Bot(Novice) Network

[Minali]

Heyho,

can confirm this is happening on Alpha as well. And weirdly on Twintania with bots from Raiden...? Are they bored on their new world? The chat gets a bit quieter once the bots reach Amdapor and don't press "0" to interact with NPCs anymore. I reported them (in total around 120) via the official support form for this, as recommended by the GMs bc. the whole RMT bot thing seems to be handled elsewhere: https://support.eu.square-enix.com/c...383&la=2&fty=2 (Category "Report a case to the Special Task Force). So far this seemed to work, with the next bot ban they were gone. But as long as someone deliberately keeps inviting new bots big style, this is not a lasting solution. The last ban wave was today and I checked in the morning, all the bots were gone (minus one or two outliers maybe who looked genuine.) Now it's evening and I just had to send a new report for 20 or so newcomers. And should SE not remove them earlier, it means the Novice Networks in question have to deal with the bot spam (and bots blocking sprout places on servers that are much more populated than Alpha) for a whole week. This is neither what mentorship nor the Novice Network should be about. We have answered "why do they spam 0?" moreoften than any other newbie question in the last week, at least it feels like this. This really takes the fun away of mentoring. (Let's not forget, mentors are just normal players, we aren't getting paid for this, quite contrary we are paying for dealing with this with our subs for playtime.)

I am not sure if a change in the kick system would help with the problem, though making the time-out longer than 30 minutes after being kicked x times or by x different mentors would help in many occasions. (If the "x" is high enough to prevent abuse based on personal pettiness.) Personally I think it would be much more helpful to see who invited the bots in the first place, so you know what name to write on a report to the GMs or the Special Task Force or both. A list with the invites from the last 3 days or so with inviting person and the one who was invited would also help by seeing if someone is doing this on mass or if someone accidentally invited a bot who looked legit. (They seem to change their name pattern to actual game suggestions, which makes it indeed harder to spot them.) This way the people who keep disrupting the Novice Networks would be able to be hold accountable without throwing someone innocent under the bus who just made one mistake.

For now I can just recommend: Keep reporting them via the support website. (You can avoid manually typing down all 100+ names with a "picture to text" website/program, though I haven't found one yet that isn't buggy one way or another.) Even if it doesn't address the cause, namely a mentor with a pulse (or without?) inviting them manually into the Novice Networks, it still helps making SE aware about what scope we're talking here. And that those are not a few isolated small incidents by someone who was bored or salty at a specific NN.

[RationalSquash]

Echoing the problem on alpha.

Its been a problem since the server launched, but it just gets worse and worse.

Today, I've been online for 4 hours, and every unique bot that posted in NN, I added to my blacklist.
145 unique bots... in 4 hours. And these are being added daily!

If you report to support, they redirect you to either their "task force" or to the forums. Eventually the bots are banned in a RMT banwave, but that can take weeks. And by that point, hundreds of new fresh bots are infesting NN. And the cycle continues.

If they're not going to help remove the bots, either find out who is inviting them and get rid of them, or outsource locating the culprit to the mentors by letting us see who invited a player to NN. All it takes is one malicous person on one datacenter to jump between servers and invite to their heart's content, and there is nothing we can do to stop them...

Edit: In the couple of minutes i spent typing this, 10 new bots appeared in chat...