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are they banning people for any clipper use now? or just excessive speed and pos warping?
No real answer for that question, it's kinda random.... if you get reported, and you do ANYTHING... might be gone.
Personally, I assume everyone reports me constantly, but I still pos up and down cliffs, through doors, across zones and never run less than 30%... so... maybe not... but the risk is always real.
The only sure thing is if you look like you're botting cp or stand anywhere near a reive, you'll get got.
I've heard of people who say they only clip at slightly enhanced speed... but if true it's almost definitely due to a report and probably some bad luck. Not sure if still the case but I remember a GM telling me they prefer to actually see it happening. Though STF doesn't necessarily and that seems to be where a lot of the current bans are coming from. On the other hand I've watched people 800% thru walls back in the day and nothing or recently seen people doing over 200% in town . And then there were all the POS warpers making tons of alex that just got 3 dayed so hard to say. Personally I'd say if you must go a little faster and don't have the gear/buffs keep it low enough where people would at least think you are legit
the problem with FFXI and botting lies within the game itself.
there are just way too many menial tasks that people get extremely bored of doing, thus it leads to botting. SE has a shitty client and doesn't allow add ons to their client, thus leading to people exploring third party alternatives and exposing themselves to communities they may not have.
ban waves on ffxi always leads to people quitting because its extremely hard to remake a new character because of how they made a linear game that requires you having access to old and outdated things to progress more current things (this was a theme as far as i know until delve, i'm not caught up on more recent content and haven't played seriously in ages.) the whole ideal stated above is only something that SE chooses to implement, no other game will have you doing old content/missions/raids to get caught up on current ones, it's absolutely asinine. i personally was not banned in the salvage ban(the original one), and i think people should have been punished for their actions, and maybe not as many people quit as it seemed like did, but the game, in my mind, lost a lot of respect and a lot of its playerbase, i personally have not taken it seriously since that day.
and then obviously since FFXI has always been a social game that flourished with its linkshells and communities it leads other people to quit the game as well due to their friends being banned. sure some people buy new accounts or make new accounts, but the vast majority except RMT don't. and if they do they don't stop botting because they don't want to repeat the menial tasks they already did.
transparency about bans, telling you specifically what they were for, a consistent anti-bot strategy all along and better game design are what most game companies have that SE absolutely lacks. obviously it's way too late to fix any of this in FFXI but hopefully they learned this for FF14 at least
your first sentence just described like every MMO. if those tasks bother people so much so they cant do it without boting, then MMOs arent something for those. That bolded sentence applies to every MMO out there. Every task/dungeon/wtfever gets boring at some point in any MMO
I find it a bit blatant to "blame" the developer that people are boting/cheating. Its still the peoples choice, if they cant play the game without clipper/hacks/wtfever then they should expect to get banned at some point or quit the game if its such a hassle for them to play without any of those forms. And no i dont mean this in a "whiteknight" manner, i mean this in the "your choice, deal with the consequences" manner. People need to realize that in this world (there seems to be a tremenous lack in this generation about this).
He has a point. FFXI is far more grindy than modern MMOs. Even WoW has made great strides in making it less and less grindy. SE *should* have done more, but they didn't. It's ultimately the player's fault they cheated, but SE could do more to make people not want to cheat.
I can't wait for them to start banning for gearswap
i feel like you have not played any other games if you feel this way..
leveling up/doing limit breaks etc on FFXI is not fun and is extremely tedious as well as grinding missions for sea/sky/whatever. sure they have made adjustments to make things easier, limit break adjustments, FoV/GoV abyssea (if you can get a group lul) etc makes leveling easier. but why do you have to do 10 year old content to get to the new stuff? there is literally no applicable reason. if it's so that you "emerge yourself in the story" or some other bullshit explanation then people should hate it even more for the fact that they are doing it for nothing after they get banned since they've already seen it all.
no other game that i have played (quite a few) is comparable to ffxi except maybe 14 (all story missions required to do any raids etc)
to use WoW as my example, if you want to level up you can PVP, you can dungeon spam, you can grind, you can quest. also all these quests are updated, the level 1 quests aren't what they had in 2004, they were updated as recently as a couple years ago. you can also pay $60 and go instantly to level 90. hey, money to solve a lack of funds problem and innovation! also guess what, the only thing that stops you from entering a raid is your item level. there is literally no pre requisite except having the required gear. a storyline should be optional, not forced. theres lore and quest text there if you want to read it, a lvl 99 should not have to do lvl 60 missions to get sky access to unlock af2+1(lvl 99 rem shit if i'm not naming this correctly) etc
nothing compares to the amount of FFXIs menial tasks, skilling up alone is something that literally every other game has done away with, only FFXI remains. what i said is also the reason that FFXI gets literally no new players, it is not inviting at all
edit: also my post was to point out why ffxi botting is so rampant and why its so widespread and how ban waves like this do in fact kill the game, not to say that all the other games have 0 botters. that's obviously untrue. you're right, people find things boring on other games too and they look to bots to do those things for them, but i can assure you except for maybe the grindfest that is runescape(lol) botting/cheating is a lot more widespread in FFXI than anything else
Botting battlegrounds alone in WoW was far more prevalent than all botting combined in FFXI lol. It wasn't uncommon to load up an alterac valley and have like 50% of the players being obvious bots. And there were gathering bots everywhere, leveling bots, gold farming bots, AH buy/resell bots, etc.
Outside of fishing, I'd wager only a very tiny % of the total FFXI population has ever touched a bot by comparison, despite WoW being a far less grindy game in basically every avenue.
bigger games = a bigger selection of bots, considering wow is 100x the size ffxi is of course there are more types of bots.
i dunno if i agree with the latter and i've played both games quite extensively but at thhat point i'd just be arguing my experience vs yours so i'll just leave it as is
lvling is tedious in any MMO, it was tedious for me in FF14 (yaie fate grinding or quest grinding or dungeon grinding) and it was tedious for me back then in WoW.
I'll give you the point of prerequisites for older stuff, like not being able to upgrade AF and Relic to ilvl status without CoP missions done etc. However you might call it lazyness from the developers, i call it choice of design. Its still not a reason to cry about when someone gets banned because they chose to do so by cheating. Each MMO has its own design, some more well rounded some less, noone is forcing people to play them, so blameing the developers for cheating because the design is "flawed" in their eyes is just wrong. Dont like it, dont play it, but dont whine when you get banned for boting/cheating.
Now I am not saying that players shouldnt give input to developers to change tedious stuff, by all means do it. But as long as it isnt changed its the peoples choice how they approach content. In all honesty if they would ban people for useing windower4/gearswap/plugins i wouldnt be able to play this game at all, but I am well aware of the fact that they can do it if they wanted to and if they chose to ban people because of that its their right and its something i have to deal with by either quiting the game or going vanilla or proceed on like before with the calculated risk of getting banned.
The only annoying thing about those banning is they didn't ban for obvious botting for years and now they are doing it when it's already hard to find people to play with :/
This is the problem most people have with it atm... Why are people coming in like white knights to point out the obvious? No shit if you break rules there can be consequences. The main issue is that SE chose to enforce all this within the past 8 months and even when they announced content is stopping.
Or the fairly recent salvage 2 thing... people getting hundreds of extra alex from POS hacking and using a glitch something that 100% leaves a very obvious record that they were cheating and 3 day ban.... not saying hey perma all those people but the permas since then for things that are smaller in comparison just makes you scratch your head
Outside of fishbots, I never saw obvious widespread botting by regular characters (as in, not throw away RMT accounts) before SoA. There were some cruor bots, but how could you tell them apart from some 24/7 RMT crew? Monstrosity bots, but hardly anyone touched that event, bot or not. Leveling bots? Who would notice if they aren't getting stuck on geometry? Crafting bots? No one notices or cares.
Botting JP/reives for inordinate amounts of time on your real characters blatantly in front of (and competing with) tons of other players? Yeah shits going to get reported, a lot. Probably enough so that SE decided to implement a simple system to flag obvious bots.
If people weren't so stupid with them, botting right outside of town, the same areas/reives for weeks/months at a time, etc. I doubt there would have been any real ban 'wave', but I guess that's what happens when easy to use bots are so publicly available.
Fish/Cruor/Abyssea Exp/Cure bot have been used for years(before SoA) on Asura at least