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

[Kes13a]

A friend's alt is a level 90 NIN only but has all of his Gatherer and Crafting Classes at 90 and I'm pretty sure he is NOT a bot.

not saying they all are. but I bet your friend also doesnt spend all day, seven days a week in their apartment/house crafting and selling things either

[Shuuli]

the problem thats low hanging fruit. a blind person or a trained monkey could deal with them.

SE needs to actually action on the people buying gil. if people are afraid of buying, less market, less incentive for the people running the bots. banning throw away accounts does nothing, as has been proven time and again. the botters just make more.

And how exactly would they know who buys gil? The transaction usually happens ingame, and there are legit ways to trade gil by getting gil from someone else - e.g.: I can give my friend gil as a loan to buy a house. Or I want to give gil to a newly married couple. Etc...

[Kes13a]

And how exactly would they know who buys gil? The transaction usually happens ingame, and there are legit ways to trade gil by getting gil from someone else - e.g.: I can give my friend gil as a loan to buy a house. Or I want to give gil to a newly married couple. Etc...

well, if you believe that they have no way to track gil, then more power to you. companies do it now, they have done it in the past. there is no reason SE cannot do it through their database, even ingame, so no need for spy software in the program. sure, you can lend gil, or give gil to newlyweds, which is an easily justifiable way to do it as well as easily proven. since it is just as easily provable how you earned it. there is a record.

[Themarvin]

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.

The only way to deal with it, is for the hitting the customers hard, no temporare suspension... 1 warning and reset all to level 1 to start over, second time, account termination.

Bots and the likes only thrieve because people buy their clears/gil and whatever... so hit the players hard, that use these features.

[Liam_Harper]

A friend's alt is a level 90 NIN only but has all of his Gatherer and Crafting Classes at 90 and I'm pretty sure he is NOT a bot.

There are generally other signs too when it comes to bots.

Like they only have the basic MSQ mounts or minions, no side content done at all, no instances besides MSQ. They're often in FC's that consist of just the bot and a few low level bank alts. That 8-10 person FC often has very high activity compared to other FC's on their server, meaning the bot is going 24/7. The bot is online for days at a time ingame at the same locations and often only crafts in a house or room away from public.

Once you add everything up together it's almost certain in many cases.

[Rhea_]

Bots and the likes only thrieve because people buy their clears/gil and whatever... so hit the players hard, that use these features.

How do you hit those who bot for gathering for their own use?

[KageTokage]

They're still there nearly three months later.

The only thing that's changed is that they aren't in a FC anymore, presumably because they decided it wasn't worth running those low level alts to desynth fish.

[Shoyaya]

Nice Special Task Force.. They did same again I reported someone more than 15 days and they do nothing to them. They claim the evidences is invalid and don't accept any screenshot from discord's server.

I ask them to investigate about RMT in their accounts too but yeah... they don't give any care at all. I got many evidences and TRANSLATED TO ENG AND JP to give them.
BUT THEY DON'T CARE. WHY I NEED TO PAY A SUBS TO SOMEONE doesn't WORK at all..... IF YOU CAN'T ACCEPT THE LINK AND EVIDENCES, CAN YOU TRY TO CHECK THEIR DATA LOGS?

They use 3rd party client that can install plugin can modify many features in game such as 'casting bot / latency reduction / act call / DoT timer / hit box range etc. There's someone who teach them to use 3rd party tool in those party too.
I CAN EVEN TELL THEY SAID YEAH YEAH I DON'T CARE, HOW MUCH YOU REPORTS BUT THEY DON'T WANNA INVESTIGATE US.
Staffs want to clear 3rd party program's users I give you link and pictures but you don't care yeah I'll keep report until they got banished.


About RMT they use Facebook's community to contact with merchandise so no one can grasp any in-game evidence how can i report them if as you told me that you wont accepted any evidence that occurred on external sites.

They always make fun about ffxiv's staff teams that cant do anything and still cheating / supporting RMT till nowadays because you don't exist they bullied other people in JP data center ,who don't live same as their party, with their mod's tool.

Did staff teams cant do anything like they said?

[LianaThorne]

Nice Special Task Force.. They did same again I reported someone more than 15 days and they do nothing to them. They claim the evidences is invalid and don't accept any screenshot from discord's server.

The reason for this is because outside evidence can be manipulated by the submitter. For example, Person A and Person B have a fight and Person A decides to try to ruin Person B's time in the game. They take the time to photoshop a screenshot to show Person B engaging in RMT when they never were and submit it to support to try to get them in trouble. Person B is promptly banned from the game when they never did anything wrong.

This is obviously a situation to avoid. ^

They're only going to accept in game evidence that they can also see on their end as it can't be faked. So if you want to get someone for RMT, they'd have to directly admit in game that they're participating in RMT.

[Shibi]

Nice Special Task Force...They claim the evidences is invalid and don't accept any screenshot from discord's server. ...

OMG, How did you get an answer from the STF?

I mean we all think these are three Japanese people sitting in some swanky office in Tokyo drinking tea all day as they scrunch and throw all our unread reports into the bin, like a basketball.