SE Stepped Up Their Antibot Game?

If you bot in an unpopular zone, you have nothing to fear. But if you're in a good zone, you're asking for it. If you're in KRT, you have to know you're taking a risk.

My personal opinion on this stuff is whatever is best for the game, if it's someone taking the P I will report them (botting Aello 24/7 during campaign or obviously speed hacking) but if it's a real player botting some capacity points or Ml at night I don't care. There are plenty of camps.

It's better for the game for them to pay the sub and be around doing stuff during the day, than not.

NO.

Leave him/her in Assura.

Im sure because of him/her, in a couple of days, Assura will be purest server in existance.

(Plus, none wants him/her anywhere, so stop giving bad advices)

FTFY

Chihuahuas arent dogs

That makes sense. ^^

Last week was over 80k I think? The number goes fluctuating whenever the free login campaign starts.

You act like EPing a job to 50 is a thing that needs to be done...

I can tell a lot about a FFXI player by whether they think ML50 is important/needed or not.

Most of the ML50 players I know are very inexperienced and unskilled at the game with incomplete characters and dysfunctional swaps. Not all, obviously, but most. And they keep buying more MLs thinking it will solve their problems, then show up at events bragging about how they're so strong right before they get flattened.

Im botting smn on a char that will never be on smn for content because I want that whole master level board in blue.

It has nothing to do with “ML50 is needed”. The same reason I have all jobs mastered, i have all jobs merited, its not a matter of utility, I want it capped.

I like how you responded to that then glossed over / ignored the part where Carby had a resident snitch who *** up their rep so bad they hopped servers to hide their identity.

No one likes a snitch

I personally don't care if people bot. However, I much prefer they bot in a zone that won't affect people --- like myself --- who are actively trying to play.

So I am not being pedantic about your words, and this is not personal to you, but the word "Snitch" and "Snitching" is thrown around and being misapplied. It generally refers to being an informant or revealing information about the wrongdoing of others while you yourself are also engaging in wrongdoing, usually in exchange for a lesser sentence or to avoid punishment. A person who reveals or exposes the wrongdoing of others isn't a snitch at all, he's just telling.

I get that there's a negative connotation to speaking about other people's cheats/exploits in the game, but I would have to agree with Thorny that a "snitch" (what you consider to be), while petty, isn't wrong, unless that person too is engaging in bad behavior. If someone is cheating/botting, it can affect other players, and those players do have a right to report it if they feel it affects them. Why exactly is that frowned upon? Now do I think the botting/cheating of others affects most players in a significant way that you have to go out of your way to report every single person you see? Hell to the naw; that's just a person being petty for the sake of it, not because they are truly harmed by the actions of others. Maybe a little bit, but not significant enough for it to matter.

Now let's say the crime isn't botting, but something like duping Dynamis medals. You become aware of a person who found a massive exploit in the game and can completely ruin the economy and playing experience of others. Would you report this person for these exploits? Would you consider this "snitching"? It all depends on the circumstance IMO. Interestingly enough, Thorny "snitched" on that entire operation a few years ago, and literally escaped any/all criticism of being a "snitch", even though he openly admitted to reporting and exposing it because it affected his bottom line. And that situation literally messed with the game in an adverse way. Yet, nobody had the pitchforks out for him then. But we are gonna jump all over some complete random reporting 24/7 bots? Loool, THAT'S some petty ***.

Now your analogies of a person in a neighborhood reporting a lesser crime over a more serious one, again, is petty, but that's not the same as snitching. That is reporting bad behavior because you don't want that ***around you. Snitching would be if you were selling weed and you had a competitor on the block, and you told the cops about his activities to get him off the block while you can continue selling weed yourself.

Personally I make a point to not do content with people who go around reporting other individual players for things like botting unless i know their grasp of game mechanics is good enough to not make a false report. Not because I'm afraid of being busted for something against the ToS, but because when you report other players it puts you in SE's crosshairs and their ability to verify reports is limited, along with the fact GMs will just make mistakes. I don't want some numbnuts reporting me for flee hacking if I used a Hermes Quencher or legit movement speed gear, I know people claim people don't get banned for this but I can speak to firsthand experience that they do and you have 0 recourse. This was different 10 years ago when they dragged you to jail and you could have a conversation with the GM, now they just shoot first and move on.


I've heard a lot of people say this, it's a common conspiracy theory that SE has some stake in RMT operations. I agree there's no basis for it and not true, but I think the idea stems from the impression that the same RMT bots have been doing the same things for years with no repercussions while individual players using easyfarm for EP get banned. That when combined with their years of aggressive anti RMT stance in the past while the bots sit there in plain sight for years on end does seem fishy, but like most conspiracies the reasons typically boil down to incompetence and technical limitations rather than some shady dealing. I've heard it a lot, though.

Who? Look like you have edited your posts a lot. I am not hiding my identity like some of you pussies on the official forum.

I was heavily botting on Asura like wgaf. SE knew it and tried to do something different like making FFXI more casual content for solo players so we can stfu and let them focus on FF14 issues.

I had one player sent me /tell like this

"Hahahahahaha you goofy.
You are being reported. ^^"

I laughed and ignored it. I was just sick of disconnections.

I mean, people refuse COR with rolls +7 because the COR is not a...well, roll+8, why would they accept anything short of ML50?

You can only be considered human if you are maxed in every single attribute gear, so either you bot to become something remotelly better than a pile of feces, or you will simply rot in ground till the earth absorb the bad use of carbon that is you, filthy ML49 with roll+7.

Falling into the emptyness or being reported because some has a sick dezire to happy report the other, pick your poison!

That I get, I wish SE made lvling more fun and interactive. The only time it was fun, they plugged it (Nest), they should make zones with link/aggro +nm pop that can reach 1M+ per hour, with clear 2hr limit (another instance?!?), but instead we get killing crab/bats/colibri mob that cant kill you, don’t aggro, don’t link, so boring with a reward 100K/hour max is made to be botted so you can spend time with your family. Frack even doing 9/9 HQ give you 16K EP!!! Wtf…

These the same people that struggle to clear v20 t3s. I wouldn't pay them any attention

Point of this thread was just to see if anyone had been noticing a decline in botting numbers.


Reporting bad? I'm also not fixating?


I don't think I've ever indicated that I take pleasure or revel reporting others, in or out of this thread. I also don't go looking for others to report.


And I do appreciate the people on the forums who answer my questions, really.

I do enjoy the community I've met/made on Asura, I don't have problems overall. Again, I just figure reporting blatant botters at camps where nonbotters go after rolling up and set themselves up on nonbotters, is totally fine.


This is usually the extent of my reports, and usually when I get rolled up. I don't see a problem reporting when someone sets up on me, and why should anyone. I'm not going to leave a camp I was at first because someone decided to throw their bot up on me.

Small dog take.

edit: Crazy to read some of the comments. Some of them assuming I just go around with a notepad looking for trouble when that's not the case.

The guy who replied to my post at 13:52 from a post I made at 12:40

Im not editing posts an hour later. 2-3 minutes, 5 max. Then Ill double post for this very reason.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/snitch
noun
: one who snitches : tattletale

tattletale:
chiefly US, informal
: someone (such as a child) who tells secrets about what someone else has done : one who tattles : informer

informer:
1
: one that imparts knowledge or news
2
: one that informs against another
specifically : one who makes a practice especially for a financial reward of informing against others for violations of penal laws


https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/snitch
to secretly tell someone in authority that someone else has done something bad, often in order to cause trouble:

Yeah, I can appreciate that online dictionaries (that are edited by people) can have definitions that reflect what the common belief among people is, but that's not at the root of what a word really means. (For example: the word "woke" in every online dictionary is completely made up *** that has nothing to do with the original meaning of the word, because it was co-opted and re-branded for an agenda, but I digress).

A snitch was originally regarded as someone who surreptitiously reveals information about the wrongdoing of others while engaging in his own wrongdoing, usually when crimes are involved and there is some kind of deal or incentive to him to reveal it (usually a lesser sentence or immunity from punishment). This is specifically why people don't like snitches, because most of the time the snitch is dirty his damn self, and nobody likes two-faced people. But a snitch isn't really a person who tells on someone else. I don't intend to get into word semantics, because I know what you and others mean when you say "nobody likes a snitch", but it is being misapplied beyond the original understanding.

Example: If someone murdered your entire family and you were aware of who did it, are you a snitch for telling the police so that the person faces justice? If you are in a car accident and the insurance company asks who hit who, are you a snitch for telling them what happened?

I don't mean to derail, but the campaign against "snitching" is super lame and played out. IDGAF, if someone is doing wrong around me and I am affected in an adverse way, I am telling whoever I feel has the authority to correct the situation. And if nobody else can fix it, I will find a way myself. Now this absolutely does not apply (to me) to a video game, because...it's a game and I am not about to lose sleep about someone who gained points faster or runs through purple hallways for an hour more effectively than me. Like really, are we calling people who report others in a 20+ y/o video game "snitches" lol

It's a pretty consistent pattern for many years now for SE to do bans fairly regularly. I can't provide an exact time reference but lets say 2-3 times a year for sake of argument. People cheat, get caught and banned, and make new accounts. Only recently with the FFXIV connection has there been any significant change in actual new/returning players. They aren't banning any more or less than they have in the past, but if you're seeing results of reports you've made it could certainly seem that way.

They constantly ban, in very small numbers. I would estimate there are 'waves' twice a week, always at ~2 AM EST on a weekday. Usually Tuesday and Thursday. I believe what people are observing is just a spike in highly noticeable accounts being banned. Nobody notices if one bot out of 40 active RMT parties gets hit or a nobody player on a backwater server gets tapped for speedhacking. But, if two or three of your friend list get hit in consecutive weeks, it's worth chatting about.

Go too long without anyone you associate with getting banned and you start to think they don't happen. Until, eventually, it's in your social network again.

Thanks, I wasn't aware it was that frequent.

Frequent but insignificant. It's like 50 every thursday.

The pool is vast and they drain a cup every week. You'd never even notice if you weren't looking for it.

Well, they actually have a page where they make public the number of accounts banned and money frozen.

And you can pretty much notice there is a monthly "limit" they can issue bans, probably a cap of their capacity to check reports, make a basic investigation and dealing the veredict.


They are definitively banning LESS overall over time (considering their own numbers). Probably because they must be reducing the budget with staff for FFXI.

Yeah but the ban reports are basically a wash. They "might" hit 1-2 of your close circle of friends once every few months. They ban dozens of bot accounts that are replaced within a day or two by a bot army. It's a perpetual cycle (even SE themselves said it was like a game of cat and mouse). Then once a year or whatever, they put out some bogus *** STF report where they say they banned thousands of accounts and removed billions of gil from circulation (but leave out that thousands of accounts re-appeared shortly after the bans took place). It's a complete nothingburger in the grand scheme

They update the STF page every month

http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/rule/specialtask.html

I guess they haven't done January yet, but it seems to update pretty regularly.

It still cracks me up looking back at 2008. They banned 7k accounts and only removed 1.5b from the economy. So many accounts and so little gil by today's standards

Op namedropped the bot by name, which reminds me.

It will never not be good that they made a unit to deal with RMT and called it Special Task Force Unit (STFU).

Again perpetuating the myth that ML50 is some kind of basic level of accomplishment that all veterans should be expected to have by the time their char is fully geared.

A COR should be +8 long before ML50 if they have any sensible priorities.