Cheating and RMT exploitation has hit a new level of ridiculous.

[KageTokage]

I've gotten into a mentality where I just try to tune out bots after months/years of fruitless reports, but this latest little incident was way too egregious to ignore



If you're wondering what you're looking at, this is a full party of level 90 FSH bots farming Lunar Deathworms (Presumably for purple scrips) in a cave at Mare Lamentorum; most easily discernable whenever they have to move awkwardly around to prevent the "fish sense something amiss" gimmick from kicking in or when they're flying back after doing scrip turn-ins.

They are mostly in the same FC (Though I hid that and their names for obvious reasons), and they are additionally using some kind of hack that is basically removing the animation from the Hook abilities to speed up their fishing significantly.

There are also some wanderers behaving in the exact same manner that lead me to believe this was an Aether DC wide operation, and sure enough, they were present in varying numbers in this same spot on every single server on the DC. In total I counted around 30 them of; all level 90 FSH who by all appearances were level-skipped and only progressed the MSQ far enough to gain flight in Mare Lamentorum. A lot of them also are using the Zu or gorilla mount, which suggests they leveled FSH using the Diadem then opted to dump their skybuilder scrips on those for reasons unknown.

Their FCs have several additional level 20ish members that are just holed up in the Limsa Lominsa inn doing...something, though judging from them having CUL at level 30, I'm assuming they're desynthing the garbage fish from the bots to squeeze as much gil out of the process as possible.

If you're on Aether DC, I think it would be prudent to check this out and mass report the bots in question because I haven't seen an operation on this scale since the ARR gil farmers were a thing and it would set a rather worrying precedent if they're able to get away with brazenly hacking on top of automating gameplay.

[Jin-]

In before someone comes and says they are real players

[drtasteyummy]

Oh no MMO and Bots what are rare combination

[dspguy]

Oh no MMO and Bots what are rare combination

That which we allow we condone.

[KayRadley]

Again? That's the fifth time this month!

[forsakee]

MMO's and bots are inevitable, but I don't think OP is stepping out of line trying to get this "Operation" taken down. I hope devs "investigate" this situation and others alike. I'm newer to game so don't know how well SE handles situations like this, plus all I do is savage/ultimate content so don't see many bots.

[Xrystofer]

MMO's and bots are inevitable.

Although that is true, the problem is that botting is out of hand and SE is not willing to hire more GMs to investigate those issues. Every cheating report that I wrote has been entirely ignored by GMs without even bothering to reply and let me know that they are at least investigating.

[Bearded]

The thing is that SE never respond to such things to the reporter apart from the boilerplate stuff. They are passed to a central team who (for some reason) decides to ban in waves rather than as and when reported.

Botting is of course a serious issue but it is also good that a GM does not take a player word for it - they investigate and so malicious reporting (and it sure does happen) fails.

It's no way ideal but some worlds have it worse than others - sadly a reflection of the willingness of the players on that world / data centre to engage in activities (RMT) that they ought not to.

[Johners]

The thing is that SE never respond to such things to the reporter apart from the boilerplate stuff. They are passed to a central team who (for some reason) decides to ban in waves rather than as and when reported.

Botting is of course a serious issue but it is also good that a GM does not take a player word for it - they investigate and so malicious reporting (and it sure does happen) fails.

It's no way ideal but some worlds have it worse than others - sadly a reflection of the willingness of the players on that world / data centre to engage in activities (RMT) that they ought not to.

Banning in waves is often the strategy other MMOs use. It has worked relatively well for Blizzard that used ban waves psychology. Enough players felt like they got away with it, got attached to having their cheated stuff and then banned them while removing it. Worked really well during Warlords of Draenor when there were several major ban waves during that expansion in the run up to the release of Legion.

The bigger issue in this game is the fact a lot of cheating isn't visible to players directly and Square Enix have no anti-cheat to actually detect it with. Unless the player admits it or you suspect and report them, it's more than likely that you'll get away with it. Square Enix should really start taking ownership of this including the implementation of an anti-cheat.

[PangTong]

Banning in waves is often the strategy other MMOs use. It has worked relatively well for Blizzard that used ban waves psychology. Enough players felt like they got away with it, got attached to having their cheated stuff and then banned them while removing it. Worked really well during Warlords of Draenor when there were several major ban waves during that expansion in the run up to the release of Legion.

The bigger issue in this game is the fact a lot of cheating isn't visible to players directly and Square Enix have no anti-cheat to actually detect it with. Unless the player admits it or you suspect and report them, it's more than likely that you'll get away with it. Square Enix should really start taking ownership of this including the implementation of an anti-cheat.

The reason why online games ban in waves is because fighting cheaters is an arms race. You build systems to detect cheaters, and the cheaters build countermeasures to circumvent the detection. Repeat to infinity.

If someone makes a botting program, and they get instantly banned as soon as the bot does something weird, that gives the bot-maker a HUGE clue about what tripped the detection, and therefore what they should change to make the bot harder to detect. By accumulating known bots over time and then banning in waves, it gives bot makers a lot less information about how they're being caught.

Whether or not SE is being aggressive enough with banning bots is another matter. I doubt it's something they're ignoring, but if the scale of the problem is starting to get out of hand and their current strategies are no longer enough to keep it in check then they might eventually need to take some bigger steps like adding real anti-cheat. I think they're reluctant to do that out of privacy or legal concerns though.