Request: Anti-cheat system for rampant botting.

[Jijifli]

The issue with crafting bots is that you can barely tell them apart from legitimate players. Crafting basically boils down to selecting the recipe, choosing the correct actions to complete the craft in HQ and then making a macro to perform these exact actions without your input. Then all you have to do is load up on materials, start the craft, press your macro and go afk for a bit. Hard to tell a player apart from a bot when they both just sit there and pump out potions for a few hours.


The only thing that somewhat kept crafting bots in check was the hurdle of leveling your crafters in the first place and the initial high gil investment to gear them properly.

Actually, there's one method, the times between each craft.

The bot system needs to be designed to start up the new craft, and from what I've noticed at least, some are very interesting in the way they handle the time of that. The one I was able to catch doing it in Eulmore had exactly 15 seconds (I checked timings myself, over multiple crafts that it did, it was very VERY consistently around 14.8-15.2 seconds, which I'll argue to my own human error) between the craft finishing, and the first action of the new craft.

Now, I don't know much about crafters, outside of being an omni of course, but humans aren't exactly known for having both extended waits AND perfect periods consistently for something like that. You'd think if it was somebody crafting with enough attention for a consistent time between start and end, that they'd be doing it earlier than 15 seconds of waiting, as it only takes 2 or 3 to actually get back started. And if it was a player just afk macroing, they wouldn't get consistency on the wait time at all, as they're... afk macroing, they aren't there to click to continue the millisecond the craft finishes.

Sure bots could just go against that later on by simply randomizing the wait time, but... at least for the moment that could easily hit some of these heavy ones, some carrying probably billions of gil.

I wouldnt hold your breath.

multiple reports done to the "proper" team have resulted in nothing, long term botters do everything but advertise they are cheating and SE turns a blind eye.

the reality is, 3 people based in JPN will never be able to handle the issue. If SE really wanted to seem to make an effort they would have a team for both EU and NA as well. they do not. I'll let that speak for itself.

Also, I can only speak from my experience checking bots as ban waves happen, and this is what I've noticed.

If a bot is simply doing automation, and nothing else, as in no teleport hacks or whatever, then it never seems to go away.

However, if a bot does do these things (go under the ground, teleport around, etc), then they usually seem to go within 2 waves of my report.

Even just with these map bots, I've managed to track where and how some act. Any I confirmed were under the ground (/idlecam is great for this) were banned, while the one I have found that doesn't and just runs between the market and the bell has had no action taken on it.

Which comes to a conclusion that they do in fact act, but only if it actively cheats, rather than just automates.

[KageTokage]

The funny thing is that a lot of bots actively do things that are not possible via a normal game client like ignoring LoS and targeting NPCs/objects through walls or targeting from further then is possible with the standard game client.

I assume whatever detection methods they utilize are not able to pick on those abnormalities.

[Kuroka]

ITs a joke when the server doesnt mind showing us the bot right below the ground, where no player ever could go... theres 0 excuse to not at least band aid it with an deadzone followed by a free ticked right into the prison....

[Dzian]

The trouble with bots are that no matter what SE tries to implement to defeat them, the bot makers and their users will always find a way around it, it's a zero sum game. Worse, countermeasures SE may implement often just end up negatively impacting legitimate players and the bots still continue unabated..

The thing is. in a decent game system you don't need massive amounts of anti cheat or countermeasures or whatever in the first place. all you really needs is to be more visible and pro active about the botters / cheaters.

If a game bans 50,000 bots today, and 50,000 more next week, and 50,000 more the week after. and they're visibly transparent about it, they'll drastically reduce the problem very very quickly.. because it'd create a visibly strong deterrent that the risk of a ban is very real... and that will be enough to put many players off... even if they didn't caught themselves. if they knew people who did it'd be enough to make them think twice about continuing because they won't wantto be in the next 50,000 who get banned.

As it stands in XIV though many of the people using bots and other things are visibly quite blatent about it because there's next to no risk of any action ever being taken against them. and then when players see how so many other players get away with it. they then think well why arent i doing that... and all that does it make the problem worse...

[Liam_Harper]

They really have to do something, it's become ridiculous. I've done research on their forums and seen that bots admit to having done everything from dungeons, Savage, maps, Expert crafts, the Pteranodon mount, Resplendent Tools, gathering and so on. What's the point, for example, in spending 500 hours grind on the Pteranodon when there's bots flying around with it for no work and people might even assume you're a bot too.

One issue is SE opened the doors for bots with absolutely no way to deal with them. The nerfs to craft difficulty, the massive boosts to crafting exp, Cross world visit and so on were unfortunately bot heaven and encouraged the bots to become bolder, where it quickly became apparent to them that Enix actually had no power over them. After that they just went nuts. Even worse is now the doors are open and Enix have demonstrated how powerless they are, things like restricting CW, putting little anti-bot measures in instances or reverting crafting changes wouldn't do much (besides angering the player-base). The bots will adapt because they know Enix can't handle them and it's worth the effort to work around any measures.

The issue with crafting bots is that you can barely tell them apart from legitimate players.

Sometimes it's rather obvious, such as with the RMT botting rings. You can trace some crafted gear back to a single player sitting in a FC with only them (only basic MSQ done, maxed DoH/DoL) and 10 retainer alts and an FC activity rank in the top 5 for their server, which for one person is 24/7 non-stop endless crafting. That bot will cover every world on their DC with thousands of items.

[Deceptus]

Reddit Thread today on this exact topic. Good reading:

My experience with cheaters and win-traders in Feast S19.

TLDR: Botting is blatant and rampant in this game and it appears that the FFXIV developers are doing very little to actually combat it even when presented with concrete evidence.

There's literally a front page google search if you use the right terms to find people selling scripts. It's that rampant.

They have zero fear of SE coming down hard on them. At that point, if you can't beat them . . .

[Nepentha]

At this point, botting is ubiquitous to the game. If there's a way to make gil off of it that the botters can sell as RMT, it's already automated save for a very few things that are simply too time consuming to bother with (yet). Bots in dungeons, bots running trusts, bots doing maps, housing bots that snap up mediums and larges that demo and sell them for 12x the placard's original price, bots marketboarding, bots gathering, bots in PvP, bots in Firmament, bots in high end raids.

It's not just the bots with long nonsense names you see underground anymore. Those are pretty rudimentary and old school. These days you only have to look at the botting software forums to see them saying 'Well FFXIV is a bot friendly game'. Because honestly, it is. They may pay attention to the obvious RMT cheaters who stand out like sore thumbs. But third party software use is entirely ignored.

[Kuroka]

Its starts already on the problem that you can do ranked stuff with multiple chars from the same account... *sight*

[Jijifli]

There's literally a front page google search if you use the right terms to find people selling scripts. It's that rampant.

There's a very common one, enough that in game I joke about it being our overlord due to it. Not in the sense that I know they're using it because how would I know which program, but with how brazen and bold it is at putting itself forward.

It's so forward on it I remember I was looking up information for the gathering collectable changes, and half of the first page was either that bot program, or its own forums on how the program does the process because someone shared their code. Again, I looked up a new gathering change, I didn't type "bot" or the name of the program, and it was very forward with its links anyways, which means it's not scared at all of being on Square's radar.

[Sarevok_Thordin]

GMs should challenge suspect botters with questions that demand a unique response, or something that would be hard to program a script to respond to.