SE Stepped Up Their Antibot Game?

I've never said that we don't benefit from botters, everyone does and there's no getting around it. Unless you refuse to participate with the economy at all, there's no "conflict free" items in the game.

I did buy probably at least 75% of the spheres and farmed the rest, give or take. I certainly knew that the majority of people I was buying from were botting but as I said above it's really impossible to remain "clean" of these problems unless you're going to never buy anything off AH or bazaars. Be careful not to sell anything to someone who bought their gil either, otherwise you're gaining benefit from them buying gil!

...there's only so much you can do, and I'm not prepared to play solo self-found FFXI. I draw my lines, you draw your own. Just don't be surprised when the place you drew your line gets you banned; I know mine won't.

Adding stuff intended to be unattainable by the playerbase is a brilliant strategy.

How did that work out when PW was an 18 hour fight and AV was unkillable?

Anyways, you all use Windower, or Ashita, which is against the TOS

For the regular player there really are none. If currency prices plumet due to botting it also becomes increasingly unattractive to farm these currencies manually than it would without bots. At that point your gil sources are limited to time gated events which basically caps your progress.

It's only once you bot, buy gil, buy reward multipliers or have any other avenues of acquiring gil while putting significantly less effort into it then you start benefiting from the plummeted ingame currency prices due to botting.

Somehow, I wish FFXI could come back on console so anyone who plays is gonna try to figure out how they read TPs.

We've already been over that 300 times so I won't belabor the point for another 3 pages. I disagree.

Wasn't it WoW that gave people a free coupon to get their character from 1 to 99?

If SE did this today, would people be upset because of "cheating"?

Another good question Felgarr! I dont think ppl would be upset, I think there would be a LOT more mules.

Any time they make things easier than what the first wave of people had to do, someone gets upset. I don't think it would be seen as cheating, just easy mode. In FFXIV online store, you can buy story skips and instantly level to within 10 levels of the current cap. I'm sure the same services would sell in FFXI, too.

Yeah, more mules make a lot of sense. You can never have too many silver vouchers.

I think we need to look at things differently. Bots have both disadvantages and advantages. People complain about bots, but only when they are in competition. However, they don't say anything when it benefits them. When you go to farm something with competing bots, people are mean and start reporting, because they are jealous or simply want to be the first. On the other hand, when they buy something at the AH, they will never ask themselves how it was obtained. When you buy a weapon at 80M, you don't ask yourself how the materials were farmed, or how long it took. It doesn't matter, as long as you get the precious weapon. Are you simply going to refuse to buy this or that on the pretext that there is probably a bot behind it? I don't think so. Many people complain about bots, however they don't say anything or pretend not to see or know anything when it benefits them. On the other hand, there is an advantage to bots, it is that the prices are maintained in the AH. Which is still an advantage for the casual player who does not bot. He can also sell at a stable price and profit from it. Once again, he is not going to complain about it. This game is 20 years old, there have always been bots, and there will be until the end. The funny aside is that thanks to bots, many have been able to save their marriages.

Botting Exemplar points is bittersweet to me now.

Bitter because a grind this long really is bitter. Even if I grinded as my mainstay of play everyday for like 6 hours with Trusts with Master Chain 30s on Golden Crabs, I get burnt out after some weeks. Now really really fast, like maybe 1 hour, because Trusts are just so bad by comparison.

I myself grinded the 10000 job points for Oboro to R15 my Ragnarok. I did the entire 15 week grind with Trusts on Apex Poxhounds and Locus Ghost Crabs. The culmination of Master Levels gained from 15 weeks of grinding like mad almost everyday was Master Level 32. With about 200k buffer.

Not even to the half way point total Exemplar wise. Ok, I'm climbing a very high mountain.

But then I actually start doing content with other people. They all seem to have multiple ML50s. They all seem to have multiple ML40s. They all seem to have jobs they kinda sorta care about in the mid ML30s. I think to myself how? How in the world? And it turns out they're botting EP overnight. But hey, it also turns out that because I came off my hermit path, they will let me partake. I don't even have to start botting myself. They'll let me leech. Hello Abyssea key parties/alliance exp where many, many, many people just leeched off the few actually doing work (I miss chill alliance exp).

But I don't feel good about it, so I stay up as long as I humanly can, exping beside them like they are highly efficient trusts.

This shows me the potential of player driven exp. When a party has full BRD buffs and COR buffs constantly, every DD in the party can solo Locus mobs like they are easy prey and kill them in a three step SC and go to Master Chain 522(when I passed out) like it's not difficult to do.

And doing that, even though my friend was AFK sleeping, while his 5 characters slaughtered colibri, and I slaughtered Wivres(they are fun to 3/4 step), the EXP actually felt fun again. Being buffed to the nines, using full potential of a player character group, it was amazing. Plus my friend stayed and chatted with me for the first half.

And then when I woke up, I'd DC'd anyway and missed out on 10 hours of his characters grinding, and had no way to get back into the party.

It was all of the sweetness, but it turned bitter again cause it revealed people really could EP while awake, and they could do it in an absolutely monstrous fashion if they were willing.

But, most people aren't as easily entertained as I am. And when you introduce the human element back into the setting, the buffers get tired of reapplying the buffs. The actual human players don't remember their 4 step SCs, neither how to solo them nor how to coordinate the timing on them between characters.

It circles back to the classic problem inherent in a lot of third party tools, that problem being the removal of player input and player reality. When the LUA breaks, or doesn't account for some upgrade a player didn't account for, the player screams bloody murder nowadays, and I can only imagine what that's like. You get weird complaints like, "Why can I only use one weapon skill?" "Cause your LUA is allowing you to do it without engaging, normally you have to engage to do weaponskills."

TL;DR - A lot of players have optimized their own input out of their own play, and it extends to EXPing. No one's willing to exp in person, because it is such a repetitive task. Which makes botting all the more appealing. If you can barely get people to fully engage with content that involves bosses and strategies, what hope do you have of getting them to fully engage with EXP?

-------

When a(the) mode of leveling is naked in the buff with trusts for the first 99 levels, just what kinds of parties are you gonna get if suddenly everyone had a change of heart and stopped botting their EXP?

At some point you just have to concede to the ebb and flow of how players do things now. You can never give scruples to the unscrupulous. You can never make the airhead think things through and care about proper play. You can't get the six boxer to single box. You can't make the vanilla puritan install windower.

You're gonna benefit from bots, and you're gonna get screwed by them too. You're gonna benefit from other people, and you're gonna get screwed by them too.

Draw the line anywhere you're comfortable. Always realize that someone out there drew the line a little further back or a little further forward.

I don't use windower

I am windower

*throws a smoke bomb and hides behind a curtain*

You forgot "It doesn't affect you".

wasn't there just recently complaints about some REMA material skyrocketing because someone with too much money got impatient and bought way over price?
Relic currencies are also a great example, steadily droping over months till they below 1k/piece and once bots decided it's not worth it skyrocket to the moon.

Nah man, introducing individuals with way too much easy money into a system only opens windows and doors to funny buisness.

I just witnessed a conversation in an LS recently where two people were quabbling about one of them buying HMPs for twice the monthly price.

Guess what, the guy is a very well known gil buyer who comes to events dressed head to toe in buyable gear (and r25 su5 weapon), spends the first 60s of each fight letting his bot spam all the buffs, and by the time he engages the mob is already dead. He got invited to exactly one gaol fight then spent weeks complaining nobody was helping him get Ody clears.

Imagine by yourselves the rest of my rant, I'm sick and I don't have the energy to write it.

The hardcore extremely well geared players do ambuscade and cap out no matter what it is, everyone else struggles on the annoying ones and barely does them. So much less supply week 2-3 before patch.

If it's an annoying month the prices of many things will increase near the end of the patch, cause the more casual players don't do it so much and so supply drops off.

Always happens.

Level boost tokens only set your level to the minimum required to participate in the current expansion. So if you boosted, you'd start at level 70 and have to grind to 80 with everyone else. It's a catch-up mechanic more than an advantage so nobody looks down on it as unfair, cheating, P2W, ect.

If instanced content actually reward EP in a measurable fashion, this conversation will never happened as most ppl would leave the computer off instead of running those energy hog.

Good example: Flan BCNM 10 min, 60K

Bad example: sortie 9/9 HQ run, 1 hour 16K

Get real, people botting is their answer to terrible EP design, and everyone can go on forever to pinpoint stupid EP rewards

Moral of the story seems into be if you post about bot numbers and mention reporting, you’ll cause some salty forum people to get emotional and throw hands.

You can say just about anything and get someone to argue with you

And someone to argue with the respondent

Epic NPC account swapper always their for those indviduals.

Welcome to FFXIAH, where we rehash the same 3-4 arguments like clockwork!

Honestly, EXP design has been broke ever since they introduced Level Sync. Arguments like these date back to then.

That was when the high rollers took advantage of the system to do SMN Astral Flow merc burns of Korroloka Tunnel. Pay a merc team a vast quantity of gil. They take you and a level 20 mule to Korroloka. The mule is set as the level sync designee. They kill it. They have a level 75 outside player agro linking mobs like spiders and bats, and then train the whole zone to the SMN group. The SMNs all astral flow, killing over half of the zone. The guy paying them gets from level 20 to about level 40 or w/e in that single pull. They use mules to Wild Card the SMNs and repeat the process until the buyer is level 75. It could take them a few days of meet ups, but that was versus a couple months of serious exping.

Then beyond that, it became literally possible to never have to leave a good exp camp as long as you were replacing/cycling through sync designees. You could grind Valkurm dunes from 11 to 75.

Players have always taken whatever shortcuts they deemed necessary to get levels and to get to max level. It's just that if you go far enough into the past, there was a time where bots were a lot rarer with more GM eyes on the game, and the leveling process was more of a process with a lot less automation/things for players to exploit.

Abyssea was intended to upheaval all of that, and that's the point where devs decided to give us Fields of Valor and then Grounds of Valor. Ways for people to exp more efficiently that didn't involve abuse of level sync(you still could) nor Abyssea.

Now the game is in a state of devil may care, where we still get interesting updates (see you next year, Limbus), but the developer care is still relatively low compared to a decade or more ago.

I see people often say that master level grind is the revival of the old style of grind the game used to have, and I say that's poppycock, personally.

To get from level 74 to 75 was something like 44200 exp or thereabouts. That is only 221 high end VT/IT monsters fought with a full party of 75s to 72s. Not even accounting for chain bonus. You would only have to do Chain 5 44.5 times to get it.

To go from ML38 to ML39 takes about 585000 exemplar points. Locus mobs give about 300 before chains start. Still though, it's about the equivalent of going from level 74 to 75, 13 times back in the day. A little easier because the chains do start to build to 500~600 exp per monster(800 past a certain point for Wivres). That still means anywhere from 1000 to 1300 monsters killed, while accounting for chain bonus. Chain 5, 200 times(ok more like chain 30, 45 times w/e) , for one level, anyone?

You might ask what about merits? Well, merit categories used to be smaller with a lot less to get before you capped them out. 10 total in the HP MP category. 5 total in the Attribute category. 16 total in the combat skills category. Job specific merit categories were more, especially after group 2 came out. They did require more merits as you put them in, attributes being the most egregious at 3, 6, 9, 9, 9 (360k exp, roughly level 74 to 75, 9 times).

But, for the comparison's sake, you could get 74 to 75 and fully cap your buffer at 75 (90k for brevity). Then merit an attribute to 5/5 (up to 450k) and a combat skill to 5/8(570k). And that's just ML38 to ML39.

To get from ML49 to ML50 takes 3.3 MILLION exp. Enjoy getting from level 74 to 75 roughly 76 times (Chain 5, 3382 times anyone?). For a single level. Oh, by the way, exemplar lost on death is still scaling with the total you need. I hope you aren't dying anywhere along the way without the best raises imaginable.

Now then think about what happened after the level cap raised from 75. They immediately put in higher level monsters to the Promyvion zones, which have since been turned into high level apex monsters. Those camps lasted long enough for plenty of folks to get level 80 before Abyssea came out, in the old style on mobs far more dangerous than mere colibri.

But after that, from then on all the way to 99 cap pre-ilvl, we were given the insane exp possible from Abyssea(600 exp per kill at capped lights, not diminishe by alliance size with blue boxes give 1250 to the whole alliance whenever they pop), then FoV, and GoV. Yet it was only 55k exp to get from 98 to 99.

Everything about gaining Master Levels is far more tedious and lengthy. Haven't even mentioned how there's EXP bands for the first two types of EXP but not Exemplar.

They could implement more and easier fights like Peach Power, but even if they do, they're each gonna have the irksome entry requirements and the daily restrictions. And the playerbase will find out a meta comp for it, and not want to take, "bad jobs" to it. And insist that the exemplar reward is a pittance. But even if you did it every day, you only earn 1.6 million exemplar in an entire month. Which is enough to go from ML0 to ML25 roughly. But that's 2 months to not even go from ML49 to ML50, assuming it was your only source and that you do hard content that causes death.

You look at it that way, then look at the fact that if people really teamed up even with just 3 song +6 BRD, +5 roll COR, and +7 geomancy they could get 100k exemplar an hour... Then the higher end buffed and geared people could get 2~300k per hour... So you know, that 2 month grind done in 11 hours...(still just one level btw) it's easy to see why people are willing to bot. Not many people want to get together, and when buffers are required for the good per hour, that also means people playing jobs they don't like, progressing jobs they don't like, so that exp gain can be good.

And a lotta overnight botters don't have a 6 box capable of that. They're putting their character and maybe a dual box on auto kill, and getting like 300k exemplar for the whole night. If they don't DC and if no one else camps on top of them.

So the disparity in the low end of the grind vs. the high end of the grind is mind boggling. But even the high end is not getting done in one night.

I'm just glad all the tens of jobs I got to ML50, on multiple characters, spending thousands of hours, were all legit.


Btw, if I'm in CN at 3am and you message me and I don't reply it's because I am super focused!!!

Anyways. I didn't post to start anything with people, so let's all continue getting along :S

My posts are just silly and not meant to be taken seriously unless it's about Horizon. 0w0

Don't take it too seriously, people are just abrupt around here.

I've mentioned wivres a few times in conversation, they're one of the few mobs that have a positional. I suggested Ascended NMs from the Escha areas for Locus mobs in the survey as a means to spice up the content and get bots killed, SE has gone for blood before with the Gobbies vs Fish bots. I hope to one day see Locus Leaping Lizzy merc my friends.

Ah yes
The lottery ascended locus that has stats similar to a V15 tier 3 nm to *** the bots up. The legit players will be fine though, right?

Ascended mobs could break your chain, even if you were playing legit. At this point I'd just settle for more camps and for them to be "equal" in terms of mob level. Aggro/link fine, just don't give me a camp of locus iron giants.

On a separate note, another way to throw players a bone would be to relax the exemplar point death loss. Even Tanaka would think it's absurd.