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

[Jennah]

Can you imagine how much things would cost if everyone had to gather their own crystals and aethersand, instead of bots constantly minting them by the thousands?

[Canadane]

Can you imagine how much things would cost if everyone had to gather their own crystals and aethersand, instead of bots constantly minting them by the thousands?

Yes, the economy would be healthy and good for business.

[KageTokage]

I'm starting to think they ought to just axe the free gil from job/story skips and give the player a mountain of aetheryte tickets instead because it's the only significant gil sink they're liable to actually need the gil for immediately, and it discernably plays into the farming tactics the RMTers use as I've seen waves of level 50 bots doing the 2.0 MSQ which suggests they used the skip both to get the gil and blaze faster.

I don't have much confidence these guys are going to get punished after those treasure map bots were allowed to run rampant for close to a year despite their painfully obvious scripting, and while I'd like to hope that the hacking has things stacked more heavily against them, most bots in general already bypass standard gameplay restrictions by ignoring OGCD delays, line of sight, targeting distance, and numerous other fundamentals that normal players are bound by...

Can you imagine how much things would cost if everyone had to gather their own crystals and aethersand, instead of bots constantly minting them by the thousands?

It would honestly normalize the economy because right now the amount of gil flowing in still far exceeds the amount leaving it because with all items being dirt cheap the market tax is that much lower by extension.

[LaylaTsarra]

I'm starting to think they ought to just axe the free gil from job/story skips and give the player a mountain of aetheryte tickets instead because it's the only significant gil sink they're liable to actually need the gil for immediately, and it discernably plays into the farming tactics the RMTers use as I've seen waves of level 50 bots doing the 2.0 MSQ which suggests they used the skip both to get the gil and blaze faster.

You know i can understand your frustration but those of us who use skips appreciate the gil we get to buy things we need with out alts. It's a shame that bots and cheaters often spoil things for the rest of us though and would be good if SE actually dealt with the bots.

[HisShadowX]

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 90s who by all appearances were level-skipped and only progressed the MSQ far enough to gain flight in Mare Lamentorum.

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.

I just saw a House with a name of For Sale lol

[KageTokage]

I also had a thought they might've been planning to abuse the Ishgard housing somehow to have such an excess of low level players in their FCs, but I think that sudden announcement that you need to be a member of a FC for 30 days before you're permitted to place bids on a housing plot kind of ruined a lot of schemes.

[Kes13a]

If a game company wants to get rid of RMT and its bots, it needs to focus on the RMT customer. RMT stays in business because there's no penalty to being a buyer. SE can shut down one set of RMT seller accounts and another one will appear because the customer still has money they want to spend.

I agree. ban the buyers. start with a 14 day ban for the first offense and perma for the second.

fairly sure their buyer pool would quickly empty once that got around the player base

[Kyrj]

SE: "Thanks for bringing this to our attention, we will do jack shit in fixing this, look forward to it!"

[KageTokage]

That is false. Bots always had similar movement and you can tell who is a bot if you observe them for a bit. Not only that but if you teleport a player to the GM jail after you become suspicious of them you can pretty much confirm that they are botting with confidence.
If you want to fight botting you have to make the cost of purchasing accounts higher than the profit. Otherwise, being banned for botting is just a cost of ''doing business''. If you ban bots every few months you will NEVER EVER solve the problem this way because it will still be profitable.

The reason why they are not taking action is that they are cutting corners with CS. CS is expensive and investigating reports manually is time-consuming. In WoW classic I was banned for botting, I didn't bot. They used an algorithm to flag accounts as suspicious and banned them.
Plenty of legitimate players got banned but that was acceptable collateral damage because CS would be more expensive.

I do feel like the STF is the core issue with why cheating is so prevalent.

A four member team is much too small to be trying to manage the entire game's population of cheaters without being overly reliant on automated detection methods that apparently can't even pick up on a lot of the impossible things bots and hackers alike do. The only thing that seems to semi-reliably get them banned is using hacks to teleport around the place but even that won't necessarily be acted on if used in moderation judging from accounts I've heard in PvP and elsewhere.

We really need a team that when prompted, will just go and observe suspected players in person as that's all it takes to tell that foul play is involved. You don't need fancy detection tools; just send the GMs after them with a laundry list of red flags to look for and purge them if it's obvious something is off.

[ICountFrom0]

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.

Apparently it's litterally against thier job if a GM so much as shows up on the same map as a bot. They've told me that can get fired for it. They can't file reports to the special team on player behalf, the most they can do is give you the link.

And then you have to type in the names that are intentionally hard to copy or read from an image. Or you know there's bots because monsters are dying but there's no visable player.