Firmament Botting Out Of Control

[Eriane_Elis]

I won't deny I'm really disappointed that they didn't take any measures to make the Firmament/Diadem experience more interesting/fulfilling.

The FATEs in the former could've been a regular thing and also more a involved process; perhaps allowing you to actually craft things to use for the repairs and gain bonus skyward points as a result.

Diadem could've had collectables/aetherial reduction as an alternative to just brainlessly hitting nodes, and perhaps some "boss" monsters that take a collective effort from the players there to reap a large reward.

As far as the botting goes, almost all of the people from my server I see doing it there have an established history of doing it pretty much any time they're on DoL/H jobs though, so it's not like it pushed them over the edge or anything; they just find gathering/crafting fundamentally uninteresting. There isn't any actual risk to doing it, either, as SE's three strike policy means that unless you had prior offenses, you're just going to get a slap on the wrist if you do somehow get caught.

I think the problem with Aehterial reduction is RNG. Statistics takes in consideration say 60% success but for a pool of 1000 people with a 0.2% margin. Meaning, there's a possibility of a few people who might almost always get whatever you're supposed to get with aehterial reduction so it's not 60% success for you, but as an average. But I get your point. My first issue here is that everyone gains a tremendous amount of gathering and crafting XP. This is upsetting because how many of us gained those levels by gathering and crafting things for like 2 months straight? Now you can level everything in a few days tops. It should have been more like PotD where your level goes up as you keep doing it. Adding to this point, and yours, the collectable idea isn't a bad idea per-se. But, to avoid botting there should be some kind of added dynamic to the mix and exactly what is hard to say but it could have been tied somehow to diadem-only gathering levels. It really comes down to how gathering is so dull in this game and how it easily invites bots. Plus, it doesn't help that SE doesn't monitor player bound positions so well. I get people can fall through the floor from time to time (I have) but bots are entirely different. They teleport from node to node and/or move irregularly. This should be an easy thing to monitor but it isn't. Oh well, whatever I guess. It's part of doing something new, lessons will be learned for the future. Kind of like how Eureka was an improvement to diadem.

[ZattanaWen]

I won't deny I'm really disappointed that they didn't take any measures to make the Firmament/Diadem experience more interesting/fulfilling.

The FATEs in the former could've been a regular thing and also more a involved process; perhaps allowing you to actually craft things to use for the repairs and gain bonus skyward points as a result.

Diadem could've had collectables/aetherial reduction as an alternative to just brainlessly hitting nodes, and perhaps some "boss" monsters that take a collective effort from the players there to reap a large reward.

As far as the botting goes, almost all of the people from my server I see doing it there have an established history of doing it pretty much any time they're on DoL/H jobs though, so it's not like it pushed them over the edge or anything; they just find gathering/crafting fundamentally uninteresting. There isn't any actual risk to doing it, either, as SE's three strike policy means that unless you had prior offenses, you're just going to get a slap on the wrist if you do somehow get caught.

My problem with the FATES in the original IshRest is just that they were too few and far between, too short, and involved too many people. You'd need instanced Firmaments to do them right, and that's lunacy. But you're right, I wish there was more to the Firmament beyond just a special place to grind collectibles.

And the botting in the Firmament bothers me a lot less than the general botting in the game, such as the type that takes over the market board and devastates the server's economy.

[tymora]

Cheaters will cheat no matter how interesting or dull a game is. So making something "fun" or "engaging" won't fix the problem.

[Xeronia]

We caught a bot constantly trying to re-mount constantly in my instance for about a half hour, they are the number one miner on their respective server. I would certainly hope they get removed in the final tally but I somehow doubt that. I did report it along with half the instance but again I don't think anything will done.

[SinisterJoints]

The best one is the person on top of 3 crafter leaderboards. That person is most certainly botting

[Nayout]

It has been confirmed with a post on reddit that the person who is TOP 1 in various categories on Lamia's server is using a bot and in Ragnarok I also believe that it has been confirmed that within the top 20 there are at least 3 people using bots.

The problem is that you cannot present any proof that is not direct from the game.

[KageTokage]

As some kind of stupid joke, one of the top rankers on my server who's a rather notorious bot farmer is also cheating his alt accounts he does the farming with into the rankings.

One of them jumped into top 12 after being unranked up until the most recent ranking update, and I'm honestly really afraid of how many others are potentially sandbagging like that.

[SigmaOZ]

Proving they are bots is as hard as proving they really expend 18 to 20 hours straight crafting, don't they have a life!?.


It's too fishy that some players can add + 300,000 points in a single day without cheating, they'd need to craft like 14 hours at 1 craft/3 minutes maximizing the collectability in order to make that much, definitely not achievable by a human player.


There are bots most likely and SE does nothing about it.

[KageTokage]

Proving they are bots is as hard as proving they really expend 18 to 20 hours straight crafting, don't they have a life!?.


It's too fishy that some players can add + 300,000 points in a single day without cheating, they'd need to craft like 14 hours at 1 craft/3 minutes maximizing the collectability in order to make that much, definitely not achievable by a human player.


There are bots most likely and SE does nothing about it.

After crunching the numbers, you'd actually only need to have been pulling 9K points per hour since the rankings started to have over 2 million points, and considering that you can get over 20K points per hour ideally, the number is not nearly as unreasonable as I had initially thought.

That said, identifying who is/isn't cheating is a much dicier proposition then I had initially thought.

[SigmaOZ]

After crunching the numbers, you'd actually only need to have been pulling 9K points per hour since the rankings started to have over 2 million points, and considering that you can get over 20K points per hour ideally, the number is not nearly as unreasonable as I had initially thought.

That said, identifying who is/isn't cheating is a much dicier proposition then I had initially thought.

2,000,000 points at 9,000/hour would mean crafting around 22 hours per day for a total of ~222 hours in 10 days.
2,000,000 points at 20,000/hour would mean crafting about 10 hours per day for a total of ~100 hours in 10 days.


What you're not taking into account is the RNG factor and that not every craft will yield a perfect collectability, that definitely adds many hours of unsuccessful attempts with failed crafts, I'm pretty sure only bots are able to think that fast and not get tired.