Hacking teleporting gatherers

[Vurtney]

From experience, SE lets things "go" for a few months. They write down all the names of the accounts that are involved in it and double check as much as they can. This will usually take a few months

After a few months, the damage has already happened. The botters don't give a damn if their accounts are banned since they already have had months worth of time to grab cash from buyers.

I'm not talking about individual botters, they get what they deserve but the gil/shard/whatever sellers will be back the next day setting up their bots again. They get reported again and S-E takes action after a few months. This get's repeated over and over. Mass banning does nothing against rmt botters.

[Tase]

It takes less than a few months to ruin the economy, especially at the speed bots go. In a couple months we'll already be at the point where stuff like Mythril Ore goes for 1 gil and be available in astronomical quantities. On my server right now 2 retainers have 40 stacks up, same price, probably a bot.

There will always be bots, the response needs to be quick, pilling up names then banning them once after 6 months will do absolutely nothing; it'll be like gil sellers on chat, they'll hack/buy a new account and bot away some more for an other 6 months.

[dragonflie]

I hope there is a way to target a specific FF14 copy, and for them to make it impossible to use that copy for further gaming. Else, banning accounts isn't gonna fix anything if they can still the same client over and over.

[rwyan]

The best we can do is report them. Remember, SE does have to do a full investigation of some sorts before any action will take place. Action will probably not happen immediately, but if the player is truly botting/hacking, they will get banned so long as there is a 'bread crumbs' so to speak - and reports like ours are the first steps.

Something like this tends to require the user to be caught in the act and any logging on their end may or may not allow them to truly determine said player was hacking.

[GrindShack]

They are already banning people, that is why after every maintenance, they release character creation on locked servers. Once they ban an account it opens slots for new players, watch next time they do a maintenance, right after they will open creation for a short time.

[Vaen]

I wonder if they added "level checkpoint" quests - like once you reached lvl 30 etc you'd have to do some cool DoL quests to unlock further levels - if this would stop the bots from endlessly leveling and gathering.

[FallNSkye]

It will catch up with them in time.

[Vagrant-0]

This is why I miss the old days of Everquest... When they had players with limited powers who could go around in the world and answer to these sorts of reports banning the users in question and submitting the necessary evidence incase a followup was needed. I'm sure there are countless players around who would happily shoulder this sort of duty just to be able to allow others to have use of shout/yell in towns without being flooded by spam.

You can spend all the time you want coding things in the game to foil botters, and they'll just make better bots. But once you start having some visible members of staff around removing these users as they appear, those that would use them quickly lose interest.

[Angu]

Bots are a good thing in this game. I can get large quantities of shards and other crafting mats for quite resonable price from AH. Downside is the account theft and gold selling spam business around it. But that has more to do with ppl not managing their passwords properly then SE:s fault.

Another reason why bots do not harm in this game is that DoH/DoL are completly separate game from DoW/DoM there is practially 0 interaction between them (other then token farm for 50+ materials.) So the only economy in this game is based around ppl leveling up crafting jobs and needing mats for it so thats not really even a real "economy" and it deserves to die in its current state.

But dont get me wrong i would ban every cheater from the game if there was a magic button for it. But its just not going to happen in modern mmo's and the companies know that. Thats why they dont even try to waste loads of salary expenses for GMs try to ban bots/hackers. Even if they get banned they will be back in 5mins with new or stolen accounts. But ofc they will still ban few ppl here and now for show. Otherwise it would be huge shitstorm when masses would realize they dont even try nor waste resourses for that stuff.

[Zareth]

Sadly I feel it's as Angu has stated. I have over 50 names on my blacklist. Even before my free month has finished, I only saw 3 names on my list be deleted. Not a very good track record and only one person went on that blacklist is an actual player who was being an idiot.