Bot(Novice) Network

[Minali]

Yha, the botscript folk have figured out how to get them to worldhop, sending the add in the instant before world transfer, so there's no time to kick them.
So now any server that lets any in, show up everywhere.

Okay, I would not have guessed that this is how they're doing it. Thanks for solving this riddle for us.

So, today is the day where the bot ban should've cleaned up everything. I must have reported 150 or so bots over the week for Alpha, together with plenty others. Yesterday evening it looked like a few were missing but it seems they were just offline. It's thursday morning and around half of the 264 sprouts in the chat are bots rotating in Amdapor Keep or on their way to doing this. And we still have plenty of bots spamming 0, where some seem to be able to dodge kicks now. And yet the bot report says it's around 2000 more bots that were kicked than usual. This gives me an awkward feeling that this is not just trolling or whatever but a preparation for something, like spamming advertisment without getting kicked. :/

I really wish we would get at least some sort of acknowledgement that not only the support / STF is aware of it but also people higher up in the food chain. (Considering in what short time this problem grew into this massive mess, I could imagine they feel as overwhelmed as we do by now if they can't keep up with deleting anymore.) I don't know, at least give us a lodestone message apart from the weekly standard "x accounts were kicked, pls keep reporting". Tell us you are aware of not just "there are bots" but "the novice networks are flooded".

[Curisu]

Soo, does anyone knows how to reach out to the FFxiv content creator?
Like, on this forum we already complained for so long about bots in Eureka and more problems like this and nothing has been done.

The only option I see that something changes would be when it gets called out by multiple big content creator.
It would be a easy made video for someone like Preach or Zepla that will get a lot of clicks, because this kind always gets clicks and attention.

[Minali]

Soo, does anyone knows how to reach out to the FFxiv content creator?
Like, on this forum we already complained for so long about bots in Eureka and more problems like this and nothing has been done.

The only option I see that something changes would be when it gets called out by multiple big content creator.
It would be a easy made video for someone like Preach or Zepla that will get a lot of clicks, because this kind always gets clicks and attention.

My best guess would tagging them on Twitter or joining their discords or so, should they have one. I could imagine stuff like we experience usually goes past them because they don't hang out in NN all day. (Though the bots in Eureka should be well known afaik, but if you're not in NN, you don't know what happens in NN.) Some sort of media attention would surely be nice... Though stuff like this can easily turn into a flamewar, not sure if this helps anyone. But I admit I feel like being out of options as well, aside from talking about it on the next big Twitch stream, but I'm not sure if this is truly getting seen by the right people there.

[Minali]

It's groundhog day again. Yet another bot ban wave kicked (almost) all bots out and gave us a moment to breathe until the new wave came in just a few hours later. For some reason the bots we get are not entirely new though in the last two weeks, they are already somewhere around level 50 and hanging around in Coerthas, so fairly far in the ARR MSQ. So at least they aren't spamming "0" the whole week because they reach Amdapor before that. But nevertheless it is exhausting. Kicking bots all evening and reporting 200 bots per week via the support website is certainly not what I planned on spending my sub money on. (And this happens on all four new worlds in EU, plus a few that are travelling from their original new world to another established world.) But if we don't do that, it seems nobody does, or cares. Of course now with the afk kick gone it is unclear if that person in question invited those bots three weeks ago when the bots lay dormant until they were needed, but then it would be a bunch of level 3 bots. So whoever invited them still seems to be able to play the game and keep doing their thing. There was one suspicion and a report was send, but if there were consequences, they weren't enough, because it keeps happening.

I wonder who exactly in the team is aware of the issue, aside from GMs and STF. So far it seems to be focused on the new EU servers and I doubt the devs from the Japanese team are hanging around there. Maybe it would help to send a message on Twitch during the Live Letter, if anyone of you can speak decent Japanese and is awake at this time? (It's 6:30 am here when the Live Letter begins and my Japanese begins and ends with ohayou. xD) Of course it shouldn't end up in spam and be polite, but I honestly feel like we're out of options of what we can do.