Hey look a spreadsheet of all the eureka bots!

[Jojoya]

Imagine doing the devs jobs for them!

Any moderator or GM can contact me ingame if they have to balls to actually deal with this issue.

Please investigate and ban them, they have only been reported for.. 5 months straight..


Inb4 i get a ban for 'harassment' before the actual cheaters get a ban.

Mods and GMs don't deal with bots.

The Special Task Force does. Send your spreadsheet to them via the Support Center link.

[Scruit_Bigtime]

you are aware that banning botting accounts solves absolutely nothing, when those people will just make new accounts and start over.

i'm sure they're working on trying to find a way to render the bot Ai neutered (hopefully in a way that doesn't inconvenience actual player) which is a better use of time than deleting and banning throwaway accounts day in and day out

[Meowdyj]

I'm seriously starting to believe the rumor they're just not banning them because of active subscriptions aka. they choose to keep profiting of them. Either that or they're just incapable of detecting the bots and have no jurisdiction to suspend the accounts.

[Misplaced_Marbles]

i'm sure they're working on trying to find a way to render the bot Ai neutered (hopefully in a way that doesn't inconvenience actual player) which is a better use of time than deleting and banning throwaway accounts day in and day out

And i'm sure they're not doing anything beyond what they've been doing for years, namely nothing much. I doubt it would take 10 freaking years to come up with SOMETHING to attempt, so either they're wilfully ignoring it or are incredibly incompetent. Or their masters are keeping them from doing anything. Or it's not a problem in JP servers, so it's not a problem. Who could ever tell? SE could, but they won't.

[Kes13a]

they need to start banning the gil BUYERS

banning the bots is like trying to stop the tide with a lawn rake. banning the buyers removes their market. you give someone a 5-7 day "break" from the game and they start to seriously weight the effort they have put into their character and the loss of that character should they use the services provided by the bots. the bots will always come up with work arounds because they are after real money. but they cant "work around" lack of sales.

ban the buyers. SE doesnt need fancy new tools, they dont need to put spyware on peoples computers.. they just need to track gil information ON THEIR OWN SERVERS. punish the buyers, and the bot issues will lessen considerably.

going after the bots as they have for years isnt working. could ban 20,000 barkers in the major cities every couple weeks and nothing will change. start vacationing the buyers for a week and I guarantee things will start to change. will not be immediate, but it will change.

[Scruit_Bigtime]

seen as you seem to know alot, how do you go about breaking botting scripts without negatively affecting honest players?

...i'll wait

[Jojoya]

seen as you seem to know alot, how do you go about breaking botting scripts without negatively affecting honest players?

...i'll wait

They've been able to break some bot scripts at times (usually the ones involving out of bounds hacks). Or they don't necessarily break the scrip but set up traps that get triggered by bots going out of bounds. I had a few weeks of amusement while leveling a new character watching bots get killed by a trap below the entrance to the Waking Sands. I had noticed damage numbers drifting up thru the floor and checked my combat log to see a stream of obvious bot names taking damage. Most of the bots would reappear at the entrance instead of below it a few minutes later and I was able to verify the damage taken matched their total HP.

But you're right, that's part of the challenge in dealing with bots - they don't want the steps they take to counter bots to negatively impact normal player experience. Bots using the out of bounds type hacks are easy to identify and ban. Bots that are sophisticated enough to mimic close to normal player behavior are not.

[Kleeya]

they need to start banning the gil BUYERS

banning the bots is like trying to stop the tide with a lawn rake. banning the buyers removes their market. you give someone a 5-7 day "break" from the game and they start to seriously weight the effort they have put into their character and the loss of that character should they use the services provided by the bots. the bots will always come up with work arounds because they are after real money. but they cant "work around" lack of sales.

ban the buyers. SE doesnt need fancy new tools, they dont need to put spyware on peoples computers.. they just need to track gil information ON THEIR OWN SERVERS. punish the buyers, and the bot issues will lessen considerably.

going after the bots as they have for years isnt working. could ban 20,000 barkers in the major cities every couple weeks and nothing will change. start vacationing the buyers for a week and I guarantee things will start to change. will not be immediate, but it will change.

And if the RMTs start to offer free gils in town to unsuspicious players to get them banned, how do you deal with that ? Just asking because there was a post about how the eureka bots did start to regen legit players in response to the former being MPKed by the later, so i don't think it would hard to replace the regen by free gils trades.

[Jojoya]

And if the RMTs start to offer free gils in town to unsuspicious players to get them banned, how do you deal with that ? Just asking because there was a post about how the eureka bots did start to regen legit players in response to the former being MPKed by the later, so i don't think it would hard to replace the regen by free gils trades.

Why would they do that when that gil is how they make money? There's no benefit to them to trying to entrap innocent players. That becomes even more of a deterrent to anyone doing business with them.

The regen is a scripted action the bot is going to automatically do (they've been doing it for a few years now, we saw map bots doing the same when player map parties had their chests spawn at the same location) and there's no limit to how often they'll do it short of running out of mana. They're not going to program bots to automatically hand out free gil because they'll run out of gil to sell.

[Kleeya]

Why would they do that when that gil is how they make money? There's no benefit to them to trying to entrap innocent players. That becomes even more of a deterrent to anyone doing business with them.

The regen is a scripted action the bot is going to automatically do (they've been doing it for a few years now, we saw map bots doing the same when player map parties had their chests spawn at the same location) and there's no limit to how often they'll do it short of running out of mana. They're not going to program bots to automatically hand out free gil because they'll run out of gil to sell.

Well, just do like a lot of physical store out there, and include the cost of stoled items in the budget ? Except that instead of stolen things, it would be them handing free gils.

One of the most used argument for the bots crashing the market board is they don't care of selling prices, because everything is a gain since it is done automatically without any effort. Surely it isn't that far fetched to imagine them starting to hand over for free a few percents of the gils produced just to mess up with the way their customers are banned ?