SE Stepped Up Their Antibot Game?

Pretending that other people's gameplay doesn't affect you in an MMO is pretty laughable to me, TBH. I know that I'm the king of counting small advantages and all but like...

If someone bots their job to master (CP), they're going to then decide to buy gear (maybe from you, maybe against you?).
If someone bots their job to ML50, they're going to being competing with you for places in PUGs or statics.
If someone bots and then sells their CP items for gil, they're getting gil. This might also be the (only?) way that they're capping sparks/accolades every week, more gil
As said above, someone botting could take all the desirable camps that you want to EP at.
If someone bots their CP/EP, then that gives them more of their active play time back so they can do things like make REMA, farm gil, or do other tasks to improve their character. Again making them more competitive for static spots, PUGs, etc.
If someone has botted *whatever level of ML they consider necessary* for a new job/character, they will then be able to clear new content. This increases your queues (CoD HTBF being the most recent example) and introduces new resources into the market.

...you can go ahead and argue that all of these are minimal impacts or that they're immeasurable or whatever you want, but the fact is we're playing an MMO with a live auction house, it's completely impossible to untangle the impacts of someone botting from the rest of the community. Unless/until there is no scarcity of any resource, every action you take has the potential to affect (at least 1) other player.

Whether those harms rise to the level where you need to report someone, I don't personally feel that way but I understand how others could make different decisions. Like I said earlier in this thread, if someone gets banned it's not the fault of the person who reported them, it's 100% the fault of the person who got banned. They *** around and found out, simple as that.


TBH, I don't think it's possible to get banned just for using a bot to farm EP. I'm extremely confident that, at least in my experience, everyone I know who's been banned in the past ~5 years was using other tools at the time they got banned. I personally believe that it was one or more of those other tools (that RMT don't use) that got them popped.

Unfortunately (for cheaters) SE doesn't say WHICH thing you did or tell you why you got banned, which leaves some room for speculation. Of course everyone claims "all they did" was use XYZ tool and whines about how it's exactly what the RMT are doing but I don't buy it.

I think the list of people who use easyfarm/cureplease but don't use tako/anchor is extremely small (and probably still playing the game).

And yet a lot of people have staunchly defended that these bots are the reason why REMA currencies and those prized +1 items arent even more expensive.

Bots farm Dynamis, currency goes down in value.
Bots stop farming Dynamis because currency is so far down in value, now people complain that the relic they were considering making isnt worth it.

Knife cuts both ways. People's botting/cheating affects you, but we usually only mention the negative implications from it, not the "benefits". (not condoning, just stating a fact)

Exp/farm bots are just more obvious to other players than anything else, and get reported more often. Before this spirals into which 3p tools are considered ok, and which are not (the gearswap argument), it is simply easiest to notice repetitive motion and action than other things.

I guess you could follow someone around and catch them using anchor or speed hacks, and I have known people who use those with no fear of consequence around people they don't know.

For movement related stuff there are at least two different checks, one for zoning too fast and another for desyncing your position with the server. Either is likely to put a flag on your account and potentially get banned for.

Whether or not SE has to get a certain type or number of flags to consider action, we may never know.

Can't this (maintenance mode?) be explained by lag? I thought a while ago someone said that any latency modifications like JA0wait are considered non-detectable because it looks similarly to lag from the server.

If you run around long enough with altered movement speed, or warp around constantly, you get force disconnected with POL 4006 error.

Bots give a weird vibe when it comes to the excitement and fun of the game. When I returned and got excited to see a lot of people in KRT and then my friend told me "they're probably all bots" I got a little sad. I'm sure there were at least some real people there, but that's just the vibe.

When I got excited I hit mlv40 on one of my jobs mostly from doing daily content, instead of receiving all "congratz" I remember hearing "XYZ has multiple lv50s, they 'farm while sleeping' tho but they can invite you if you want".

I'm not against 3rd party tools, but the vibe is really killed when it becomes accepted as part of the culture to the extent that it is. I don't really know where the line is, and at the end of the day I really don't care if people quietly do it, but it bugs me when people start defending it or making it so obvious as the normal

I'm not sure from a server side what can/can't be detected, but from a "player with eyeballs" perspective, JA0wait is incredibly obvious to notice. As are the "WS while disengaged" thing from GS, Anchor, and lots of other things.

I have my doubts about whether GMs (if any exist) could tell the difference and I very much doubt that systems could detect it. I also very much doubt that actual human beings are watching FFXI gameplay to determine who to ban.

At the end of the day though, it doesn't really matter what the method is. If you break the ToS, you're playing with fire and gambling hoping that the tools you think are OK are undetectable, that nobody will report you, or whatever other random things might cause you to get banned. If you didn't realize this then you've had your eyes and ears closed for years, sorry bud.

It's entirely possible that (mass) reports get your character flagged for scrutiny and that's what causes you to get banned. It's also entirely possible that reports go directly into the trash and your friend got banned because they were obviously cheating and SE bans some % of obvious cheaters every week to keep people on their toes.

Also, and I feel like this bears repeating for the people in the nosebleeds: you get a suspension before the ban. I don't know of a single person I've ever met who was banned without a warning. Maybe it was different in the Salvage wave times, but these days absolutely nobody is banned without a warning first. If you keep cheating after that, you can't really blame others for your repeated behavior. JFC grow some nuts and take responsibility.

I'm gonna reverse my opinion about exp bots not harming others. ML aren't required to beat the hardest content in the game, but they are one of the lowest common denominator activities than people can team up for, and between sellers and bots, that social interaction has all but completely been removed from the game. You might see shouts for exp parties, but everyone wants to play their current job AND have an ideal party setup with a COR, and when those conditions aren't met, are much less likely to join.

At lot of this started with the introduction of trust as well. which is bassically "free bots" it became less common that people would team up for EXP/CP whatever. if it was not for getting leached during a cleave.

Trust did huge steps into making the MMORPG into a MSORPG

Botting might not "harm" anyone in a direct way, but it can certainly affect everyone indirectly.

Imagine if most players hit ML50 very fast and this enabled them to clear the highest level of content SE put out significantly easier (this is kinda a poor example, because MLs don't magically work like this). When SE is designing the next wave of battle content, they might make it significantly harder than what is capable for a normal player. Their data might suggest that most players are ML50 and the current battle content isn't challenging enough, so they make the next wave even harder to compensate for the overall strength in characters. Those who didn't hit ML50 are immediately at a disadvantage because the content is geared for ML50s and not you.

It's almost like when SE started putting massive amounts of defensive traits on all gear because they had intended for monsters to do more damage to players, so people had to be ready for it. If you weren't prepared with the right sets, you'd get wrecked, and now those sets became standard. Not saying this is exactly what happens when people bot, but SE has timelines on when they anticipate people will hit certain milestones. If players push way ahead of those early, it might force their hand to release something prematurely before the majority of players are even prepared for it.

I understand what you are saying here, but its poised in such a way where its easy to consider the inverse effect. If there are more ML50 people with REMAs then there are more people available for pugs which have more people participating in end game is arguably a net boon for a game on life support. It also keeps people engaged longer and keeps things selling on the marketplace.

As someone said, bots are a knife that cut both ways. We are all sit here and reap the benefits of having an egregiously botted community (cheap currencies, actually having alex/beit/pluton/riftborn) but admonish the annoyances, like trying to farm up a relic piece or oneiros gear in Dynamis jueno.

Bots are only good as the ecosystem they are allowed to thrive in, no game is great at preventing them but some games are good at making their efforts not matter. Unfortunately FFXI is no such game with steep grinding requirements around every corner.

I'd argue that SE knows the benefits of the bots and that is why they don't remove them all. More bots = more subs and more accessible stuff = more players for longer duration. I can only imagine how daunting this game would look from a fresh level 99 in a world where bots weren't driving down prices or generating gil.

I also want to say on a technical side that anchor or more or less non-detectable since it never checks again to see if the client received the "knock back" packet correctly. I doubt anyone was banned for that outside of reporting.

I STRONGLY disagree with this. Trusts are pre-programmed NPCs that merely allow you to make progress in smaller groups/solo that you otherwise wouldn't have without them. They don't replace players in the least bit, because they can't wear gear, use macros or modify their abilities, so they are as plain and vanilla as they come. 90% of trusts are worthless to players, and most just view them as buff bots to pump themselves up. But trusts are vastly inferior to even an average player, and they have large limitations. Trusts were just a bridge to assist players who might struggle finding support in an organic way from PUGs, but they don't replace actual players at all.

Bots affecting players? That's so 2018.

That dude on the official forum, once I become a suspected bot, he wouldn’t chat or agree with anything I said. I kept suggesting he should just leave Asura and head back to where he came from, but no. All he wanted was to see me banned. A year later, and nothing’s really changed. It seems like SE made the choice to stop weighing in on illegal matters, but I’m not sure why. (SE loves friendly bots and dislikes angry legitimate players?) He started pestering SE to add more slots to the blacklist. But honestly, it doesn’t do him any good because once he blocks all the bots and the spamming /yells, there’s nothing left for him to read. Nobody pays attention to /yell anymore. So, he finally got that blacklist update he was after, but still, nothing’s different. Five years later, and he completely lost his brain cells, still seeing me post on the official forum and can’t even remember how to play since the game has changed so much. He quit and I haven't seen him back.

He was just a pure vanilla player who had no idea how things work.

I read these forums a lot, as I feel it's the best place to think about how to do things efficiently. I think there's plenty of perspective from players who are successful.

I will now speak from a minority on the forum. I am a low tier idiot.

I have never merced or used bots and I'm close to mastering one job over years and years of on and off casual play, mostly by grinding out levels on Thf while farming omen for detritus to sell.

I was not always a low tier idiot. I was one of the founders of a 75 era endgame shell on a character I gave to someone else when I quit.. whom promptly banned it by POS hacking. I think since I started my character again in 2010, the only thing I haven't surpassed is captain rank (from lack of trying). I want to note I was also a raid leader for Heroic WoW, back when that was the hardest difficulty, and have raided Mythic a few times usually getting X-1/X clears. I was once a high tier idiot. I can if push come to shove press the buttons really good.

When I think of having to do the footwork again to form a healthy LS and push together with a group of friends into endgame, a deep weariness fills me. Many of the problems below CAN be solved by making your own group - aka shouting for a few hours and hoping someone takes pity on me thus reducing the time I spend doing it myself. I have had terrible luck trying to get Delve clears. I also do not do well joining groups.

Why? I am what I would consider a 'gimp', an anchor somewhere in the bottom 10 percent of most jobs I have geared. My only blessing is I know I should do more Escha fights (7+ years ago when people did them for gear). Lots of pieces in my sets are in the LQ tier on the job guides. Ambuscade +2s for days. If I keep grinding, I will eventually have enough gear that it will be worth figuring out gearswap for mage jobs. I just use macros ATM.

I try to make progress on leveling or gear every day but some days I do not feel like killing the same sets of mobs over and over and over. Sweetwater trash, boars, bugs... Other days I'll half *** soloing Apex Efts for a few hours watching anime. Sometimes I pay attention and properly 3 step with trusts. Progress feels glacial any given way, though I also spent time, too much perhaps, finishing an empy weapon and hitting 99 on every job.

I sometimes group up, and the CP is nice, but those groups are few and far between.

I'm dreading that if I want to advance my 'useful' non damage jobs I'm going to be locked into endlessly shouting for CP parties as well as months of grinding money and materials for ultimate weapons that are now the baseline for those support jobs. (Yagrush, for my own sanity on whm, and Idris because it seems many players can either whip out their own ML geo or just get their dualbox geo at this point.)

Many of the things I need to push out of NQ/garbage gear can be solo'd by jobs once they have a solid set of gear wearing gear that can be soloed... and master status per testimonials.

I want to stress that I can chip away at the above with a few hours of play a day and will inevitably give myself a good starting point, but I feel like an idiot when I consider that I *could* use a program to be doing the drudge work of smacking crabs while I'm sleeping or at work so that I can actually engage in the parts of the game that are interesting. I am electing to roll the boulder up the hill when there is a ski lift. I would just need to check in every few hours to dump points, then let a bot go back to wacking monsters.

Yes, There are times when EXPing is relaxing or can be gathered while clearing other objectives, but the other 1500 JP is EFT after EFT after EFT.

Same with earning gil vs buying gil/botting items - I spent hours and hours killing Aello to build Twashtar. Bird after bird. I know I've been working on it for years because 2018 I was at Aello when some idiot started the other half of my building on fire. I even did some outside of the campaign, mostly when I needed high end mats to throw on the AH on my mule. I maxed out ambuscade items in months when I could get a party and sometimes got a few HMPs when I couldn't and had to do regular solo.

If I was botting those plates in 2018, I still would have been living in a hotel for a few weeks, but I'd also have more heavy metal plates. I'd also have spent those ambuscade points on getting the proper capes for other jobs.

Tonight I spent 50 dollars on groceries (whole other rant). I can search how much Gil 50 dollars is. I can see one of the first results tells me if I had toast and water tonight for dinner, I could have spent 10 dollars less on sushi, and gotten 20 million gil.

That was a joke - I work my *** off with insane hours to be middle class I could have gil on my sushi every night. I have uncashed bonus checks sitting on my nightstand that are each worth 6 aeonic weapons. I could deposit them, dump one into pay pal, and stop worrying how I will make gil for beitseu or alexanderite or whatever else crap I don't need for a job that's a means to an end. But I am a low tier idiot. I treat this game as a hobby. There is something in my brain that tells me if I take a shortcut I will be a loser.

Corsair, the only other job I liked enough to hit 75 in the before times, is at 99 and will likely never come out for a party. To be ready to play need to just grind 14,000 more merit points to finish nagelring for SB spam, 2100 jp and 80 mil for +8 rolls. Or to hope that I can get a pity party with my feeble +5 rolls.

I know some of you can knock out 0-2100 in 12 hours but I do not know how to do that, nor do I have the depth of gear to pick a job and go HAM right at fresh 99 (Cough *Nyame* COUGH)

I respect anyone who has the fortitude to put years of work into building a character with multiple high ML jobs who can fulfill any role and do it well. I did that in the 75 era with multiple sets for red mage and corsair.

Now, because the baseline feels so high to be useful on other jobs I think I'm going to take another break when I hit 2100 on thf and I don't know if I'll be back, if I wasn't an idiot I'd just bot and enjoy the game more and get more parties without stressing that my ***sucks.

The point of the game is progression, we are all goal orientated and once you achieve your goals you'll lose the drive to play. I learned this multiple times on multiple games, and the only time I quit XI was when I had nothing left to work on. When I came back years later I made multiple characters, to never have that happen again.

This is why Mlev is as hard to cap as it is, you're not supposed to cap it in long grind sessions. They know you're goal orientated so they gave you a goal you'll struggle to cap, cause they slowed content additions and want you to keep playing. Which is ultimately good, cause it keeps you playing and engaged with the game you enjoy.

Botting isn't the smart way, it's ultimately self defeating. That's why I don't do it personally, I know I'll lose motivation if I cap my fav jobs out. When I came back I was happiest grinding out Cap points, and the most unhappy when I got master and logged in and had nothing to do and not progression left on my fav job.

I do; and not just because they occupy good camps. ML botting drains potential members for real parties because why waste time if you can just buy it.
It's also going to affect balancing of future content if a good chunk of the population is Mlvl 50 instead of in the 15-30 range which puts none botters more and more in a predicament where they are either forced to farm the higher lvls or buy/bot themself. Imho it's only fair to be pissed about that considering the steep curve of MLs only is that steep because of bots in the first place.

People here can repeat those phrases like "it doesn't affect you" or "it's a 20 year old game" like a mantra. Doesn't make that statements more true or relevant.


BTW has anyone considered that the most active reporters might be RMT themself? Puts more strain for SE to sift thru reports so chance their bots get cought thins a bit down and most importantly it eliminates competition.
I'd be surprised if there was no RMT out there that hasn't automated the reporting process.

Their policies and procedures are a bit baffling, I don't think I could make sense of them and it's fair that most people using EF are likely to use other tools, however it's worth considering what they technically can and cannot detect without some client side agent. There's a technical element to it and that's what makes it a little more confusing.

Things like anchor could theoretically be detected - they could add a check to see if your pos changes after being knocked back, but then they would have to consider things like your back against a wall, knockback reduction gear, shadows, etc - it's a fairly complex set of conditions that would likely lead to false positives. I don't know that it's realistic for anchor to be detected.

OTOH I'd expect detecting engaged time is easy or even EP gain over a period of time (or both). No one is reasonably going to be engaged for 45hrs in a 48hr period. The thing I still don't grasp is why, if they are detecting this way, so few bans are issued. They could just be randomly selecting a subset of people who exceed a certain engaged threshold but that doesn't seem likely to me given their history.

Other tools like ASE will depend on how they are used, I'm honestly surprised they haven't patched or started detecting that in the way most people use it. That said if you don't interact with anything that isn't normally there, then they can't pick up on that either since (As far as I can tell) it just forces hidden things to render client side.

I'd assume Pos warping can be detected as can movement speed outside of the bounds of what the game permits, but you could probably safely use movement speeds of +25% or whatever via Tako and them not detect it, but something like 500% or w/e, that's probably pretty easy to pick up on. They could add checks to see if you have the proper buffs and/or gear to meet your speed, but again I doubt they'll do that.

It's also possible there are corner case bugs in EasyFarm, CurePlease, EliteAPI, or Tako that trigger in rare circumstances that get detected by the server and result in an automatic ban. I'd expect server side to have at least some sanity protections against a client sending too many messages in a window of time or something similar, but maybe not. If there's a bug in one of these that causes some condition to occur that the server can detect in rare cases, that could be an explanation also.

It's hard to make sense of, I know people who botted almost daily for years and never got banned until one day they just got popped. I know others who rarely ever did it, then were banned after only a few times. SE doesn't seem like the type to randomly enforce detections, but I've yet to hear an explanation that makes sense other than just that - it's a random subset of the few things they can detect that they ban to discourage it but not wipe out the player population.

The only thing you need to know is it's random.

I'll never understand why it always has to be explained. It's blatantly obvious.

You can bot for an hour or a hundredthousand hours. If rng doesn't pull your number, you're golden.

No, I get it, it just still seems silly to me. If they are so confident in their detections for tools like this then why ban so few at a time? Why allow RMT to run rampant when historically they've aggressively pursued it?

Maybe they are trying to discourage cheating while still enforcing the rules as an example and not wiping out the player population, but SE has taken a low tolerance approach towards these things in the past. It seems strange to me they'd have a high confidence detection mechanism and limit it to banning a random small subset of players cheating.

I agree it's all that makes sense, it just seems weird for them which is why I still have to think there might be another underlying reason.

Because square is a company first and a game owner second.

You pop all the bots today, XI is toast tomorrow. That's just bad business.
(Not literally closed, just severely reduced profits, which would likely snowball hard. The banned won't come back if the enforcement goes that hard, groups will break, friends will quit etc, smaller pool to sell to so mercs quit, no customers, rmt will quit, it's all held up by just pretending it's not happening.)

I don't think ML50 was a decision based on people botting. I really thinking the botting is the direct result of SE just not respecting peoples time.

Maybe the people who are botting every day for 2 years don't POS warp. Maybe they don't use tako at all. Maybe they don't use Superwarp or SellNPC or whatever other random ***that the next person is using.

Sending packets the server isn't expecting seems like an obvious way for them to detect you're doing *** stuff.

Ultimately I don't have the answer to which things will/won't get you banned and frankly I don't think most people are honestly listing out everything they use to their friends when they get banned. Even if not lying, there's like 50 programs installed and most users don't have the first clue how most of them work or what risk they pose. Plus people will move their dead body a month ago and then forget about it, or tako to an EP camp because they're too lazy to warp/walk/etc.

It's silly though. Trying to figure out how to avoid getting banned is easy: don't cheat. If you want to try to thread the needle of cheating with ABC programs but not XYZ programs, that's fine, but you can't exactly shockedpikachu when you get banned and pointing to other cheaters doesn't give you your character back. Seems really dumb to me.

No one wants to spend 200 hours getting ML50. Its *** boring as all hell. Its not like the XP grind where you did a couple hours then moved camps and/or got new abilities and/or popped on that new equipment. Its the same mobs, the same abilities (occasionally you'll get something new and useful from the SJ increase), the same equipment all the way through.

Dont believe me? Feel free to dig up all the pissed off comments when CN got nerfed. People complained because the quick EP route no longer exists.

What does the reporter do when all the RMT/botters are gone? There are no more reports to submit...and I have a sinking feeling they won't be content just playing the game, with whomever is left afterwards.

FFXI becomes 1/10th of it's current population, no one groups together people only play jobs of specific interests and not for collaboration or group play? ...Everyone stops talking to each other and then plays with trusts. FFXI becomes a Massively Single-Player Online RPG. (MSORPG?)

Yikes.

It's SE. FFXIV is experiencing the same thing. Why no ban to bots and rmt?

FFXI got more casual content for solo players and FFXIV is on the same path. Though, FFXIV doesn't feel like a MMORPG. It's a themepark and you play with your FC or non-FC friends most of time just like you play with your LS friends.

I love the person with control over the whole "people who bot are getting banned" situation is not the botter, but rather this illusory "reporter."

The real reason the community is dying isn't because cheaters cheated and got banned for cheating, it's because people reported the cheaters. They're the real cause of the problem.

How about, stick with me here, instead of botting EP until you get banned and then blaming the system, you just stop botting EP?


I agree. Just...don't get ML50 then. We keep going back and forth on this but like...your compulsion to get a blue number is your problem, not SE's or *anonymous reporter guy*'s

Let's face it, ML was a pretty lazy design compared to merit points and job points. You're definitely getting stronger and progressing your character, but there are only a handful of really useful traits and job abilities from sub job 59 compared to all the perks and new spells/ja/ws/etc. unlocked from merit and job points.

Did you ever wonder who supplied all of the spheres required to make 8 shields? Not picking on you but trying to illustrate that there is tons of cheating that goes unreported. I guarantee you no one was in control of their character 100% of the time on a smaller server to generate than many spheres, and correct me if I'm wrong but I believe you've stated you purchased rather than farmed most of yours.

Like it or not we all have benefited from cheaters and botters, but its only the ones that are inconvenient to us that get reported.

Absolutely, they were thanking me left and right for selling all kinds of Gobbiebag stuff at my bazaar while I was next to the NPC. It really helped them with their mules, and multi-boxing was getting more popular! Boosting profits for SE!

That was some years ago. lol