Bots and Cheaters.

[Valoria3]

The Title says it all.
I have made a new character I am doing quests with just for the heck of it.
BUT at ever quest spawn point I see one bot after another trigger the quest (From UNDERGROUND) and you can see the mobs standing looking stupid while they are being attacked by an invisible character and when you use Target's Target to see they name it is all random letters and when you look them up on the Community they are all identical Lalafels. At one spawn point I saw this happen no less then 12 times over just 2 minutes, I seriously wish SQ would do more to combat this plague.

[Jeeqbit]

As they tell it, they do. There are lodestone reports every 2 weeks where they say how many they banned or suspended. They just do it in waves, so you can still see them between all of these waves.

[Valoria3]

As they tell it, they do. There are lodestone reports every 2 weeks where they say how many they banned or suspended. They just do it in waves, so you can still see them between all of these waves.

Yeah 17 bots accounts banned between sep 28 and oct 4 that's ALL across the world.. Today ALONE I've seen over 30 CLEARLY bots running around.

[Xirean]

Yeah 17 bots accounts banned between sep 28 and oct 4 that's ALL across the world.. Today ALONE I've seen over 30 CLEARLY bots running around.

Then report them? It's not like these things can always just be detected automatically. For stuff like this, the player base is basically the filter system.

[Jojoya]

Yeah 17 bots accounts banned between sep 28 and oct 4 that's ALL across the world.. Today ALONE I've seen over 30 CLEARLY bots running around.

That's only the bots that aren't related to RMT. Those involved in RMT are included in the RMT numbers (3993 accounts for that same week).

The vast majority of botting is RMT related. Those underground bots are leveling up to get where they can start farming dungeons like Amdapor Keep that drop a lot of gil plus items that can be sold to vendors for gil.

I don't know why they don't just do a check if the bots are under the map and ban based on that. Plenty of other games ban people who go OOB on the map and there's no real reason to go OOB under the aetheryte unless you want to advertise RMT in say chat.

As others have said, bugs can occasionally cause players to go out of bounds. The need to manually review every OOB to see whether it was due to a bug or if it was a bot would require a lot of manpower when there are simpler ways for SE to detect which characters are bots.

If you want bots out of gaming, then players need to decide they aren't interested in cheating. As long as there are players interested in cheating to get what they want or engage in RMT, there will be sellers appearing to provide those services. Just banning those selling the services does nothing since they'll make new accounts and continue their operations. There's a profit to be made, after all. Remove the buyers, who are far less likely to enjoy constantly losing access to what they had gained, and there's no profit for the sellers to continue their operations.

[PredatoryCatgirl]

The issue with this is that they have a high burden of proof for banning a bot. And they should. Banning a legitimate player for odd behavior that might look like a bot would be a PR nightmare and majorly demoralizing. On top of this, the people most likely to engage in bot-like behavior without actually botting are people on the autism spectrum, ie: people who use online as their primary social outlet and are less likely to cancel their subs due to a content drought.

[Johners]

The issue with this is that they have a high burden of proof for banning a bot. And they should. Banning a legitimate player for odd behavior that might look like a bot would be a PR nightmare and majorly demoralizing. On top of this, the people most likely to engage in bot-like behavior without actually botting are people on the autism spectrum, ie: people who use online as their primary social outlet and are less likely to cancel their subs due to a content drought.

Except a lot of these bots are always teleported under the map. They were all over Alpha and Raiden last summer when those servers opened last summer. I recall seeing many mobs in the world dying while being attacked by "players" that were under the map. It's the same as the RMT bots that are clipped under the aetheryte plaza in every main city.


There's absolutely more Square Enix can and should be doing to moderate their game. Anything out of bounds should be a slam dunk for auto detecting. Start by disconnecting and if it continues, then start start issuing suspensions. Likewise they could actually implement client side anti-cheat mechanisms so these things are detected much sooner and don't rely on players having to manually report things (which takes far longer than it should in XIV and it's less effort to just join in with the cheating myself).

[Amarande]

Anything out of bounds should be a slam dunk for auto detecting. Start by disconnecting and if it continues, then start start issuing suspensions. Likewise they could actually implement client side anti-cheat mechanisms so these things are detected much sooner

Out of bounds DC is easy to propose and difficult to implement, even more difficult to implement without creating a whole kettle of extra problems. Blizzard started doing it with WoW, and it's taken literal years to get it into some semblance of order. Are you willing to deal with that many years of such bugs?

Areas with rough terrain become nightmares. Trip over a rock and get detected as a hack attempt and DC'd. Bit of latency during mountain climbing? Next thing you're off the mount... server altogether because it thought you were trying to phase into the mountain. Happened TOO often in Highmountain, in Legion.

A small, simple placement error on the part of the server goes from a minor annoyance to having to get a hold of customer support. Exile's Reach did it a bunch with the boat at the start, to the point where it was even thought that if you got disconnected on the boat you might have to delete your character and try again. Real issue: server placed your feet an inch below the deck, so every time you tried to reconnect it would go "nope, you're out of bounds" and re-DC you until you filed a ticket.

Some areas in Shadowlands still have the issue. Fall down the proverbial well and the momentum will result in you being seen as trying to hack below the floor, so instead of just dying from the fall like you used to ... DC loop till you file a ticket.

Which means stuck characters would likely often go from a matter of hitting Return or typing /stuck to having to file a ticket. Hope SE decides to implement an automated ticket service for stuck characters like Blizzard had to, then. Given how long it takes them to implement any changes to customer support? Not holding my breath, there.

It is unfortunate that this game seems unusually vulnerable to bots, and it's not just because of the lack of an anti cheat system (which has its own problems: most significantly, performance hits, and loss of a non-trivial amount of player revenue when the graphics modding RP players quit in droves), but also because the gameplay in this game is so deterministic that legitimate player improvement literally equates to trying to play more and more like a robot (as in almost all modes there's a definitive one, static, best way to play) - meaning the SNR between bots and repetitive clockwork player behavior is even worse. And I'm not sure of a solution other than how the game already goes (the impact of bulk gil farming being fairly minimal due to the fact that bulk gil is simply not that significant in most cases).

[Kes13a]

The issue with this is that they have a high burden of proof for banning a bot. And they should. Banning a legitimate player for odd behavior that might look like a bot would be a PR nightmare and majorly demoralizing. On top of this, the people most likely to engage in bot-like behavior without actually botting are people on the autism spectrum, ie: people who use online as their primary social outlet and are less likely to cancel their subs due to a content drought.

yeah, all legitimate players run around underground...

people on the autism spectrum run cheat programs.

please explain how "legitimate" players are doing this and accessing quest givers as well as mobs from below ground... please. I have seen bugs and glitches in this game, but I cannot say that that behaviour is one of them.

[PredatoryCatgirl]

yeah, all legitimate players run around underground...

people on the autism spectrum run cheat programs.

please explain how "legitimate" players are doing this and accessing quest givers as well as mobs from below ground... please. I have seen bugs and glitches in this game, but I cannot say that that behaviour is one of them.

Running underground is not botting. Its cheating. More than likely someone is actually controlling the character, which means not botting. Learn what words mean before you say that mine are wrong.