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.