn't hang around the main AH in SW or Org much because the spam bot problem never went away, it was just reduced (at least as of when I quit WoW at the end of Legion). What got it under control was the chat restrictions on trial accounts plus auto-squelch if enough players reported the character for chat issues. I had fun visiting the cities, seeing the obvious spam bots, reporting them if they weren't already squelched then hitting them with my Turkey Shooter to make them the turkeys they are.

The bot operators continue to get creative with their messages, making it hard for SE to keep up with which text strings should result in the message blocked. What SE needs to do is implement am auto-squelch like WoW has so the character is muted after a certain number of RMT reports are submitted by other players. Let the squelched characters stay muted so their operators don't get alerted and send in a new bot to replace them. If a legitimate player is falsely reported, a GM can be contacted to lift the squelch then squelch the players making the false report.