Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[KageTokage]

I have a hunch that reporting for RMT may have worked because while the STF and GMs suck at identifying bots, they seem much better at tracking suspicious gil transfers; to such an extent that I've heard stories of players who weren't actually involved in RMT being contacted out of the blue because they were transferring several million gil to either an alt or a friend.

There's some kind of Aether DC-wide shard farming operation going on using a series of FCs named "***HUB" (With the asterisks being shorthand for the server name, so CacHUB in the case of my server) that are populated by a single max level DoL bot that does nothing but aetherial reduction in HW and SB areas so perhaps I'll see if I can get rid of them using the same tactic.

[TheLoveJenovan]

I have a hunch that reporting for RMT may have worked because while the STF and GMs suck at identifying bots, they seem much better at tracking suspicious gil transfers; to such an extent that I've heard stories of players who weren't actually involved in RMT being contacted out of the blue because they were transferring several million gil to either an alt or a friend.

I've tried the game's "Report Cheating" with RMT in the subject, and I've used the Special Task Force (STF). The bots I've reported to both are still present after about 6-8 weeks. If anyone would like to try STF, you can submit to the STF at this link:

https://support.na.square-enix.com/c...382&la=1&fty=2

This was also the procedure that SE USA recommended to me when I sent them a support email. Who knows, maybe more reports through this mechanism will work. From my understanding, the STF operates out of Japan.

There's some kind of Aether DC-wide shard farming operation going on using a series of FCs named "***HUB" (With the asterisks being shorthand for the server name, so CacHUB in the case of my server) that are populated by a single max level DoL bot that does nothing but aetherial reduction in HW and SB areas so perhaps I'll see if I can get rid of them using the same tactic.

I've noticed this as well, and I've reported our version on Jenova a few times over the last 3 months--including the STF. Nothing has been done with this bot. It's not even a sophisticated bot, as its movements are 100% deterministic. I've even asked the account if it's a bot, without a response.

[Muutaras]

I do not know how many GMs are running on the servers and what they are doing. But is it really difficult to arrange 2-4 GMs per server? If, as they say above, they are triggered only for large volumes of gil transfer, but this is very strange. As already mentioned, you can try to make volunteers for GM positions that will help the main GM on server. When just observing the collection point for about a week ShB nodes and check actual sellers on market board, I find near 30-40 people who 99.99999% bots. Moreover, having FC for greater profit and through them you can find whole networks of bots on other server.

[Muutaras]

I took one look at the characters in that group and the face looks and I know EXACTLY two of those in that group that are gathering bots that are on 24/7 feeding this. I've literally reported them well over 60 times over the course of months as have others and they still exist. One's name is like a unpleasant rabbit for example and the other is a J (hope that avoids the naming and shaming rule).

Pretty sad when I can look at that and I know exactly what names of what bots are fueling this junk on my server.

The market bots and gathering bots are directly entwined since they fuel eachother and both need crushed to fix this, though breaking the gathering ones would starve the market bots. Either way it needs enforced, oh it might cost money to have staff do it, but doesn't our money for the game make us worth fixing this for? We do the heavy lifting most times since as shown we actively checking this out, making sure even our accusations have weight and evidence and we want to avoid catching legitimate players. I'd not be as upset myself if AT THE VERY LEAST one of the multiple bots I've seen EVERY DAY for the last 4 months had been banned, but they haven't they still are running gathering circuits and still dominating the markets for months on end when supposed ban waves happen.

You may have seen an interesting bot these days with the initial letters N. S., this person too interesting, he comes when prices on crafting jewels up was Restoration starting. He have 10-20 lvl war or pal and 80 DRK(he buy book for fast 80 lvl) and typical all set gatheting-craft jobs, and FC owner. + It's too multi server bot. Item on him made a person with the same appearance with the identical FC name on another servers. I found 4-5 servers where this bot working. You can add me in friends in game Ijn Akagi

[Muutaras]

https://mobile.twitter.com/Creamploo...121609728?s=19 Interesting tweet post about Restoration ranking.

[Commander_Justitia]

At this point the best they could do is allow botting. They don't have the tools to get cheater/botter and don't wanna get into an arms race with them, because that doesn't generate any money. They should really have a look at how other games make a GM visit a pleasant experience, e.g. when a bug occurs.

@Muutaras The GM won't invest as much time and effort to come to conclusions like you do. It is detrimental anyway because as a GM you would be on a constant witchhunt, if you would work like that. If you accept outside evidence you also risk getting faked information from players that want to see another player banned, as happened in the past. The majority of the cases GM have to deal with include harassment and griefing. And the bans we see are for RMT advertisment mostly from free trial accounts.
By the time a GM sees your report and checks & acts on it, the Restoration rewards will probably be out yet.

[Kes13a]

At this point the best they could do is allow botting. They don't have the tools to get cheater/botter and don't wanna get into an arms race with them, because that doesn't generate any money. They should really have a look at how other games make a GM visit a pleasant experience, e.g. when a bug occurs.

@Muutaras The GM won't invest as much time and effort to come to conclusions like you do. It is detrimental anyway because as a GM you would be on a constant witchhunt, if you would work like that. If you accept outside evidence you also risk getting faked information from players that want to see another player banned, as happened in the past. The majority of the cases GM have to deal with include harassment and griefing. And the bans we see are for RMT advertisment mostly from free trial accounts.
By the time a GM sees your report and checks & acts on it, the Restoration rewards will probably be out yet.

So, you are saying cheating should be allowed? Treat it as a pleasant experience?

I am certain I just read that wrong and misunderstood what you are saying.

[Jojoya]

At this point the best they could do is allow botting. They don't have the tools to get cheater/botter and don't wanna get into an arms race with them, because that doesn't generate any money. They should really have a look at how other games make a GM visit a pleasant experience, e.g. when a bug occurs.

@Muutaras The GM won't invest as much time and effort to come to conclusions like you do. It is detrimental anyway because as a GM you would be on a constant witchhunt, if you would work like that. If you accept outside evidence you also risk getting faked information from players that want to see another player banned, as happened in the past. The majority of the cases GM have to deal with include harassment and griefing. And the bans we see are for RMT advertisment mostly from free trial accounts.
By the time a GM sees your report and checks & acts on it, the Restoration rewards will probably be out yet.

The GMs have nothing to do with investigating bots. That's handled by the Special Task Force. The most the GMs will do is forward the information to the STF.

The "outside evidence" may not be treated as actual evidence but it does give SE information they can use to check their own logs. It never hurts to submit what you have to help them pinpoint where and when something happened.

SE has started banning for non-RMT botting and now lists it as a separate category in the weekly notices. There's not a huge number of accounts getting hit but they are taking action against some. It could be interesting to see if there's a sudden spike in the number in the weeks after the leaderboard rankings end.

[TheLoveJenovan]

Thanks Commander_Justitia,

I don't agree that they should just allow bots. The only reason to play an MMORPG, instead of an RPG, is to play with other players. I don't want to play with bots, and I don't think other players want to either. It ruins the game. It ruins the marketboard; it ruins duties; it ruins the experience in achieving anything in-game.

A common refrain in these discussions, not necessarily from you, is that it's a pointless endeavor because bots will continually pop back up. It's not an either-or proposition. To some extent, it would be like saying that catching bank theft is pointless because theft at banks will inevitably happen. They could at least get the low hanging fruit to begin with. Many of the bots are extremely easy to detect right now, and I could write a simple script to identify most of them, if they gave me access to their API.

The other point that comes up is that it's too costly to address this issue. I agree that it costs money to address botting, and it's likely cheaper to ignore the problem because it won't ultimately decrease subscriptions.

SE has money. Their FFXIV quarterly profits* are on the order of $620M. They have a 20M registered user base. If we conservatively say that 2M of those a paying subscriptions, and subscriptions are $13 a month, then that's ~$312M a year ($78M per quarter). My guess (based on my work in supercomputing) is that infrastructure is $30-50M per year, so that leaves $262-282M. That's enough to pay for a staff over 2000 full-time employees at 100k per year (average). They have 300 dev staff--and definitely not 1700 support staff. 1700 support staff would be enough to have 20 full-time employees per server (68 servers) while having 340 full-time staff to manage other operations.

They're just being greedy.

* https://mmos.com/news/square-enix-an...uly 2%2C 2019.

[Commander_Justitia]

I don't agree that they should just allow bots. The only reason to play an MMORPG, instead of an RPG, is to play with other players. I don't want to play with bots, and I don't think other players want to either. It ruins the game. It ruins the marketboard; it ruins duties; it ruins the experience in achieving anything in-game.

Many of the bots are extremely easy to detect right now, and I could write a simple script to identify most of them, if they gave me access to their API.
[...]
They're just being greedy.

I mean it is obvious they never will allow it, it would be admitting total defeat against them. But funnily it worked out in some older MMO which were very grindy and it made those games mildly enjoyable, I know this won't compare to FFXIV, as grinding is usually not needed for PvE content for example.

The problem I see is, there are (almost) the same type of bots since the release. They teleport around the map, they talk to the same NPC, in the past they unlocked the same crossskills for Blm (unlimited resources; when TP was a thing) so they could heal themselves with Physik and got Raging Strikes from Archer just so they could clear stuff faster. They still did that when it wasn't even useful anymore. They have their farming spots at specific locations on the map.
As you say they are extremely easy to detect. This happened for 7 years and they still don't think it is necessary to do something. They mentioned in some live letter or event that they don't wanna start a war with the botters, where normal players have to suffer because the anti cheat code gets too complex and influences game performance... But well how much blatant botting can you allow, how many hundreds bots are okay to pass through a mainstory npc during one hour? They start to go on other worldservers than their original home server too, I assume it helps them evade detection.
So in conclusion I feel like they gonna keep using that excuse "old code= servers implode, cant do much, its not that bad yet, just ignore and report" when there are cases where bots never got banned after years lmao.
This game got more popular recently, I assume sub numbers to be at least in the 1-2 million now too, more players attract more RMT/Botters as well, as they see their demand for RMT Gil is rising, every other MMO loses gil value over time as well and this game seems to be in a deflation right now. Some items rarity didn't change at all, but it becomes all cheaper. This is so unusual for MMORPG's. But it just shows that it has become hard to sell something to a good price, when a lot of it is in the hands of bot users.

The game has almost reached its demise, I don't see it happening anymore after 7 years, even though I feel they should.


And to @Jojoya: With outside evidence I mean stuff like socialmedia/discord screenshots mostly, people have been creating new accounts with the same avatar of persons they wanna talk dirty about.
Something like a Twitch clip is ofc way more useful than a screenshot of something like that.
If you compare the numbers with the ones of 2 years ago then you notice they are actually same or even lower. And botting is still only in the single or double digits. I don't look at those reports with much confidence, they would suggest that there is no real botting problem which is not the reality.
And STF used to be slow, idk maybe its changed - but for something like Ishgard Restoration where you only have a bit more than a week to act upon (before rewards are send out), it won't be able to achieve its purpose.
I guess chargebacks are considered under prohibited actvities aswell..It is obvious they don't wanna tell too much about how they operate and what they do, it might scare people from doing it after all, but I would take those numbers with a big grain of salt.