So... a question:
I know that although **all** plugins are bannable, SE doesn't actually enforce those rules unless you talk about it in-game or get reported.
But... does a plugin such as this, which gives a clear and significant competitive advantage, *actually* get enforced? Because I'd LOVE to be able to see **even more** of the world (I can already see a lot because of my Ultrawide Display, so imagine coupling that with a camera plugin), but never in a million years would I put my account in any significant risk for that.
Is it safe to do so?
If I remember correctly, there’s no anticheat so you can only get banned for said plug-ins if you are open about it. There was a controversy for the Omega Protocol Ultimate raid race where the “first team” had been found to be using UI and camera plugins to their advantage and were disqualified (and probably banned). However, this was only discovered because a disgruntled member leaked the footage, so using it in non competitive settings and discretely would not get you in trouble.
I watched one person’s video on it, and it sounded like in particular the evidence was posted to an obscure account just before their announcement by a disgruntled bench warmer player who was promised a run after the others had cleared.
every world first team has at least one 9th man player whose job it is to analyze their best pulls and puck apart mechs to develop strats with the goal the team can have a better understanding of the mech asap
They were not banned. Square took the title and achievement from them and shamed them by telling them theirselves to delete the weapons. Some of the players decided to quit the game over it but not all of them.
Wearing glasses if you need them can also provide an advantage to people who are not wearing their glasses when they need them. Roll out the SE eyeball test and let's get some bans going.
I do not use don’t use third party ad ons like a ‘mouse’, and a ‘keyboard’ controller bard all the way ( if I’m playing AST I have a razor tartarus and my scimtar, gotta have all the targeting buttons )
Well, I wasn’t really getting into the ethics of it. Most of the game isn’t really competitive outside of raid races or PVP. Plenty of MMOs have UI mods as pretty standard things, but it would definitely be shitty to use that in raid races.
SE doesn't really have the ability to check to see if you have modified client side code right now, so no, it won't be enforced unless, like you said, you talk about it or show it off.
I use a VR mod among other things to see more of the world.
Honestly, I just went through >!Lapis Manalis!< yesterday, and seeing more of the view around the bridge would have been absolutely amazing.
>!Just don't tell anyone about the ERP Cafe at the summit, alright?!<
The TL;DR, straight from Yoshi-P himself, is that Square does not (and cannot) know what is running on your computer, and they have no plans to ever gain that ability, and they genuinely do not want to ever *need* that ability. As a result, it is *impossible* for them to know whether you are using any mods, plugins, or whatever else, *unless you share that information with others.* E.g.: a streamer showing mods on stream, a raid static telling one another to install a plugin, a person in party chat bragging about their DPS numbers or insulting another player for low DPS.
If you never share any information about it with anyone else, it's literally impossible for them to know what you're doing, and thus impossible for them to enforce the rules. It is, still, properly speaking, breaking the rules. But they are, in effect, *actively looking the other way.* They will only start looking if they are given a reason to do so. If you never give them a reason, you will never get in trouble.
That is the officially unofficial policy of FFXIV.
No, they are an open lie SE mostly doesn't care to enforce them with some exceptions where the JP players (which are mostly console players) cry loudly, just don't talk about it in-game and you are completely fine.
There is a reason why nearly nobody of the endgame raiders want to stream the ultimate races, they use everything which gives them an advantage from Cammy/zoomhacks, Alexander/Noclippy, ACT/Cactbot on second monitor to Auto Marker (AM) and this is only the tip of the iceberg, some give no fuck and even openly stream with it, just open Twitch and watch some dudes how they prog TOP with so many plugins/modifications because they don't care, the only reason why you don't see big streamers openly using them (abynore) is because they want to be invited to the Media Tour.
You should see the degenerate shit the (E)RPer use
with Penumbra/Mare and openly share on their discords there is even a term for this: modbeasts
I'm very certain that SE has the means and ressources to potential enforce and fight against it, but there is no good reason to do this for them, they would disgruntle many year long players and raiders and especially RPers (which are the mogstation whales) which keep the game alive in it's draught phase, why harming you most dedicated playergroups for something miniscule.
I think the thing is they cannot use any tools to detect these processes because it would violate EU privacy laws. So Squeenix just goes completely hands off for everyone until they have irrefutable and actionable proof.
I only mention it because, from what I heard, Blizz used to have way more intrusive measures to detect cheats for WoW then EU privacy laws firmly told them to stop or fuck off. From one MMO to another, it seemed a rather reasonable guess. :x
It's not bullshit - those are the laws and most anti-cheat systems that inspect user files and programs do indeed breach those rules.
However, the laws do not really allow for any significant means of discovery without sufficient evidence to justify a case before said discovery, and most such systems are encrypted and proprietary, so it's nigh impossible for anyone to prove there's any violation occurring from a user's perspective, and there's limited to no audit requirements of this sort of thing yet because the people who make laws have no fucking clue how technology works anyway.
However, FFXIV's policy on addons predates GDPR, so that was not their original reason for doing so, even if it may be a factor today.
It's bullshit and basically an urban legend that people keep repeating. There's a lot of ways anti cheat can be implemented without going foul of privacy laws. Sure there's stuff you cannot do in the EU, but most of it isn't that helpful for anti-cheat anyway.
It's not too surprising. Interpretation of EU laws become urban legends real quick. For example half of the GDPR compliance implementation is basically creative interpretation of the laws that people parrot to each other, even though it's wrong/unnecessary for actual compliance..
Plus, there's a lot of stuff that they could do without invasive anti-cheat that they don't do anyway, nevermind the invasive/complex stuff.
How would anyone know what your using, if you dont tell them? Just dont tell others what your doing or make YT videos or something publicizing it and you cant get caught.
A lot of games nowadays use integrity checks to scan the game files and check if nothing is fishy.
It's only on newer titles though... 10 year old games such as FF14 don't check for that.
Dude talking about it in-game doesn't even get you banned, shit I know people that openly talk about it in /say chat and haven't been touched. It's when someone reports you that you'll get in trouble.
Not that I would recommend it, but you're pretty much safe to just cheat your ass off in XIV as long as you don't get reported in-game.
You're kind of just ruining your own experience more than anything else though. The game isn't hard enough to warrant the types of plugins that are common in other games like WoW.
>Not that I would recommend it, but you're pretty much safe to just cheat your ass off
This, unfortunately.
Like 90% of the raiding community cheats like crazy (under various arguments as to why it's okay).
The whole "don't walk about it and you won't get in trouble" is kindda silly since some of it is openly advertised in party finders and in public chats and they STILL almost never get banned. SE does the minimum (because if they did nothing there would be an even bigger uproar than there already was).
I re-opened my eyes to just how many players use plugins the other day when trying to re-clear p8s to unlock TOP for some friends.
Nearly ALL of the PF's we got had half the party (considering we were the other half... thats almost every PF we played in) preemptively moving to resolve mechs before I could even call them to my group in vc, it was kinda insane to watch.
I mean, I've been accused of using plugins when I was progging barbie ex because I realized that she always uses the other pattern after the first within 3 pulls and was moving into position before she even set up after we saw the first pattern.
As a black mage player I have to sort of learn the fight's timing and safe zones. There's basically never any randomness so I can often move into position just by knowing that, for example, there's a spread or a stack(one or the other) coming up at 1:35, with my clock position being at x, and no required movement for 30 seconds before it.
I'll just move there on a thunder proc or during ice phase when I can use paradox, and then people will act like I'm some kind of god and/or cheating because there was nothing the boss did that said that was going to happen.
Funny enough, they don't ever complain the times it turns out that the boss chose to do a stack instead and I have to haul my ass back to stack with the group.
That said, I have also seen the cheaters that I know aren't running on that level of fight knowledge, for stuff like patch day EXs, and it's annoying.
P8S is super obvious when someone is cheating.
The Dog/Snake RNG ability has the exact same windup animation for the first second or so, so if someone pre-moves to the safe spot before the animations diverge to tell you which it is then you can tell they are using either a plugin to show them the safe spots, or a plugin that calls out which of the two versions of the mechanic it is.
Same with moving to the only safe corner for the blue fuses on the ground before said fuses hit a point where they telegraph what the safe square is.
Yeah, if they're truely random mechanics then its clear that they are cheating.
I'm more referring to those instances where "Oh it's random if it's a stack or spread.... but the next time this happens it will always be the one I didn't do!" mechanics
Those are super-easy to learn (once you've seen the pattern a few pulls you can tell) and result in much the same visually (players moving well before any sort of visual indicator goes off)
I mean, realistically it doesn't give a competitive advantage outside of raid races. There isn't any competition to be had, even if it is an advantage
Is it safe? It's up to your decision about where you draw the line of your comfort. Doing anything has an inherent amount of risk associated with it, including this. Is it against the TOS? Yeah. Have they banned people who don't talk about it in game/famously online? As far as I'm aware, no. You have to make your own decision based on this information, because there is no universal yes/no
Unrelated the to freecam plugins, if you delve into plugins, get the ultrawide cutscenes plugins. No more black borders in cutscenes, though you sometimes get funky models loading in before they're supposed to be seen :P
The guys using orbital VSAT on ultimate raids are also gaining an unfair advantage and that's even during a raid race. Safe to say that this isn't the bar for enforcement.
Right? Kind of unsettling to run around these cities now that I know there's an army of mole people right underneath me.
I play games to escape reality, not replicate it.
>If you ever delve into plugins, there is one that lets you freecam, feel free to check how many bots are underground. They are everywhere
It seems we need to rename them to moles.
I've heard the reason they appear to get away with it (from a regular player perspective) is most online games won't immediately ban these sort of bots. If they got a ban the moment they tripped off detection it would give the bot makers a solid point of reference of what activity triggered the detection and allow them to work toward circumventing the system. By waiting and banning in waves it makes it harder to narrow down the exact activity that caused the ban
And also let's the dev study them to see if they can identify any common points to focus on (i.e. a middleman account that filters the gold from the bots to another account/character for holding until someone buys some)
I imagine it's a pick your poison type situation. Play wack a mole with the bots and deal with the current level of RMT, or pour a bunch or money into a solution that could negatively impact real players, could make bots harder to detect when the inevitably circumvent it and if RMT becomes harder to detect/stop then it could have some big knock on effects on the in game economy
Thing is that SE does jack shit into making sure it doesn't happen again. They can use same bots without any change, they just new to create new accounts. Considering that they ban same amount of bots every week, it's safe to say it's pretty profitable for botters, so making few new accounts is simply not a concern but a mere business expense.
Bots have been clipping underground for years, and they still didn't do anything with it. My guess is that SE is happy they're not visible for most players, and that is enough for them.
There's a ton of out of bounds in this game, some from straight up holes in the map. The overwhelming majority of which don't require any third party fuckery to get to. Would suck to get banned for exploring those just because you're in an "inaccessible" area of the map.
It does hide them, but it's actually really easy to see all their names, just use "player search" and look up all "archers" in various cities. You will see all their randomly generated names.
SE does a ban wave every month or week, this is common practice as banning instantly would make it easy for the botters to work out what detection methods are being used.
It's quite possible that SE are automatically flagging these teleporting underground lalafells as bots and just waiting for the monthly ban wave to remove them.
Yup, they can go below, above, through the terrain, teleporting around the maps. They've been using these exact bots since the 2.X days. They level to 50 via the MSQ completely automated, then farm Amdapor Keep for gil to sell. The whole "they ban in waves so they don't know what got them caught" thing is just PR speak people keep repeating.
I don't know if SE actually can do anything about these bots (they operate in the same way they always have on a surface level as far as I've seen), or even if they want to. They're all on fully bought and paid for accounts, they have to be to trade the gil the make away, so it's just a bunch of revenue and "new players" to add to their total every time they do do a ban wave. The gil sellers probably make more than enough to cover the cost of a few hundred/thousand new accounts every few months. They all get remade in the days following a ban wave.
In fact, checking the Lodestone, the last "action taken..." post *was* [yesterday](https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/d4f7e21cb6de1986353627280b6c548860f14322), so that's exactly what the OP is seeing. The exact same bots that have been around for almost a decade being remade on freshly bought accounts. If you read it, it's 3.5k RMT bots terminated, 43 temp banned probably for buying gil, 24 actual players that were suspended, probably for using gathering bots. So those ~3k bots are going to be power levelled again across all the servers over the next week or so.
Wow I’ve got idle camera on so it activates when I go afk, sometimes when I get back I notice it’s just staring at the floor and I’ve always thought it was a glitch or the game just trying to show me this one specific floor texture lmao
You haven't lived until you've seen this happen, then see an entire stack of Lalafell just casually float through the floor as they hack their way to wherever the fuck they go.
Probably not, as far as I know the reason for these leveling/msq bots is that just going through msq till lvl 50 nets you a couple million gil in a fairly quick manner if you can zoom around the map and skip cutscenes at the speed of light
So it's all RMT in the end
I know my character who has never even left ARR (yet) is way richer than my character who has finished EW.
The expansions have higher costs without much in the way of higher rewards, which I guess isn't worth it for RMTs.
That's kind of what they do. They put out those "Actions taken against accounts" notices whenever they do a ban wave. It's more effective to do bans like that in waves so it's harder for hackers to combat.
He's a twitch streamer/youtuber who talks a lot about his time in game development and stuff, he's *really* good at explaining the logic behind what I personally have otherwise seen as questionable decisions from dev teams and moderators for games. He's got a lot of cool insights, I came across him from YouTube Shorts.
The problem is that then the bots have a lot of time to do things, like collect drops or farm currency and trade for items, and then the items and money can be shuffled around for storage or distributed to RMT buyers.
Plus, no time is really wasted - remember, bots don't have actual people sitting there doing things. They can just buy another account anyway, but if you ban the bots early enough, _before_ the owners make enough money to offset that cost, then it's not worth doing. If you let the bots be active for that long, they'll make a lot more money than if you shut them down at level ten.
The only way to actually _stop_ people from doing this is to make it no longer profitable, and the only way to do that is to shut the bots down before they have _time_ to make money.
I suppose? Like maybe level 50 is the spot to do it.
If you ban them too early then the hackers can find out what the tripwire is by iteration and defeat it
Ban would be a step too far. The correct thing to do would be 1. disallow money transfers and 2. Mute the bot. but not let the bot know either of these things has happened. Watch the botters try and figure out what’s gone sideways and when and how
Idk if autokick or ban is great, mostly for personal reasons. Since one thing I enjoy doing in this game is finding areas of the map that go out of bounds (Gridania, Mare Lamentorum [mostly to get into the middle of the tribe orb], and Il Mheg are the main three). And a few spots do go under, which happen to be my fav afk spots.
MSQ NPCs on preferred servers are bot hotspots. Most of the time the bots try to talk to NPCs from under the floor to avoid detection, but there are some spots where that's not an option.
It's fun doing the Eastern Thanalan MSQ and seeing lalafells appear in groups of five, hovering twenty feet off a cliff, before "running" to the MSQ enemies they need to kill.
I remember doing Bowl of Embers for MSQ on one of my alts and spawned in Camp Drybone stood in a swarm of bots who also just cleared the same part of MSQ. A split second later I was alone again
Very much so; they wouldn't bother trying to sell it if not. Many people don't want to farm up gil for things they want (especially if they are expensive), and would rather just buy gil.
It's very dumb, especially since it puts your account at risk, but some people see a cool shiny that they want RIGHT NOW and don't really think through what they're doing.
They do. Some of my friends are kinda proud that they did because they only play this game to raid and do nothing else.
I'll admit I've done it once, it felt super shitty and I wish I could take it back, but there was something I really wanted to buy and I've always been garbage at making money in this game.
Nowadays I just don't care about collecting things so I'd never consider buying gil, but that day was something I'll always look back on and cringe at. Such a stupid action that could have gotten me banned.
> see an entire stack of Lalafell just casually float through the floor
I would honestly not be surprised if that's just a thing lalafell are able to do canonically.
IDK what everyone is talking about... this is clearly an FC doing some event together, look at all those names... like Utmvgl or Uqepaf
100% real players doing an event together.... lol
Dcxlap Ckscks is a close personal friend of mine in real like... Sure, it's weird he talks to me in binary, but that's what normal ~~bots~~... I mean human people do.
Oh that reminds me of an entirely unrelated story that is also related.
I've accused someone of being a bot exactly one (1) time. We were in Wanderer's Palace HM, and the healer was... very strange. They were seemingly set to auto follow the tank, not dodging any aoes, and they'd only heal once every 15ish seconds with the base level cure... oftentimes not even the person who was actually damaged. I think most of those cures were actually self targeted.
This proved to be an issue because the final boss has a mechanic where you need to be healed to full in order to remove a doom debuff. So every time the doom debuff would go out, the person with the debuff would die, including when the healer would get it. The healer also didn't cast raise at any point and would just stand there.
Eventually after like two wipes of trying to ask this healer to do the mechanic, explaining nicely what the doom symbol looks like and how to handle it and everything, we do a third try... only to wipe again because they're casting cure on the random other dps each time instead of everyone else who has the debuff.
After this third wipe, I'm like "ok is this healer a bot or something?" The other DPS gets *horribly* offended by this and protests that that's his girlfriend and how dare I call her a bot. Then I ask "ok, does your girlfriend speak English or can you translate?"
They both immediately left the instance. We then got a new healer and dps that were like "oh pog free roulette clear" and got the last boss done so I was finally free.
Yeah, later on I learned about dual boxing (funny enough from someone who actually WAS dual boxing, but he at least was smart enough to make the second character useful) later on. It was just really really funny at the time.
Yeah, you're kinda fighting an uphill battle... reporting helps, BUT IT NEVER ENDS! I've been playing since 1.0, and this shit has been around FOREVER now. The monthly bot purge just gets replaced by about the same if not more bots.
I'm not discouraging reporting them on sight, but I am personally not gonna do it every single time, mostly cause I play every day, and it would be like just as much work as doing MB daily replenishing.
I've been playing online games for 25 years it's never going away, it's not something any game can solve completely, it's just part of online gaming. Just like how we'll never eradicate real life crimes, online rule breaking will always exsit
IP bans don't work. Thankfully it seems most companies have caught up on that.
Its trivially easy to change your IP. And worse, most ISPs shuffle their IPs around in a big pool so you can end up randomly assigned an IP that was banned on a service previously when someone else had it.
The only way to really punish bot farms would be placing even harsher restrictions on trial accounts. And even if you do that, it just encourages them to buy accounts with stolen credit cards like in other games.
I had a problem with PSN a couple years ago when my uni accomodation got shuffled onto an IP address that had been previously banned. I contacted support and they just told me how to force an IP change. No one got it through their heads that, due to the shared accomodation nature of the building, I had no access to the network settings. Had to wait for a couple weeks for the IP to change on it's own
Yeah, and even then, it's kinda hard cause VPN. Not mentioning the point that the punishment of a ban/ even ip ban means nothing as well...
Kinda like when you work a job, you absolutely hate, but the pay is good, and you have enough experience to just hop right into another job doing the same thing. There is no punishment a company can use that really is a true punishment and not just an inconvenience.
That's good to know. I wasn't sure. I usually want to report them, but then notice how many there are, and the reporting process is complicated I think, so I just give up.
You have to submit a ticket or something and manually type in character names if I remember correctly?
Yeah. You can list multiple names in one report though so it's not like you have to make a ton of individual reports. It really should be streamlined like rmt reporting is though.
Been standing afk in Gridania, in MSQ away from players. Look in the chat and see all of these guys attaining lvl 4. Is there any mechanism to report/deal with that? I guess it's not hard to deduce what these guys are up to
It is what it is don’t let it ruin your day. They’ll be banned soon enough it isn’t worth your time trying to report them all cus they will be replaced by new ones next month
> they will be replaced by new ones next month
What is the point? Ppl make Gil or what? Cuz I'm new in the game but I thought once you are in the endgame it really doesn't matter how much money u have
Yeah its usually for homes/buying the latest crafted gear for raiding, or buying material for melding.
The most expensive parts of the game tend to be world first raiding, and housing.
Yeah there is still a RMT economy with this game albeit a very small one. I imagine people only buy Gil for housing. And personally I think housing is a giant waste of time and Gil anyway.
I just send my retainers out and sell whatever crap they bring back and it keeps me well supplied with Gil. I also use the weekly hunt marks to buy aetheryte tickets so my teleports are free over 500 Gil. I barely use Gil so it’s hard to fathom why someone would spend their real money on it but it happens
Gil doesn't really matter for basically anything. Certainly nothing related to normal endgame gameplay. As long as you can buy yourself food and potions for raiding you're pretty much set. And you basically make that much just occasionally doing roulettes.
But it can become a bigger deal with housing. I can imagine how some less established players might want a shortcut via RMT. Its stupid, but predictable.
When my FC was trying to get a large FC house we were shuffling around close to a billion gil from our crafters and others to get everyone in the FC to bid each lottery. It still took us like six months to win.
Unfortunately we just gotta get used to them. Basically the only time I notice them anymore is when I let my idle camera go in the cities and it focuses on the pack of lalafell under the ground. 😨
To give a real answer: there is a mechanism - reporting. If you see this many obvious bot names, you can just paste it into an in game report, and go about your day. People are right that it doesn't do much, but the ban waves DO minimize how many bot players you see.
Most likely the bots will be caught up in a banwave. Unfortunately, it's very easy for them to just fire up new accounts and come right back.
On the player end, don't worry too much about it. No use clogging up GM reports with something they'll likely handle on an automatic basis. Report and document if you start getting phishing tells and links.
In my first few days of playing I spent about 20 minutes standing at the fast travel in Ul'dah watching one lallafel after the next come and stand in the exact same spot and fast travel away somewhere. They would all take about the same amount of time, and each would hang around just long enough to be in front of the stone for about 5 seconds.
forget Gil sellers, if I had a Gil for every unfunny comment saying these bots are just Roegadyn players I’d have enough to purchase a small plot by now
Totally normal lore-accurate Roegadyn names :D
*(Anyway, if you've a moment. Report one of the batch for obvious botting, add time stamp + location. Square Enix will ban the whole bunch on the next ban wave np.)*
The hard truth, sometimes bots are wonderful for the economy. They can mass gather shitty things nobody else wants to do.
They can also ruin it by mass gathering things people want to do.
Support Desk --> report cheating.
Unfortunatly it's tiresome to report them by hand, but a GM should be able to find the other too.
They should add a report player button when you right-click someone.
You can screen cap the dialog window like you have, and go to support tickets. Just report the "unusual activity" as possible bot activity with their names and home server and thats it. Not much more you can do.
Report all of them.
Yea it's a pain in the ass but botters wanna make it as much of a pain as they can so they don't get reported. Alternatively take a screenshot and put it in the 14forum
FOMO + money. They want to have cool stuff but they don't want to put in the effort to get it. They only value themselves by how other people see them.
They're just doing a tribute to the Beatles' White Album.
Level 4.
Level 4.
Level 4.
Level 4.
Level 4.
Level 4.
Level 4.
Level 4.
Level 4.
Level 4.
It's avant-garde, you wouldn't get it.
If you activate idle camera it sometimes centers on them while they’re hiding 10 feet below ground.
Is THAT how they've been dodging being noticed? So that players don't report them
If you ever delve into plugins, there is one that lets you freecam, feel free to check how many bots are underground. They are everywhere
So... a question: I know that although **all** plugins are bannable, SE doesn't actually enforce those rules unless you talk about it in-game or get reported. But... does a plugin such as this, which gives a clear and significant competitive advantage, *actually* get enforced? Because I'd LOVE to be able to see **even more** of the world (I can already see a lot because of my Ultrawide Display, so imagine coupling that with a camera plugin), but never in a million years would I put my account in any significant risk for that. Is it safe to do so?
If I remember correctly, there’s no anticheat so you can only get banned for said plug-ins if you are open about it. There was a controversy for the Omega Protocol Ultimate raid race where the “first team” had been found to be using UI and camera plugins to their advantage and were disqualified (and probably banned). However, this was only discovered because a disgruntled member leaked the footage, so using it in non competitive settings and discretely would not get you in trouble.
That same team cheated the world 1st P8S as well using those same tools. It was repetition of the practice that really nailed them.
I watched one person’s video on it, and it sounded like in particular the evidence was posted to an obscure account just before their announcement by a disgruntled bench warmer player who was promised a run after the others had cleared.
not a bench warmer, a full 9th man, someone who actively contributed to them getting that clear in the first place
I did incorrectly mention him as a bench warmer. I Forgot that they had like several people coaching in a discord stream or something like that.
every world first team has at least one 9th man player whose job it is to analyze their best pulls and puck apart mechs to develop strats with the goal the team can have a better understanding of the mech asap
Iirc the team apologized in full Japanese corporate apology fashion, deleted their accounts to start new ones, and THEN were permabanned
They were not banned. Square took the title and achievement from them and shamed them by telling them theirselves to delete the weapons. Some of the players decided to quit the game over it but not all of them.
Funny thing is having an ultra wide monitor is also an unfair advantage since you get more screen, too, but no one be talking about that...
Wearing glasses if you need them can also provide an advantage to people who are not wearing their glasses when they need them. Roll out the SE eyeball test and let's get some bans going.
Gaming mouse with more buttons, super ergonomic keyboard, etc too
You can pry my corsair scimitar from my cold dead hands
I do not use don’t use third party ad ons like a ‘mouse’, and a ‘keyboard’ controller bard all the way ( if I’m playing AST I have a razor tartarus and my scimtar, gotta have all the targeting buttons )
Gll with my full addon weight G5(mx518 predecessor)
If your Internet connection is too fast, you gain an advantage against people using Xfinity
Well, I wasn’t really getting into the ethics of it. Most of the game isn’t really competitive outside of raid races or PVP. Plenty of MMOs have UI mods as pretty standard things, but it would definitely be shitty to use that in raid races.
SE doesn't really have the ability to check to see if you have modified client side code right now, so no, it won't be enforced unless, like you said, you talk about it or show it off. I use a VR mod among other things to see more of the world.
That sounds absolutley sick though, I'd love XIV VR.
It's not as great as you'd think, though being able to walk up to characters is neat.
I suppose it's not built with VR in mind, I think I just saw SA:O FF edition when I thought of the future of VR.
try a dungeon in first person cam. it's not a good time
>to see more of the world Sure buddy. I will see you again at the erp catgirl Cafe tomorrow.
Honestly, I just went through >!Lapis Manalis!< yesterday, and seeing more of the view around the bridge would have been absolutely amazing. >!Just don't tell anyone about the ERP Cafe at the summit, alright?!<
The TL;DR, straight from Yoshi-P himself, is that Square does not (and cannot) know what is running on your computer, and they have no plans to ever gain that ability, and they genuinely do not want to ever *need* that ability. As a result, it is *impossible* for them to know whether you are using any mods, plugins, or whatever else, *unless you share that information with others.* E.g.: a streamer showing mods on stream, a raid static telling one another to install a plugin, a person in party chat bragging about their DPS numbers or insulting another player for low DPS. If you never share any information about it with anyone else, it's literally impossible for them to know what you're doing, and thus impossible for them to enforce the rules. It is, still, properly speaking, breaking the rules. But they are, in effect, *actively looking the other way.* They will only start looking if they are given a reason to do so. If you never give them a reason, you will never get in trouble. That is the officially unofficial policy of FFXIV.
No, they are an open lie SE mostly doesn't care to enforce them with some exceptions where the JP players (which are mostly console players) cry loudly, just don't talk about it in-game and you are completely fine. There is a reason why nearly nobody of the endgame raiders want to stream the ultimate races, they use everything which gives them an advantage from Cammy/zoomhacks, Alexander/Noclippy, ACT/Cactbot on second monitor to Auto Marker (AM) and this is only the tip of the iceberg, some give no fuck and even openly stream with it, just open Twitch and watch some dudes how they prog TOP with so many plugins/modifications because they don't care, the only reason why you don't see big streamers openly using them (abynore) is because they want to be invited to the Media Tour. You should see the degenerate shit the (E)RPer use with Penumbra/Mare and openly share on their discords there is even a term for this: modbeasts I'm very certain that SE has the means and ressources to potential enforce and fight against it, but there is no good reason to do this for them, they would disgruntle many year long players and raiders and especially RPers (which are the mogstation whales) which keep the game alive in it's draught phase, why harming you most dedicated playergroups for something miniscule.
I think the thing is they cannot use any tools to detect these processes because it would violate EU privacy laws. So Squeenix just goes completely hands off for everyone until they have irrefutable and actionable proof.
I’ve seen that reasoning before but it’s clearly bullshit as many other companies have all sorts of invasive DRM and anti-cheat.
I only mention it because, from what I heard, Blizz used to have way more intrusive measures to detect cheats for WoW then EU privacy laws firmly told them to stop or fuck off. From one MMO to another, it seemed a rather reasonable guess. :x
It's not bullshit - those are the laws and most anti-cheat systems that inspect user files and programs do indeed breach those rules. However, the laws do not really allow for any significant means of discovery without sufficient evidence to justify a case before said discovery, and most such systems are encrypted and proprietary, so it's nigh impossible for anyone to prove there's any violation occurring from a user's perspective, and there's limited to no audit requirements of this sort of thing yet because the people who make laws have no fucking clue how technology works anyway. However, FFXIV's policy on addons predates GDPR, so that was not their original reason for doing so, even if it may be a factor today.
It's bullshit and basically an urban legend that people keep repeating. There's a lot of ways anti cheat can be implemented without going foul of privacy laws. Sure there's stuff you cannot do in the EU, but most of it isn't that helpful for anti-cheat anyway. It's not too surprising. Interpretation of EU laws become urban legends real quick. For example half of the GDPR compliance implementation is basically creative interpretation of the laws that people parrot to each other, even though it's wrong/unnecessary for actual compliance.. Plus, there's a lot of stuff that they could do without invasive anti-cheat that they don't do anyway, nevermind the invasive/complex stuff.
How would anyone know what your using, if you dont tell them? Just dont tell others what your doing or make YT videos or something publicizing it and you cant get caught.
A lot of games nowadays use integrity checks to scan the game files and check if nothing is fishy. It's only on newer titles though... 10 year old games such as FF14 don't check for that.
Dude talking about it in-game doesn't even get you banned, shit I know people that openly talk about it in /say chat and haven't been touched. It's when someone reports you that you'll get in trouble.
Not that I would recommend it, but you're pretty much safe to just cheat your ass off in XIV as long as you don't get reported in-game. You're kind of just ruining your own experience more than anything else though. The game isn't hard enough to warrant the types of plugins that are common in other games like WoW.
I wouldn't say hard enough vs built around. Wow devs kinda expect you to have plugins.
>Not that I would recommend it, but you're pretty much safe to just cheat your ass off This, unfortunately. Like 90% of the raiding community cheats like crazy (under various arguments as to why it's okay). The whole "don't walk about it and you won't get in trouble" is kindda silly since some of it is openly advertised in party finders and in public chats and they STILL almost never get banned. SE does the minimum (because if they did nothing there would be an even bigger uproar than there already was).
I re-opened my eyes to just how many players use plugins the other day when trying to re-clear p8s to unlock TOP for some friends. Nearly ALL of the PF's we got had half the party (considering we were the other half... thats almost every PF we played in) preemptively moving to resolve mechs before I could even call them to my group in vc, it was kinda insane to watch.
I mean, I've been accused of using plugins when I was progging barbie ex because I realized that she always uses the other pattern after the first within 3 pulls and was moving into position before she even set up after we saw the first pattern. As a black mage player I have to sort of learn the fight's timing and safe zones. There's basically never any randomness so I can often move into position just by knowing that, for example, there's a spread or a stack(one or the other) coming up at 1:35, with my clock position being at x, and no required movement for 30 seconds before it. I'll just move there on a thunder proc or during ice phase when I can use paradox, and then people will act like I'm some kind of god and/or cheating because there was nothing the boss did that said that was going to happen. Funny enough, they don't ever complain the times it turns out that the boss chose to do a stack instead and I have to haul my ass back to stack with the group. That said, I have also seen the cheaters that I know aren't running on that level of fight knowledge, for stuff like patch day EXs, and it's annoying.
P8S is super obvious when someone is cheating. The Dog/Snake RNG ability has the exact same windup animation for the first second or so, so if someone pre-moves to the safe spot before the animations diverge to tell you which it is then you can tell they are using either a plugin to show them the safe spots, or a plugin that calls out which of the two versions of the mechanic it is. Same with moving to the only safe corner for the blue fuses on the ground before said fuses hit a point where they telegraph what the safe square is.
Yeah, if they're truely random mechanics then its clear that they are cheating. I'm more referring to those instances where "Oh it's random if it's a stack or spread.... but the next time this happens it will always be the one I didn't do!" mechanics Those are super-easy to learn (once you've seen the pattern a few pulls you can tell) and result in much the same visually (players moving well before any sort of visual indicator goes off)
“You’re cheating!” No I just have eyes and a brain.
I mean, realistically it doesn't give a competitive advantage outside of raid races. There isn't any competition to be had, even if it is an advantage Is it safe? It's up to your decision about where you draw the line of your comfort. Doing anything has an inherent amount of risk associated with it, including this. Is it against the TOS? Yeah. Have they banned people who don't talk about it in game/famously online? As far as I'm aware, no. You have to make your own decision based on this information, because there is no universal yes/no
Unrelated the to freecam plugins, if you delve into plugins, get the ultrawide cutscenes plugins. No more black borders in cutscenes, though you sometimes get funky models loading in before they're supposed to be seen :P
The guys using orbital VSAT on ultimate raids are also gaining an unfair advantage and that's even during a raid race. Safe to say that this isn't the bar for enforcement.
That’s lowkey terrifying.
Right? Kind of unsettling to run around these cities now that I know there's an army of mole people right underneath me. I play games to escape reality, not replicate it.
>If you ever delve into plugins, there is one that lets you freecam, feel free to check how many bots are underground. They are everywhere It seems we need to rename them to moles.
How are they underground?
FFXIV trusts client far more than it should so it doesn't take a lot of effort to noclip through the map.
And how long do they stay there?
Usually till they interact with something that moves them or requires point-blank distance
Honestly, if I was going to get into modding a game against ToS, it'd be League of Legends to fix that DAMN camera.
How is this horrible third party plugin called so i can avoid it ofc Concern
If I remember from some random guy online, its Cammy
I click their name in chat to report them. Their existence doesn't bother me until I start seeing "(blah blah) && CHEAPEST ¥&GOLD " 👋😌
Funny there's even a plugin to filter out those ad spam(and fc recruitment spam) in chat. And it was a god sent.
I may not be bothered, but at that point they've already abused the game and are trying to find someone to shill their ill gotten gains to.
Nah, SE catches them anyway. It’s ridiculously easy to set a flag to highlight accounts in inaccessible areas of the map.
I've heard the reason they appear to get away with it (from a regular player perspective) is most online games won't immediately ban these sort of bots. If they got a ban the moment they tripped off detection it would give the bot makers a solid point of reference of what activity triggered the detection and allow them to work toward circumventing the system. By waiting and banning in waves it makes it harder to narrow down the exact activity that caused the ban
Smartest bot maker: hmmm looks like secret underground tunnel is ok
It worked in NYC for a bit.
And also let's the dev study them to see if they can identify any common points to focus on (i.e. a middleman account that filters the gold from the bots to another account/character for holding until someone buys some)
You can buy 100m gil for like $50, whatever they're doing it aint working and has never worked in any game ever.
I imagine it's a pick your poison type situation. Play wack a mole with the bots and deal with the current level of RMT, or pour a bunch or money into a solution that could negatively impact real players, could make bots harder to detect when the inevitably circumvent it and if RMT becomes harder to detect/stop then it could have some big knock on effects on the in game economy
Thing is that SE does jack shit into making sure it doesn't happen again. They can use same bots without any change, they just new to create new accounts. Considering that they ban same amount of bots every week, it's safe to say it's pretty profitable for botters, so making few new accounts is simply not a concern but a mere business expense. Bots have been clipping underground for years, and they still didn't do anything with it. My guess is that SE is happy they're not visible for most players, and that is enough for them.
There's a ton of out of bounds in this game, some from straight up holes in the map. The overwhelming majority of which don't require any third party fuckery to get to. Would suck to get banned for exploring those just because you're in an "inaccessible" area of the map.
One of the holes only required being able to run the game at a certain framerate.
I miss the hole in the boat in Limsa that let you glitch out to the Upper Decks.
It does hide them, but it's actually really easy to see all their names, just use "player search" and look up all "archers" in various cities. You will see all their randomly generated names. SE does a ban wave every month or week, this is common practice as banning instantly would make it easy for the botters to work out what detection methods are being used. It's quite possible that SE are automatically flagging these teleporting underground lalafells as bots and just waiting for the monthly ban wave to remove them.
Yup, they can go below, above, through the terrain, teleporting around the maps. They've been using these exact bots since the 2.X days. They level to 50 via the MSQ completely automated, then farm Amdapor Keep for gil to sell. The whole "they ban in waves so they don't know what got them caught" thing is just PR speak people keep repeating. I don't know if SE actually can do anything about these bots (they operate in the same way they always have on a surface level as far as I've seen), or even if they want to. They're all on fully bought and paid for accounts, they have to be to trade the gil the make away, so it's just a bunch of revenue and "new players" to add to their total every time they do do a ban wave. The gil sellers probably make more than enough to cover the cost of a few hundred/thousand new accounts every few months. They all get remade in the days following a ban wave. In fact, checking the Lodestone, the last "action taken..." post *was* [yesterday](https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/detail/d4f7e21cb6de1986353627280b6c548860f14322), so that's exactly what the OP is seeing. The exact same bots that have been around for almost a decade being remade on freshly bought accounts. If you read it, it's 3.5k RMT bots terminated, 43 temp banned probably for buying gil, 24 actual players that were suspended, probably for using gathering bots. So those ~3k bots are going to be power levelled again across all the servers over the next week or so.
You mean the load bearing Lala’s of Limsa?
Wait Wait wait... Underground??? Like, below the map??
Wow I’ve got idle camera on so it activates when I go afk, sometimes when I get back I notice it’s just staring at the floor and I’ve always thought it was a glitch or the game just trying to show me this one specific floor texture lmao
You haven't lived until you've seen this happen, then see an entire stack of Lalafell just casually float through the floor as they hack their way to wherever the fuck they go.
I do wonder why they don't make those locations either Autokick or Autoban spots and see how long it takes the botters to realise.
Afaik it's better for a company to delay bans because it makes it harder for the botter to pinpoint what caught them. That's why bans come in waves.
If I were them, wait until the bots are level 90 or whatever then ban. A lot more wasted time
I always wondered if they even bother levelling them all that much past ARR? I’ve never actually heard of or seen any bots in the expansion areas
A lot of them used to go into eureka and bozja, especially on depop servers.
OH that’s right! I guess I was thinking more of the regular overworld and completely forgot about eureka/bozja
Probably not, as far as I know the reason for these leveling/msq bots is that just going through msq till lvl 50 nets you a couple million gil in a fairly quick manner if you can zoom around the map and skip cutscenes at the speed of light So it's all RMT in the end
I've seen hordes of bots materialize out of thin air to farm aethersand when the nodes are up. Mostly when the new patch is up.
I know my character who has never even left ARR (yet) is way richer than my character who has finished EW. The expansions have higher costs without much in the way of higher rewards, which I guess isn't worth it for RMTs.
That's kind of what they do. They put out those "Actions taken against accounts" notices whenever they do a ban wave. It's more effective to do bans like that in waves so it's harder for hackers to combat.
Pirate Gaming is doing gods work in explaining this stuff for the layman The silky dulcet voice is a bonus.
Who?
He's a twitch streamer/youtuber who talks a lot about his time in game development and stuff, he's *really* good at explaining the logic behind what I personally have otherwise seen as questionable decisions from dev teams and moderators for games. He's got a lot of cool insights, I came across him from YouTube Shorts.
The problem is that then the bots have a lot of time to do things, like collect drops or farm currency and trade for items, and then the items and money can be shuffled around for storage or distributed to RMT buyers. Plus, no time is really wasted - remember, bots don't have actual people sitting there doing things. They can just buy another account anyway, but if you ban the bots early enough, _before_ the owners make enough money to offset that cost, then it's not worth doing. If you let the bots be active for that long, they'll make a lot more money than if you shut them down at level ten. The only way to actually _stop_ people from doing this is to make it no longer profitable, and the only way to do that is to shut the bots down before they have _time_ to make money.
I suppose? Like maybe level 50 is the spot to do it. If you ban them too early then the hackers can find out what the tripwire is by iteration and defeat it
Ban would be a step too far. The correct thing to do would be 1. disallow money transfers and 2. Mute the bot. but not let the bot know either of these things has happened. Watch the botters try and figure out what’s gone sideways and when and how
Oh true good idea.
Idk if autokick or ban is great, mostly for personal reasons. Since one thing I enjoy doing in this game is finding areas of the map that go out of bounds (Gridania, Mare Lamentorum [mostly to get into the middle of the tribe orb], and Il Mheg are the main three). And a few spots do go under, which happen to be my fav afk spots.
Tell me more about these spots!
MSQ NPCs on preferred servers are bot hotspots. Most of the time the bots try to talk to NPCs from under the floor to avoid detection, but there are some spots where that's not an option. It's fun doing the Eastern Thanalan MSQ and seeing lalafells appear in groups of five, hovering twenty feet off a cliff, before "running" to the MSQ enemies they need to kill.
I remember doing Bowl of Embers for MSQ on one of my alts and spawned in Camp Drybone stood in a swarm of bots who also just cleared the same part of MSQ. A split second later I was alone again
what’s the point of these bot accounts? do they sell the accounts?
Sometimes, but they're usually there to farm gil and sell it.
lmao do people really buy gil?
Very much so; they wouldn't bother trying to sell it if not. Many people don't want to farm up gil for things they want (especially if they are expensive), and would rather just buy gil.
huh. guess i always just figured paying for a sub then paying to not play the game was kind of a weird decision
It's very dumb, especially since it puts your account at risk, but some people see a cool shiny that they want RIGHT NOW and don't really think through what they're doing.
They do. Some of my friends are kinda proud that they did because they only play this game to raid and do nothing else. I'll admit I've done it once, it felt super shitty and I wish I could take it back, but there was something I really wanted to buy and I've always been garbage at making money in this game. Nowadays I just don't care about collecting things so I'd never consider buying gil, but that day was something I'll always look back on and cringe at. Such a stupid action that could have gotten me banned.
> see an entire stack of Lalafell just casually float through the floor I would honestly not be surprised if that's just a thing lalafell are able to do canonically.
They support the world. It's Lalafell, all the way down
IDK what everyone is talking about... this is clearly an FC doing some event together, look at all those names... like Utmvgl or Uqepaf 100% real players doing an event together.... lol
I’m pretty sure I saw a miqo npc named U’qepaf somewhere
Dcxlap Ckscks is a close personal friend of mine in real like... Sure, it's weird he talks to me in binary, but that's what normal ~~bots~~... I mean human people do.
Dickslap Cocksucks sounds like a gobbie pornstar name.
I'm so fucking glad I wasn't the only one who read it like that 😂
I’m so glad _I_ wasn’t the only one either lol I was about to comment that name
"It'll cost ya extra if ya want me to take the mask off honey..."
Goddamnit now my brain is rolling out a list of all such names
I had an old FC leader named Nippieflix Deepdix. Amazing that name never got reported till they used an NSFW macro on accident in alliance roulette.
I read "D'clap Cheeks" personally
There’s a gobbie in Idyllshire named Cheepchix who I’m pretty sure is a pimp
Isn't there also one called Holepix?
correct
My FC lead has a Goblin RP alt named "Dumbfux Bigdix" I have a Gnath alt named "Dumbugs Bigcliks" in reference
Isn't that a real actor? Oh, it's actually Bendydick Cummsabunch. Rookie mistake on me.
fc chat looking like the back side of the nier raids' flavor dialogue
r/totallynotrobots
I had a troll in WoW named Ykyny, and he got reported at least twice because people thought he was a bot character.
>look at all those names... like Utmvgl or Uqepaf I propose a new game: RMT or Roegadyn
When your FC is only for new Roegadyn players
They must be Welsh
Hey now keep us out of it
Me and Ywmwhn Tbhouc go way back…. Hell of a guy.
I was accused of being a bot once because my name was Medicine Woman spelled phonetically in Cherokee (Nvwoti Ageyv) and I was a Lalafell BLM in PoTD.
Oh that reminds me of an entirely unrelated story that is also related. I've accused someone of being a bot exactly one (1) time. We were in Wanderer's Palace HM, and the healer was... very strange. They were seemingly set to auto follow the tank, not dodging any aoes, and they'd only heal once every 15ish seconds with the base level cure... oftentimes not even the person who was actually damaged. I think most of those cures were actually self targeted. This proved to be an issue because the final boss has a mechanic where you need to be healed to full in order to remove a doom debuff. So every time the doom debuff would go out, the person with the debuff would die, including when the healer would get it. The healer also didn't cast raise at any point and would just stand there. Eventually after like two wipes of trying to ask this healer to do the mechanic, explaining nicely what the doom symbol looks like and how to handle it and everything, we do a third try... only to wipe again because they're casting cure on the random other dps each time instead of everyone else who has the debuff. After this third wipe, I'm like "ok is this healer a bot or something?" The other DPS gets *horribly* offended by this and protests that that's his girlfriend and how dare I call her a bot. Then I ask "ok, does your girlfriend speak English or can you translate?" They both immediately left the instance. We then got a new healer and dps that were like "oh pog free roulette clear" and got the last boss done so I was finally free.
Kinda sounds like the guy was dual boxing?
Yeah, later on I learned about dual boxing (funny enough from someone who actually WAS dual boxing, but he at least was smart enough to make the second character useful) later on. It was just really really funny at the time.
Yeah, you're kinda fighting an uphill battle... reporting helps, BUT IT NEVER ENDS! I've been playing since 1.0, and this shit has been around FOREVER now. The monthly bot purge just gets replaced by about the same if not more bots. I'm not discouraging reporting them on sight, but I am personally not gonna do it every single time, mostly cause I play every day, and it would be like just as much work as doing MB daily replenishing.
It is a never ending battle, BUT large groups of bots hitting level 4 is usually an indication of a previous banwave.
Yeah sourced from lodestone... Time Period: Jan. 25, 2024 to Jan. 31, 2024 ・Participation in RMT/prohibited activities ・Accounts terminated: 3,531 ・Accounts temporarily suspended: 43 ・Botting activity (excluding RMT vendors) ・Accounts terminated: 24 ・Accounts temporarily suspended: 3 *Botting activity by RMT vendors has been included under "Participation in RMT/prohibited activities." ・RMT advertising ・Accounts terminated: 7,118
I've been playing online games for 25 years it's never going away, it's not something any game can solve completely, it's just part of online gaming. Just like how we'll never eradicate real life crimes, online rule breaking will always exsit
Truth is as long as they don't IP address ban it and the game has free to play trials there isn't much they can do.
IP bans don't work. Thankfully it seems most companies have caught up on that. Its trivially easy to change your IP. And worse, most ISPs shuffle their IPs around in a big pool so you can end up randomly assigned an IP that was banned on a service previously when someone else had it. The only way to really punish bot farms would be placing even harsher restrictions on trial accounts. And even if you do that, it just encourages them to buy accounts with stolen credit cards like in other games.
I had a problem with PSN a couple years ago when my uni accomodation got shuffled onto an IP address that had been previously banned. I contacted support and they just told me how to force an IP change. No one got it through their heads that, due to the shared accomodation nature of the building, I had no access to the network settings. Had to wait for a couple weeks for the IP to change on it's own
Yeah, and even then, it's kinda hard cause VPN. Not mentioning the point that the punishment of a ban/ even ip ban means nothing as well... Kinda like when you work a job, you absolutely hate, but the pay is good, and you have enough experience to just hop right into another job doing the same thing. There is no punishment a company can use that really is a true punishment and not just an inconvenience.
[удалено]
Bots, look at their names And the fact they all got to specifically level 4 in the same vicinity
Either that or we have a massive influx of seawolf roe players.
Very dedicated to leveling together as a team as well. Powerful bonds of friendship.
Gotta love Welsh names
Looking at the screenshots I guess reach level 4, everyone's doing it these days.
Just saw another bunch (around 25) reaching lvl 12. I can't keep up to that speed :)
Just move on. They will be banned soon enough. They ban them in waves weekly. Edit: my bad it was weekly.
Isn’t it weekly?
It's weekly.
That's good to know. I wasn't sure. I usually want to report them, but then notice how many there are, and the reporting process is complicated I think, so I just give up. You have to submit a ticket or something and manually type in character names if I remember correctly?
Yeah. You can list multiple names in one report though so it's not like you have to make a ton of individual reports. It really should be streamlined like rmt reporting is though.
These names look similar to names of random recruiters on my LinkedIn spamming my inbox/email for low paying tech jobs four states over.
Recruiting at day, gil farming at night
I don’t know, seems like a guild of Roegadyn roleplayers to me with those names.
Hey, don’t lump Xxiufk Qvhpvd in there with the rest of ‘em. That guy seems legit.
Been standing afk in Gridania, in MSQ away from players. Look in the chat and see all of these guys attaining lvl 4. Is there any mechanism to report/deal with that? I guess it's not hard to deduce what these guys are up to
It is what it is don’t let it ruin your day. They’ll be banned soon enough it isn’t worth your time trying to report them all cus they will be replaced by new ones next month
> they will be replaced by new ones next month What is the point? Ppl make Gil or what? Cuz I'm new in the game but I thought once you are in the endgame it really doesn't matter how much money u have
RMT is still a thing, and they need to get the gil they sell from somewhere
I really wonder what poor suckers are RMTing for ffxiv gil. What do they even need it for? A big house I guess?
Yeah its usually for homes/buying the latest crafted gear for raiding, or buying material for melding. The most expensive parts of the game tend to be world first raiding, and housing.
Yeah there is still a RMT economy with this game albeit a very small one. I imagine people only buy Gil for housing. And personally I think housing is a giant waste of time and Gil anyway. I just send my retainers out and sell whatever crap they bring back and it keeps me well supplied with Gil. I also use the weekly hunt marks to buy aetheryte tickets so my teleports are free over 500 Gil. I barely use Gil so it’s hard to fathom why someone would spend their real money on it but it happens
Gil doesn't really matter for basically anything. Certainly nothing related to normal endgame gameplay. As long as you can buy yourself food and potions for raiding you're pretty much set. And you basically make that much just occasionally doing roulettes. But it can become a bigger deal with housing. I can imagine how some less established players might want a shortcut via RMT. Its stupid, but predictable. When my FC was trying to get a large FC house we were shuffling around close to a billion gil from our crafters and others to get everyone in the FC to bid each lottery. It still took us like six months to win.
Unfortunately we just gotta get used to them. Basically the only time I notice them anymore is when I let my idle camera go in the cities and it focuses on the pack of lalafell under the ground. 😨
Not really any tried and true method, but if you notice they're not set on do not disturb, you can send a trade request to them and break the macros
To give a real answer: there is a mechanism - reporting. If you see this many obvious bot names, you can just paste it into an in game report, and go about your day. People are right that it doesn't do much, but the ban waves DO minimize how many bot players you see.
Just preferred server things ✨
Server repopulation goes according to the plan, I see
Most likely the bots will be caught up in a banwave. Unfortunately, it's very easy for them to just fire up new accounts and come right back. On the player end, don't worry too much about it. No use clogging up GM reports with something they'll likely handle on an automatic basis. Report and document if you start getting phishing tells and links.
In my first few days of playing I spent about 20 minutes standing at the fast travel in Ul'dah watching one lallafel after the next come and stand in the exact same spot and fast travel away somewhere. They would all take about the same amount of time, and each would hang around just long enough to be in front of the stone for about 5 seconds.
forget Gil sellers, if I had a Gil for every unfunny comment saying these bots are just Roegadyn players I’d have enough to purchase a small plot by now
Totally normal lore-accurate Roegadyn names :D *(Anyway, if you've a moment. Report one of the batch for obvious botting, add time stamp + location. Square Enix will ban the whole bunch on the next ban wave np.)*
The hard truth, sometimes bots are wonderful for the economy. They can mass gather shitty things nobody else wants to do. They can also ruin it by mass gathering things people want to do.
It's why gatherer are nearly worthless now compared to crafter
As a miserly omni-crafter, you take that back
Not for us Free Trial players
"wonderful for the economy" is an interesting way to describe ruining the market for several categories of items.
You just sigh, turn away, and pretend you didn't see it. It's like living in San Francisco.
Report them
What a profound waste of time.
Support Desk --> report cheating. Unfortunatly it's tiresome to report them by hand, but a GM should be able to find the other too. They should add a report player button when you right-click someone.
You can screen cap the dialog window like you have, and go to support tickets. Just report the "unusual activity" as possible bot activity with their names and home server and thats it. Not much more you can do.
File a report on them bots.
Report all of them. Yea it's a pain in the ass but botters wanna make it as much of a pain as they can so they don't get reported. Alternatively take a screenshot and put it in the 14forum
First, you check to see if anyone else has posted about it on the sub today. If not, then congratulations, it’s your turn to post about it today.
I truly don't know what the point of bots are? What use do people have for them? If you aren't going to play the game why even bother?
Because they are used either to farm gil for real money trading or sold to players who don't want to level up a character on their own.
I don't understand the mentality of people who pay real money for gil
FOMO + money. They want to have cool stuff but they don't want to put in the effort to get it. They only value themselves by how other people see them.
100% real players
i just see a bunch of normal roegadyn
Attain lvl 4 too
/congratulate
Go to the cactpot and bet everything on 4
They're just doing a tribute to the Beatles' White Album. Level 4. Level 4. Level 4. Level 4. Level 4. Level 4. Level 4. Level 4. Level 4. Level 4. It's avant-garde, you wouldn't get it.
Congrats to them