Bots

[Ecto1]

I have a question to SE. And its a big one. Why you dont rly do smth sbout all the bots, like banning them constantly, checking servers for them? As you can Literaly see lots of bots when you do a player search thing in main cities. Just look at all those same low lvl, weird named characters. Its just so obvious, and for some reaxon, theyre always there. The bots hurting this game in many levels, so why you cant just check the servers, world from time to time, maibe assingn some gms for the task and get to banning them? Imo it isnt a hard thing to do. And as it is now, it seems that bots are just left to do whatever they want in game. So, yeah, if you wont do smth about that, the situation can go out of hands sometime in the future. And it wont be pretty.

[KageTokage]

The ARR bots come back so quickly that constantly banning them doesn't accomplish much.

What they should be doing is taking more proactive measures like tracking where they're sending their gil to and cutting it off at the source and also just doing more to punish people for buying gil because the lack of a risk of getting banned is why the business thrives.

This is partly due to the fact that people have wised up to the transaction methods the moderation teams can track, and I've seen multiple vendors specifying that they sell "clean" gil that cannot be traced to illicit methods...which more often then not just means they're using bots that aren't getting caught.

[Casti_EL]

Unfortunately it's also a never ending battle and one a lot of MMO's suffer from - SE bans the botters; they just buy new accounts, SE finds a way to tell if an account is using software that violates ToS; they just create/get new software that SE can't detect. I hear there's quite a lucrative market out there for coders who can write bot programs - some even sold on dark sites for quite an amount.

I do agree that something needs to be done and going after the reason for the botters in the first place (buyers) is probably the best course of action (as no buyers = less rmt botters) but it'd requires considerable resources that SE don't apparently have (or are unwilling to pay for).

Although a few characters all the same level with weird names is a sure sign of botting, SE won't ban them until they can catch them doing something against ToS.

[Kes13a]

I agree, we will always have bots, because buying gil is a no risk action. SE needs to make it an account level risk when someone buys gil and as people stop buying... the mass of bots will start to lower.

you cannot fight the bots, but they should be able to fight RMT (which they really do not...)

[Amarande]

Yeah, it's less a matter of "they don't want to do anything" and more a matter of "what can you do technologically?"

Hardware authentication? I expect you'd either need the invasive anticheat SE doesn't want to install, a remote attestation check (which would probably mean having to immediately make Windows 11 the minimum at a time when so many people are still sticking to 10), or drop PC support altogether and rely on PS5 being a closed platform with much stricter authentication.

Behavior check? Let's see.

XIV is a VERY rote based game (to the point of macros being the norm for serious crafting, and solved optimization to the point that literally trying to act as much like a robot as you can is The Way) so even just rote repetitive behavior isn't something that can be flagged in the way it might in other games (where things are usually more random, so a fixed algorithm is much more likely to fail suspiciously at some point, too).

Actioning for a name being too random seems risky, especially depending on the detection algorithm that gets used (particularly with matters like the game being global and how odd Sea Wolf spellings can be).

Flagging floor sinkers is also not nearly so simple as it looks. You might think that checking for attempts to move out of bounds is enough - in fact, Blizzard actually did. Unfortunately, this results in massive numbers of false positives due to latency, abnormally fast movement speeds (i.e., due to falling or even the existence of legitimate speed buffs not thought of at the time), and/or uneven terrain in which it's very easy for a normal player to generate movement vectors that appear to move into the wall and/or floor (in fact, Blizzard's attempt made zones like Legion's Highmountain miserable disconnect fests for exactly this reason).

As a result, you need to constantly check every player's actual position for being out of bounds (which increases server load, and may also require all zones to be regenerated in order to attach said "out of boundsness" flag to the relevant regions), and even then at best you can only DC the person (maybe do like WoW does, in which a legitimate player will find they simply re-DC on logging back in, and have to acknowledge the issue by putting in a stuck character ticket) and maybe generate a report for GM review (auto banning would be too dire, especially with XIV's account mark policy).

[Avoidy]

SE bans the botters; they just buy new accounts [...]

From a business standpoint and an optics standpoint, this seems like a great position for Square to be in. They get to say they're doing something (banning botters) while botters purchase new game accounts and pump up the sales. Genuinely unironically wondering why they don't just have bot bounties and in game snitch-forces reporting to an active GM who responds to purge bots so they have to drop more money on a new account. Like, if this went on for a few months surely the botters would grow weary of it and leave, no?

[Amarande]

From a business standpoint and an optics standpoint, this seems like a great position for Square to be in. They get to say they're doing something (banning botters) while botters purchase new game accounts and pump up the sales. Genuinely unironically wondering why they don't just have bot bounties and in game snitch-forces reporting to an active GM who responds to purge bots so they have to drop more money on a new account. Like, if this went on for a few months surely the botters would grow weary of it and leave, no?

If botters and RMTers actually bought their accounts with legitimate payment details, sure, that would be different (and basically reduce the botting issue to its direct gameplay impacts only, which still exist, e.g., market inflation, shutting out legitimate players from things like Eureka bunnies, and perhaps the first notable case, players starting in Ul'dah who could not pass the MSQ where you need to kill Quiveron due to him being swarmed by bots to the point that - failing perhaps being a THM with Blizzard II - a legitimate player had no chance, as there wasn't even time for a human to target Quiveron and put in an instant attack before he was dead).

The trouble is that too many of them use stolen details (supposedly, often from their own customers, but this seems sketchy from a business standpoint), which results in that "new account money" being charged back. SE is apparently already on the brink in that regard, judging by having had to switch to a new payment processor (and drop support for some payment methods, including Discover which is still semi popular); part of the problem here being that payment processors tend to consider chargeback rate as an absolute metric, without any concern for why a company gets so many of them (IE it doesn't matter if you're arguably a victim, you should still change your business model, not expect the banks to be more tolerant).

Imagine if it's SE that has to be bought out in the next big merger (because they literally have no choice but to let a big fish gobble them up so they can use their "digestive system" so to speak) instead of Activision (who, for all their problems, are still plenty viable as a business on their own)?

[Absimiliard]

"There are no bots in Square Sing Se."

[dspguy]

Literaly see lots of bots when you do a player search thing in main cities. Just look at all those same low lvl, weird named characters. Its just so obvious, and for some reaxon, theyre always there.

Because being low level and having a "weird name" isn't a bannable offense nor is spending your time farming gil nor is spending all day at a summoning bell relisting items for 1 gil less.

Finding bots is more nuanced than those things.

That might just be a convenient excuse for SE to do nothing - or what the playerbase perceives as nothing.

[Luluya]

I see a lot of such talk of nuance and having to be caught explicity breaking ToS but surely the male plainsfolk lalafell bards on dynamis flying through the air, levitating below questgivers, swimming underground, and shooting enemies while hidden in walls or the floor, would be considered at least a teensy bit on the illegitimate side, no?