The Botridden Land, Eureka Pyros

[Raoabolic]

They need to crack down on the methods being used to traffic the gil so people won't buy it in the first place.

But then how will SE double dip in game sales and level/story jump potions? Won't anyone think of the company!?

[KageTokage]

The moderation teams operate under an "innocent until proven guilty" policy so implicating anyone with a ToS violation is a no-no and tends to get topics removed.

I think the best way to prove botting activty is with actual footage that has player names disabled so you can demonstrate the suspect behavior as botting tends to be extremely easy to discern going off of movement patterns alone.

[Geruu]

Oh, well can't say it doesn't make sense, I'll try to catch some of them at another point in time in video instead and with names disabled then!
And yeah absolutely, that weird sort of stuttering walk along with honestly everything else in their movement pattern is (thankfully) a big tell.

I'll go and edit the post to remove the image then since the main thing the image was pointing out is the name and amount of bots so it feels like there's no point in it being there if the names are not allowed, thanks for explaining it!

[Curisu]

You can quite simple find out who is a bot.
Port the potential bot out of the instance in the house close to the pier and see how they react.

1 Person can do this on all DCs within a hour. Whats the price for it? probably 50$ worth of work and you banned all active Pyros bots.
Now the bot makers have to adjust but a human will probably able to observe the new behaviour .

[ArchlordPie]

You can quite simple find out who is a bot.
Port the potential bot out of the instance in the house close to the pier and see how they react.

1 Person can do this on all DCs within a hour. Whats the price for it? probably 50$ worth of work and you banned all active Pyros bots.
Now the bot makers have to adjust but a human will probably able to observe the new behaviour .

This makes sense until they do this to someone who's paying attention to their bot. This person will watch for a bit, go "there must be a GM doing this" when more bots start showing up one at a time, and either lay low for a bit, or update their bot to recognize when it's been ported and get back into Pyros from where it got ported to.

Pulling other mobs into the bunny fates and trying to de-level the bots that way is probably the most effective thing you could do to counter them, though that also lands you solidly in danger of getting reported for "gameplay disruption" by the bot owner.

[KageTokage]

A lot of bots already have a failsafe that kicks in and either makes them teleport to a specific aetheryte or use Return, then restarts whatever script they currently have running.

I've seen it happen to ones that got stuck in a loop of actions due to latency or some other problem.

[VictorSpoils]

I'm not entirely sure if this is becoming an issue in other data centers, but unfortunately on Light data center farming in Pyros at late hours when there aren't many players around has become a HUGE pain (read: practically impossible) due to the ridiculous amount of bots in the area staying in Pyros' bottom Happy Bunny/Elemental conflict FATE pretty much 24/7.
The players are literally sighing in relief when a new instance begins and the bots have yet to join it!

Is this a thing in other data centers as well?

P.S: People have been reporting them for so long and yet nothing has been done, it's so irritating tbh.
For real, example: out of 14 Players in the instance, only 3 of us are actual players, farming fates and having to deal with fates adapted to 14 people, my burning hatred for these bots knows no bounds anymore lol.

That's nice and all, but how does one figuratively sigh in relief?

[Meowdyj]

I really don't get it why game masters aren't actively tackling this problem. Its so obvious they are bots yet not getting removed. Would say get a grip Square but its honestly embarrassing on every aspect of the game, bots everywhere.

[Jijifli]

I really don't get it why game masters aren't actively tackling this problem. Its so obvious they are bots yet not getting removed. Would say get a grip Square but its honestly embarrassing on every aspect of the game, bots everywhere.

Game Masters are specifically trained to NOT deal with them at all. To the point where they have to pretend the character in question doesn't even exist, apparently. <.< I get wanting people who're specifically designed to the task to deal with it, but it's strange to go that far.

[Chasingstars]

I see two different groups of bots for bunny fates at pyros on the Crystal datacenter.

The excharic-geared ones. They tend to have one job at 80, they wear HQ excharic gear, they are always in a party together, they all use default chocobo mount.
And the cryptlurker-geared ones. They are not in a party, they have gladiator at level 2 and another job at level 80, they wear augmented cryptlurker gear, they use the default chocobo mount.

The excharic-geared ones are part of a bot FC as said FC has a name that is bot-level gibberish in its name.
The cryptlurker-geared ones are not in an FC.

Both bot groups are Private Third Class for their respective grand companies. Maelstrom for excharic-geared, Immortal Flames for cryptlurker-geared.
Both bot groups don't use one of the various titles for their characters.

EDIT: In total I counted 14 bots at the lower-leveled bunny fate in Pyros.

Before someone tells me to go just report them, I have already. I am just waiting for the Special Task Force to do their job.