Nothing being done about Gathering Bots (PROOF)

[Fenrisen]

I used to be a bot hunter for Ragnarok Online.. The only way to really get them to stop circumventing bans was by administering IP bans. It's an easy enough job to do if you know what to look for, frankly I think every MMO should have GMs, though one of the other problems is that they can be corruptible. I saw many GMs get banned themselves during my 'career', it is difficult to find someone that is actually trustworthy.

[Huginn]

the saddest part is that there are enough pople buying gil from them that they can afford the $30 per account just to spam us

[jcw005]

Unless a more automated method is employed, they'll never stop. Why? For one simple reason. How many S-E employees do you think there are devoted to this task? Don't forget to take into consideration how much they must be paid and all the other things they must concern themselves with. Now consider how much it costs to hire a Chinese gold farmer (note also that certain Chinese prisons have been known to force inmates to participate in these operations) or a bot. Which side do you think wins a war of attrition?

[AsakuraVN]

I used to be a bot hunter for Ragnarok Online.. The only way to really get them to stop circumventing bans was by administering IP bans. It's an easy enough job to do if you know what to look for

Just so you know, IP bans don't work for Asian countries, cause everytime they reset their modem, they got a new IP, it's how their ISPs work. Unless the game publisher decide to ban the whole country, but in general VPNs & proxies are like common knowledge even for IT noobs cause a lot of sites got blocked by their government.

But yeah, active GMs for each server would do the job. Just monitor chat boards in crowded zones & ban on the spot.
Loading...

[Synvul]

The only way to get rid of farmers and spammers is to get people to stop buying what they are selling. Everything else is a band-aid and will be circumvented eventually. This is the same in every single online game with an economy. SE has done a ban wave, they posted about it already. I'm sure they will do another one, but they have to be careful because there are people that farm like bots, but without breaking the rules.

If they are teleporting from node to node then they are breaking the rules. There is not farming like a bot but it is ok to be teleporting from node to node since is a real player.

I wish SE had employees in the game that could go into worlds, screenshot the gil spammer and instant ban. Go to each section of starting cities and sit for a few minutes then move on to the next. I think it would be harder for the harvesting but still is one of those things that it would be helpful to have the spammers gone at least.

[Jynx]

604,800g a week

And people say there isn't any gil being generated into the game....oy...

SE was pretty together with the special task force in XI.

[GinTama]

It usually takes awhile before they compile all the information from the servers and perform mass bans. Till then all you can do is report them to the GMs using the in game report system.

This, sometimes GM get to many reports at once and they miss to investigate the report immediately. If that happens they can miss the time frame where the reported player is botting/cheating. Normally they would instantly investigate and then mass ban later.
What doesnt happen at all is that they ban just because someone reports something, they investigate the claim first and that can take time.

[Raymeo]

I know that this is a different game, but I can't help but be reminded of a blue post that was made on WoW's support forums a couple of years ago. The logic shown in the post is likely the same logic shared by any MMO on the market, including FFXIV today. It may be from the mouth of Blizzard and reference the company itself, but nevertheless it does give a lot of insight into the types of decisions that must be made when a company -- any company -- is trying to combat bots and hackers in the MMO landscape. I highly recommend the read for anybody who might be frustrated by SE in this thread:

There is so, so, so much confused perception in this thread. I'll do my best to clarify, but this situation is one where I can't go into too much detail about the things we do - doing so only benefits those who would take advantage of it.

Why won't Blizzard do anything to these game hackers and cheaters?

The answer we give in response to this question is the same as it has always been - we gather information from those who would exploit the game so that we can hit them back on a much larger level.

There's many reasons for this, but the primary one is that those who abuse our systems usually aren't on their own accounts - they're often the compromised accounts of other players. Banning them does little because they'll just use another person's information. We'd be punishing those who don't deserve it, and not stopping the abusers because they just move on to their next target.

It's much more effective for us to study what they're doing so we can break the processes at a larger level, or detect them earlier. This is a constant, ever-evolving battle. We break a bot, they make a new one, we study that one, break it, they make a new one. So on and so forth. It's a bit endless, and it always will be so long as there is a market for the things that they do. Gold selling and trading is, most of the time, the direct source of these botters and exploiters.

When Blizzard cuts back on combating farmers and hackers it shows and the game starts going to hell in a hand basket very quickly.

These preconceived misconceptions come from not being able to see what it is that we do in these situations. It's unfortunately a byproduct of having to keep our actions veiled in mystery, to be as well armed as possible when combating these things. The military doesn't state the intricacies of their strategies publicly for a reason. I'm unable to provide you hard facts about what we do - I wish I could, because it's all really cool and I'm in constant awe of the work we have going on behind the scenes. You will have to take my word for it - I can offer little more.

So the take away is that as long as you're willing to download a new bot every once in a while, you're golden?

No, most of them do get caught. But on the forums especially, players tend to focus on the negative more than the positive. And those who bot support that ideal, because they want people to think they're winning. They like the community to think that we don't do anything, because it discourages your player reports. And those reports help us immensely in our work.

Not reporting is helping the botters get their way. It doesn't look like, on the surface, it does much. But it runs a lot deeper than we're able to share.

In short... who cares HOW you are fixing the problem. We want to see MUCH faster results.

How we fix the problem matters because it's a lengthy process. We don't want to hastily put out a system that runs a 90% false positive return. Who is that helping at that point?

It's a lot like bug fixing. We have to make sure that stuff works as perfectly as possible when we implement it. We're dealing with whether or not people can access their accounts - I'm willing to bet that's a pretty important factor to you guys, and that you wouldn't much appreciate being suspended for something you didn't do because a 0 was where a 1 should have been. Stuff like that does inevitably slip through... but we work to minimize that effect as much as possible.

I'd like to think you could find a better way -- some form of compromise between long-term research and short term clean-up.

My father used to always say, "There's got to be a better way." When he said that, he meant it for everything - there is always a better way.

But if we had found it, we'd already be using it. >^.~< That's not to say we aren't constantly looking for a way to improve such situations.

[Delsus]

What SE seriously needs to do is hire In Game Managers. GM's with the power to ban players with an easy click. Players reporting them will only swamp them with tickets, and if my experience with customer support is any indication to their organization in that department, it will take months for them to get through them all.

The good thing about this game is that there is only one channel, so players can see all other players in the same area. GM's would be able to ban them all quickly and clean the game up for the rest of us.

Banning with one click will cause more problems it will solve, you will get people reporting legit players, either through a misunderstanding, or malicious intent, which is why SE investigates all reports. All SE can do is IP ban all and any RMT rather than an account ban, but they would get around that, RMT adapt very fast to countermeasures put in place, bans, filters, trade restrictions etc etc.

[Darlingchan]

Banning with one click will cause more problems it will solve, you will get people reporting legit players, either through a misunderstanding, or malicious intent, which is why SE investigates all reports. All SE can do is IP ban all and any RMT rather than an account ban, but they would get around that, RMT adapt very fast to countermeasures put in place, bans, filters, trade restrictions etc etc.

The point of a GM, is for them to see the bot for themselves, not for them to just go with whatever people are saying. That would be the same concept as reporting, which I said would take a very long time to process.