Obvious botting and teleport hacking

[FeroXs]

There's a serious problem within FFXIV for teleport hacking and SE doesn't seem to be doing anything about it. Not only that, but these two tele-hackers in the video don't even attempt to hide the fact that they're doing it.



For anyone not able to watch the video; there are two characters who pop-up from the ground to pull the mob, then instantly go back under the ground so that the mob can't hit them. Once it's dead they teleport about 20 meters away and do the same.

[Petitssk]

Saw this happen in the Central Shroud on Sargatanas yesterday, filed a report, naming about five of them; hard to write down all the names when four of them stand on top of each other. Though it happened all over the zone anyway.

[3.141592]

Saw this happen in the Central Shroud on Sargatanas yesterday, filed a report, naming about five of them; hard to write down all the names when four of them stand on top of each other.

Switch between them, then right click -> send tell and copy / paste the names.

[Madeline]

It's really everywhere in this game. Not only do they teleport hack to gather, they're also bypassing the delay between swings while doing so. Leading to a very RMT dominated shard/crystal market. Kind of disappointing considering we crafters need those. I've just been making it a point not to purchase from them, but every day there are more and more of them it seems.

That said, I had no idea they were doing it to farm mobs now. Only a matter of time until the ones botting Spiritbond by Quarrymill, and the ones constantly farming Sheep, Snurbles and Diremites are doing the same.

Needs a better response time to these things. And some server side detection so they don't have to work so hard.

[arus2001]

I've seen mining bots around that try to be subtle by not teleporting, either. Basically anyone's who done some gathering knows the each level range has 4 spawns within a specific area, and of those 4, they have a few different pop locations. Well, the bots I've noticed will visit all of those possible locations even if they dug out the node earlier in the check before running off to repeat this process at the other 3. When done, they return to a specific spot and repeat the process all over again. If you're not paying attention it's easy to miss, but the behavior stands because it's seriously not how a human would mine.

[Lucavi]

Its been going on since launch, and if you want to be consistent, its been going on since XI.

[Niiro]

As someone with more than 20k of each kind of shard stocked from 1.0 the crystal market doesn't really effect me, but given the ridiculous amount of shards needed for higher level synths and gathering being the only (and absurdly tedious) source of them I wouldn't want to think about what shard prices would be like, especially on new servers, if RMT weren't around.

SE didn't really think the shard thing through and RMT kind of help in that sense.

(not really related to the RMT/botting problem, just an aside)

[Lucavi]

Their attempt at slowing down progression and the surplus influx of goods on the market has certainly backfired in terms of shards/crystals/clusters. There can be no argument there.

[Niiro]

They should have left crystals as they were in XI, something everyone gains from normal play activity and can sell on the market at the end of the day.

People who don't craft make some pocket change, people who do might have to buy a bit more.

They're too essential to the economy to only come from a single, exclusive activity/source, especially one as mind-numbing as gathering, and especially at the rate they can be gathered at VS the amounts needed for synths.

[FHT]

I've seen mining bots around that try to be subtle by not teleporting, either. Basically anyone's who done some gathering knows the each level range has 4 spawns within a specific area, and of those 4, they have a few different pop locations. Well, the bots I've noticed will visit all of those possible locations even if they dug out the node earlier in the check before running off to repeat this process at the other 3. When done, they return to a specific spot and repeat the process all over again. If you're not paying attention it's easy to miss, but the behavior stands because it's seriously not how a human would mine.

I saw it too, it also happen on gardening.

[Kincard]

Yeah, I don't know what the hell they were thinking when they made it so that you either mine one shard at a time (2 in certain nodes) or +3 per attempt by blowing a shitload of GP. There's a number of things they can do to fix it:

1. Make GP charge faster
2. Make shard blessings cost little GP, separate them into tiers if you care about the speed people get crystals and clusters but the latter is limited by unspoiled nodes anyway
3. Make all enemies have a chance of dropping shards like in XI
4. Make spirits drop more shards/crystals more often, whee more shit spam X at

If they got rid of RMT, the bright side would be that gathering would actually have something to make money from again I suppose, since selling crawler cocoons at 200 gil each wasn't exactly useful enough to encourage leveling those Xspam classes to 50.

[lexicum]

Yeah, I don't know what the hell they were thinking when they made it so that you either mine one shard at a time (2 in certain nodes) or +3 per attempt by blowing a shitload of GP. There's a number of things they can do to fix it:

1. Make GP charge faster
2. Make shard blessings cost little GP, separate them into tiers if you care about the speed people get crystals and clusters but the latter is limited by unspoiled nodes anyway
3. Make all enemies have a chance of dropping shards like in XI
4. Make spirits drop more shards/crystals more often, whee more shit spam X at

If they got rid of RMT, the bright side would be that gathering would actually have something to make money from again I suppose, since selling crawler cocoons at 200 gil each wasn't exactly useful enough to encourage leveling those Xspam classes to 50.

SE should also think of allowing people to convert crystals to shards and clusters to crystals.
They could make crystal and clusters

[Raldo]

In the absence of RMT, I think the lv50 nodes should just plain give more shards (or alternatively, have shard yields be based off of your stats). The bots just run around in broken lv1 gear from what I've seen, so the stats thing might be a better option.

[Rocl]

Honestly make the conversion an Alchemy recipe like it was in 1.0 but make it a double/single star synth since Alchemy has fucking awful lvl55/70 synths

[lilbubbles]

but the behavior stands because it's seriously not how a human would mine.

Not saying you're wrong, but be careful what that logic.

If you see my character running around like a moron trying to mine, it may be because I am watching tv and not my character hehe.

[Seravi Edalborez]

SE should also think of allowing people to convert crystals to shards and clusters to crystals.
They could make crystal and clusters

IIRC they basically said "nope, not gonna happen, affects the delicate balance of blah blah whatever economy DoL livelihood".

[Taruranto]

It's weird, I don't see many of these in Ragnarok.

IIRC they basically said "nope, not gonna happen, affects the delicate balance of blah blah whatever economy DoL livelihood".

I wish this game had any resemblance of economic balance.

[arus2001]

Not saying you're wrong, but be careful what that logic.

If you see my character running around like a moron trying to mine, it may be because I am watching tv and not my character hehe.

It's one thing to be occasionally erratic. It's another to be precisely wasteful of movements. When I think of a legit gatherer, I would anticipate them wanting to move from A to B in the most efficient manner as possible. As you're mining, you're probably already looking at your minimap to see where the next node is if you hadn't committed that to memory along the way. When you're done, maybe there's a brief pause to orient your camera. Maybe you do run the wrong way for a sec. That's fine. It's when you see these guys never stop making these "mistakes" and in the same pattern that I'll call bullshit.

Unfortunately, since they aren't POS hacking like the other types, it's no doubt harder for SE to nail them. I also don't expect a GM to actually understand the above process in the small amount of space we're given to report specifics. "Are you there?" prompts can be worked around, too. It's still a pain in the ass that I can't basically AFK shard farm while these fuckers can get away with it because the police don't know what to look for. Mechanically, were I capable of writing a bot, I could pretty much flow chart this process to the letter and actually take it a step beyond to better mask illegitimacy. Either way, one of the individuals I caught using this was one of my servers early max-many-50-crafter types. This may not mean much now that launch players have pretty much had enough leves replenished to max everything (I'm pretty close to doing this myself), but you can bet it would've been a significant advantage then when other gatherers were in short supply and they could just AFK to profit. I know I may posture a lot clamoring for fair access to things and alternative progression schemes, but the whole botting/hacking/cheating thing isn't that, it's just taking a shortcut.

[FHT]

It's weird, I don't see many of these in Ragnarok.

I wish this game had any resemblance of economic balance.

If you go try to farm the diremit webs where they are LV25 (near relic NPC) you will alway see an ARC there, watch it as it jump everytime the mob pop, its funny.

[Raineer]

If you go try to farm the diremit webs where they are LV25 (near relic NPC) you will alway see an ARC there, watch it as it jump everytime the mob pop, its funny.

The great thing about the SMN bots on my server is that they are bad at claiming. So if you outclaim them they will kill for you and you get all the loots.