Bots at the Bard trainer

[Vexy83]

I did not know where to put this. But i was watching thounds on thounds of bots at him. Same character over and over, different name. The bot train that i look at has gone for close to 2 hours nonstop. Looks like its generated 4-8 bots every 6 seconds.

South Shroud X:32.7 Y:21.3 Z:0.1

Im new to the game, but come from world of warcraft.. They have bots, but this in here is INSANE.


Vexy

[DrWho2010]

those bots get banned in waves every week. not much any one player can do about it. if they are impeding your progress you can use the world visit system to continue on your way where they might not be there.

[ItMe]

Did you take a video?
Unfortunately, I can't travel to Spriggan to take a look : (

[Vexy83]

No, i did not take a video of it.
Friend in the Company did have issue with em, took over quest zones he said. I see the same guy selling gold for 5GOLD.COM in the chat now. They had to be couple of thousands of em, when i was watching em for 2 hours. Premade same character.

Only lvl 50 bards

[Jojoya]

The RMT bots do get pretty crazy at times. They tend to run through in groups.

SE isn't unaware of the problem. They will ban several thousands each week for RMT related bot activity and advertising. You'll see a notice posted each week on the Lodestone, usually on Thursdays - this is the most recent https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...6b50ba79c12ac8

They've got some countermeasures in a few places that hinder the bots even if that doesn't stop them completely (if you pay attention to environment, you'll sometimes catch it happening). Occasionally SE will do something that interferes with a specific behavior more permanently and we'll see bots switch to new patterns.

WoW also used to be extremely bad. I was playing back when the level 1 bots would "suicide" in Stormwind and Orgrimmar to spell out the website address of a particular gold seller and even when I last played in Legion the spam bots would be camped by the Trade District AH either repeating their message or marked as Squelched by the GMs. The WoW token cut into the illicit RMT market a bit but never got rid of it entirely.

As long as there are player who would rather pay real money for game currency, RMT bots will always be a problem in MMOs.

[Vexy83]

I remember those bots in SW :P Wow was bot free 2 years, after they sued honorbuddy etc. The bots came back this year, after 2 months of the start of the expansion sadly.

I noticed server lag when i was in the zone. Did not understand it, so i checked my speed on the internet. Due i have not seen lag in the game so far. Then i start to port around in the zone, while walking.

They changed one rule in wow now.. So they dont sell gold anymore due mass farming, they pay guilds to do loot runs for gold. Due, the removed the free subscription from the game. Was a huge fuzz, when you could not buy game time for gold. Then the bots where close to gone again. So i bet the main problem is the free sub in the game. Ban em, and they get a new free account.

[Frizze]

They have a few character types that they use. Youll see armies of black mages too if you hang around the right parts of Ul Dah. I think they use PAL and WHM for tank and healer, but i personally run into those less. And if i remember right, they dont do a pre-set character. They just do default. I dont think they use the free trial though. Cant trade items, can only earn so much gil. They tend to use actual accounts paid for with stolen credit cards or fraudulent charge-backs.

[Jojoya]

They have a few character types that they use. Youll see armies of black mages too if you hang around the right parts of Ul Dah. I think they use PAL and WHM for tank and healer, but i personally run into those less. And if i remember right, they dont do a pre-set character. They just do default. I dont think they use the free trial though. Cant trade items, can only earn so much gil. They tend to use actual accounts paid for with stolen credit cards or fraudulent charge-backs.

As far as I can tell, they mostly use Bards and Thaumaturge because of the ranged attacks (Summoners would be less effective because of the pet though there would be the advantage to having access to Scholar for dungeons past 30). They still need the tanks and healers to meet role requirements to enter dungeons but not as many.

They actually could make use of the free trial at first. Set up free trial account, run bot until it hits trial gil cap (300k). Switch account to paid using stolen/fraudulent payment information and move the gil. Keep running bot to earn more gil and move it until SE bans the account.

Do they do it this way? Maybe? It's going to depend a lot on speed of bot detection and ban processing versus speed of chargeback notification and ban processing.

The number of bots being run at one time affects how fast SE can process all the bans (unless the ban system is 100% automated, which would scare the crap out of players paranoid about false positives).

Look at last week's ban notice. 4818 accounts banned for RMT related activity and another 2172 accounts banned for RMT advertisement. If each ban requires 1 minute of an employee's time to process, that's 116 man hours or 3 full time employees (by US standards).

Chances are good that what the employee is processing today are the bots that were initially detected yesterday. That gives the bot a probable average life span of 18 hours before getting banned for detection.

How fast does the chargeback take? Payment request gets sent through clearinghouses to the payor that identifies it as fraudulent and sends the notice back thru the clearinghouses. I have no idea how fast it is anymore, I haven't worked in banking in over 20 years but I would hope that time is down to hours instead of the days it used to take.

If it takes less than 18 hours for a chargeback to get received and processed, then it's better to use the free trial at first to gain a few extra hours of gil farming on the bot then upgrade to paid. If it takes more than 18 hours, then it doesn't matter. The bot will be banned for detection before the chargeback is received.

Yes, those numbers involve a lot of guestimates because we don't know what is actually happening behind the scenes but it should help to demonstrate why bots don't simply disappear immediately after being reported.

As a bit of trivia, if those 4,818 bots banned last week each made just 300k gil, that was almost 1.5 billion gil generated. I have no idea how much gil players tend to buy at a time. If it's 5 million, that's about 300 customers served. It goes to show how a small number of cheaters can ruin things for the rest.

[TheDarkrayne]

I've just seen this happening on Phoenix and thought I'd search to see if there was any chat about it. Absolutely tons of them in a constant stream at the Bard trainer.

[ICountFrom0]

Funny that doing the math confirms it.

Yes, there are exactly 3 people on the anti-bot team, named, by name, in the latest credits.

If you try to post a video HERE about it, you'll get banned.... So record it, put it on youtube, and make a new non related account to post the video here, if you want something done about the bot parrade.

Last time something actually happened, two different bot groups managed to make Ul-dah unable to be entered, at all, due to filling the town AND the entry que. As well as south shroud.