Does SE actually ban botters?

[Etienn]

Camp Horizon you say...
It reminds me of this: http://i52.tinypic.com/24g66mp.jpg

I really cannot say if they were bots or not. They stayed still for quite some time. The weird thing was that after I stared a levequest, one of them did, and then the other, and so on. By the time I was back I only saw one or two.

most likely rmt...

[Teepot]

lol
Enthhy@ ...we have "wut ____"
SirEdeonX@ ...Fabul its "Fab ____"

TonyMontana@ why do I know that guy ?


SE will be assimilated by bots, resistance is futile.

http://www.dollfie.de/Bilder/FFXIV/DSC_5703.jpg
http://www.dollfie.de/Bilder/FFXIV/DSC_5709.jpg
http://www.dollfie.de/Bilder/FFXIV/DSC_5717.jpg

[Jinrya-Geki]

lol funny!

[Xatsh]

They ban botter but they need proof they are botting.

They can ban 1000 botters and accidentally ban 1 legit and they would never hear they end of it. (gardening bans in FFXI for example although that was rmt same principle)

Issue with botter are they are in general not stupid, the bots shut down when they get a tell, they play an alarm when a gm contacts them, some even have replys built into them. So if they get a tell or a gm contacts them they simply answer who ever is talking to them.

How can you ban someone for absentee gameplay when they answer you. It is alot harder to tell a bot form a non-bot when you have to be 100% sure you are not getting a legit player. I have some people in my linkshell who craft hours a day, who are not botting for example. They talk in ls and vent and just craft away. They don't move much in-game though.

[Hotohori]

STF is down right now for sure so reporting surely won't see any bans. For those who don't know the bots in Limsa around the fish NPC is pretty much 1 group of RMT breaking down shards for fast gil. Hasty hand can generate tons of shards through the fish sold from the NPC. The market prices of shards are pretty much in the control of RMT and are proportional to the cost of the fist required to make the shards. (Fire shards being the most expensive to make through NPC fish.) The names of the bots are just pretty much the first 3 letters of your server name + random other names so that the RMT can distinguish what server those characters are on which server without having to log in since they deal with so many accounts and characters.

At the moment craft bots are used more by players then RMT for ranking up, sadly due to how important high level crafts are to the game. Many can deny they exist but since the posting of some very good craft bots in public forums, the access to those bots have been plaguing every servers. I have seen many players bot multiple accounts simultaneously with some amazing abilities such as super fast loading, perfect standard synthesis speeds, synthesis speeds greater then the speed allowed by the animation or simply the ability to run forever until materials have run dry. Many choose to simply ignore them because there is very little that can be done right now.

Places players like to bot that I have noticed:

Menders' Wards corners behind the pillars
Tinkerers' Wards also
Back of the Thaumaturge Guild
The corner of Ul'dah wall outside in the Thanalan side
Alchemist Guild in the back
Other various guilds in plain sight, these people usually are attentive bots (they watch their bots run so they can NPC byproducts of their bots every 20 minutes or so...)

But back to RMT shard bots, if you're wondering where does the massive number of lightning shards come from, it's from the battle bots just outside Gridania that farms literally all night and day. These bots mimic the actions of real players very well. The foot traffic here is pretty non-existent so the chances of being seen as potentially legitimate, real or new players leveling up is much harder to distinguish and be reported as the unattended farm bots which they are. Properly stationed new characters that bot fireflies and marmots generate lots of small gil items and lots of usable shards.

Also the fish market bots are the same group of individuals who run the Lalafell Armies spamming Levequests for the raw gil and shards output. People on the forum argue there are no RMT do not seem to be playing because they surely outnumbering real players at the moment on my server. The party mechanics of both levequest rewards sharing and shard splitting rewards both need serious attention. Shards get split evenly to all members of the party which may sound fair but is not the best idea do to the abuses possible with constantly large party sizes.

Some quick math about the gil generated by the Lalafell Armies.

8 Regional Levequests per reset per character. x15 characters = 120 levequests available per run.

8 characters per account. x15 different accounts = 120 characters available (8 runs) for levequest use per RMT so 8x120 again 960 levequests per reset with 15 character maxed accounts.

Average 15k per levequest reward. (rank 10-20) Using the 15 accounts 15k x 960 = 14,400,000 gil in reward money.

Additional 30k (2k x 15 characters) average per levequest from 15 characters sharing bonus. (5 stars) 30k x 960runs = 28,800,000 gil but divide this by 4 (the max number of quests that can be linked) because I do see them linking to save time. 28,800,000/4 = 7,200,000 gil from leveshare rewards

Additional average 30k (2k x 15 characters) from chests that may spawn being shared across 15 characters. 30k x (960 levequests x .20 average chest spawn rates) = 5,760,000 gil divided by 4 again for reduced number of runs from linking for time = 1,440,000 gil from chests.

Total 14,400,000(Rewards) + 7,200,000(Leveshare) + 1,440,000(Chests) = 23,040,000 gil per levequest reset made by a RMT group of maxed out 15 accounts approximately every reset.

In the early months of the game, I have seen up to three different RMT groups at a single camp at the same time. 45 standing mules to leech rewards, which was pretty crazy to see but lately I have seen that they have reduced their farming efforts in seeing the game is hardly popular at the moment.

If SE is expecting players to take some time and report 15 difficult to type names, standing at the camps they are kidding themselves. I have better things to do then worry or care about it enough even bother really. They need to start making some serious counter measures against this instead of expecting players to be snitching on them constantly. Come on SE, when an account has with 8 identical Lalafell, with the highest being rank 12 conjurer having the achievement 1000 Regional Levequests completed, you should automatically lock it and say the account is currently under investigation for RMT related activities.

Lowering the max party size will cut that chest bonus and leveshare bonus down a lot but still it is a lot of pure gil produced by the RMT which makes the shard bot action they do on the side seem much less in comparison. People say money is easy to earn but the value of things will always scale to the total money in circulation and people need to note that RMTs are generating 15 times what you are making at the same speed through additional character management. The money they have been saving up can be flooded into the market by one or two rich players who feel like buying gil quickly instead of earning it over time making inflation shoot up on everything in a short amount of time.

Please correct my math if you see a mistake, I tried to do the math in my head and ended up using a calculator and I do make mistakes often. My point was RMT exist and they are really hoping SE fixes the game the most because they don't want their Work to be wasted I'm sure.

[Visch]

I think SE is too busy fixing the game right now. But I'm sure they'll get what's coming... Just like the salvage dupe bannings! >: D

[zaviermhigo]

I think SE is too busy fixing the game right now. But I'm sure they'll get what's coming... Just like the salvage dupe bannings! >: D

I wonder how many people reported themselves and got banned for the CONJ ban.

[zaviermhigo]

When someone says "they're constantly tabbing" that's not a crafting bot its a battle bot duh. If you tab while crafting I don't care, if you're in the middle of Gridania, r20 with a r1 weapon, you tab all around, you jank up hills I CANNOT RUN UP OVER AND OVER AGAIN, that is proof of botting, to believe they don't exist is stupid. This isn't a lag issue either with the janking up hills, there is a ledge above a Gridania camp, and you cannot get from the camp to the ledge AT ALL by just running up a hill and getting there, you have to go around at least 2-5 mins to get there. This bot of course named Sel ___ (cause I'm on selbina server) janked up the cliff in 2 secs flat from the camp to me. I've seen videos on youtube of the same thing.

I've reported 7 bots, and only 2 got banned, so they do ban some, but I think some fall through the cracks obviously.

[viion]

I think SE realised that in this game RMT are not getting much service as its very easy to obtain gil and they are infact helping us by feeding us bucket load of shards for cheap. Sadly due to how the market wards works you are pretty much forced to buy from a possible botted/rmt retainer of shards now since their are hundreds lol.

[Kilta_Firelotus]

the STF is down till the battle system is revamped if they are banning ppl it is when they feel its is a must. But honestly there does need to investigate, a person can every day log in the same spot press tab a while for kicks, unless you stand next to them for 30 hours also recorxding it, you can't prove they are there 100% of the time. I had a mule on ffxi for a quick holder while I rerolled my character for the same name different race I just did a quicky and my cat pressed the a button on me. so its name was Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. I loged on did the cs and set them up to rescieve items. As I was doing that someone had the nice idea to send me a tell
they said " your site is worthless, and your the scum of ffxi, go to hell" I ran into this person again and they tried to deny it.