Underground players on Dynamis DC tagging mobs. Are these hackers?

[Uncle_Jafar]

Every once in a while in the open world I run into these things. Kind of depressing since I don’t often run into actual players. When I travel to other DCs, like primal, they don’t seem to have this problem. Of course, It doesn’t do anything to me personally, but makes the game super weird especially given the low population.

[Canadane]

Oh don't worry, other DC's have this problem.
But yes, they're generally position hacking bots used to automate whatever script they have to generate gil to sell on shady websites.
If you see them, try to grab a few of their names and report them.

[Jeeqbit]

It's always happened. They use a hack (my guess is hacking the movement packets) and sometimes this places them underground. SE doesn't seem to check this, probably for a few reasons. Firstly, you can be moving constantly, so it would be a lot of resouces for the server to thoroughly check each time you move an ilm. Secondly, checking like this can result in rubberbanding, which isn't fun for the player. Thirdly, you could have a lag spike, so your movement could suddenly appear on the other side of the map when it catches up.

In practice, it doesn't usually affect you when doing quests, but on occasion they pull a mob you were going to fight. In my experience doing the MSQ on various alts over the years, they are not always doing it at a set location, necessarily. They have a burst period where they are all at some point in the MSQ, then they all progress along together to the next quest. This way it doesn't permanently disrupt players who would then be forced to report them.

It's important to mention, that all MMORPGs I've ever seen have bots, especially ones with any amount of actual popularity. No matter how hard the developers fight them, the botters win, because they are spending day and night abusing systems to make their botting work, while the developers need to focus their efforts on making things for genuine players. If they put their resources into fighting bots, it would take away from the rest of the game, and measures to stop bots could potentially impact players. In fact it already does. We can hardly make gil via any system available early in the game, because SE makes sure it hardly gives anything to make it harder for bots, leading to new players lacking gil... which, ironically, motivates them to buy from botters. So it doesn't seem like an easy fight for MMO developers to win.

[Gurgeh]

No. Just no.
They could create a simplified singe floor topology map for key locations,where this would work. Which is most places.
Like market boards, like certain nodes. Like parts of exploration zones where there are no cave systems.
No one is asking them to solve the problem for all locations like the whole of Limsa with it's spiral stair cases.
They wouldn't need to check often because they wouldn't need to catch everyone. Just every transgressor some of the time.
You can use a reduced snapshotting system. Crikey they use that for all the battle.
Rubber banding doesn't need to happen because you don't need to prevent the act, only need to penalise as soon as possible after. (and even this assumes that prevention does need to have a substantial cost)
This kind of pseudo authority pseudo engineering has been so damaging.
I don't want to fall out with Jeeqbit but it's all getting too much. Some people just accept this kind of absolute certainty as gospel, and it's not true. It's rarely true, it's software.
It can only ever be a discussion, not a declaration.

This kind of statement can only come from CB3 devs. (I won't go into whether they'd be convincing)
Although I have on many occasions wondered if Jeeqbit isn't SE Community. If they are though they need to reject 'some' if the info-policy they've been provided and ask for proof/justification.

Yes, it would require some development.
Some code would need to be added.
Some code would need to change.
There will be 'some' compute cost.

But this whole 'it can't be done' thing is silly.
Yes they will eventually find another exploit. But in that case why ever bother banning any bots at all ever then? Why ban RMTers? They same people will always return.

[Gurgeh]

Also, why are we assuming this is RMT type botters and not part of some discord trying to 'game' Forked tower?
Both currencies are used to exclude other players.

[Jeeqbit]

This kind of statement can only come from CB3 devs. (I won't go into whether they'd be convincing)

Not really true. It could come from any developer that has programming knowledge (which you will find a lot of players do, especially in 2025). All they do is put their programming hat on and predict the potential issues that would occur - which is a fundamental part of programming. If someone can't anticipate potential problems, then they shouldn't bother trying to become a programmer - not everyone is capable of it, it's just something they're born with.

But this whole 'it can't be done' thing is silly.

Then why do all MMOs have this problem? Surely some of them would have "won" this battle by now.

why ever bother banning any bots at all ever then? Why ban RMTers? They same people will always return.

That's true and you are correct that banning them is not very effective. If they have 100 bots and they ban random ones that get caught (let's say 3%), it's not really a big blow. Additionally, banning them immediately informs them of what they did to get detected and they can work out how to avoid detection.

So that's probably why they ban in waves instead. They detect the violation, then wait until a certain interval and ban the backlog (let's say 75% now) that were detected, so they can't figure out what got them detected as easily. By banning lots of them at the same moment, it's a bigger blow to their operations.

But it could be an endless cat and mouse game so most likely MMOs don't want to bother investing endless amounts of money in building a large, separate development team to fight them.

[VeyaAkemi]

I will also add that the "it can't be done" point needs to be elaborated on, I don't think Jeeq is remotely trying to say it's implement any of the changes that Gurgeh suggested, maybe they would be easy to implement, but that's not the point, what he is saying is that they would be pointless, they'd tweak and shift methods, they'd be faster than any game developer can reasonably be, and so the effort that went into patching the previous methods would be a wasted effort, plus each time you have to get more strict, you run into the risk of changing systems such that they start harming legitimate players. So it can be done... temporarily, and they'd be back overnight.

[Amarande]

they would be pointless, they'd tweak and shift methods, they'd be faster than any game developer can reasonably be, and so the effort that went into patching the previous methods would be a wasted effort, plus each time you have to get more strict, you run into the risk of changing systems such that they start harming legitimate players. So it can be done... temporarily, and they'd be back overnight.

Exactly this. Star systems and fingers or such and so, one might say?

Measures designed to mitigate bots invariably fail to do the job for long, and leave inconveniences for the legitimate users - that the bots often do not even suffer from after that round of bans as the next time around, their operators account for the detection systems, while it is all too frequent for the legitimate player to either have to actively modify their gameplay around the detection rules.

Diablo II was full of it, botters would be able to farm day and night without incident while legitimate players that made the oh so terrible mistake of starting too many farm runs too quickly, or swapping characters too quickly, or or ... would get greeted with the fake "Realm Down" error that indicated they had been restricted from playing on that server for at least two hours (with the ban lengthening on every attempt to log in during it too, to a maximum of a couple of days!).

WoW has tried several "underground bot" mitigation systems of types similar to those being suggested; they quickly resulted in droves of irritated players as even trying to run around on uneven terrain (such as Highmountain in Legion) could easily cause a sudden disconnect (which I might note in WoW's case destroyed all your UI data for the session because that is only saved on a UI reload or a LOGOUT, and NOT a disconnect!). Or falling into certain holes (I remember one in Bastion in Shadowlands) would trip the hack detector and DC you; to make it worse when you logged back on you'd be hovering above the hole so you would immediately fall again and re-DC to the same enforcement - the character was unusable until you filed a stuck character support ticket (and there is a cooldown on that, so hope you don't hit a similar snag again ...).

See also "the fish sense something amiss" for an example in FFXIV that is especially maddening because the timer persists across logouts and is only reset by actually fishing elsewhere, so you can run into it pretty easily if you are focusing on specific fish ...