Salvage Bans v 2.0

[gaira]

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

Spoiler: show

pretty telling just how inconsequential previous gil fountains were to what i assume is mostly duping in the past year or so. ~100 billion is a pretty big number

[Lolwutt]

According to SE, 72PB implies review for termination. So basically, if you see a 72PB and know you're likely to get terminated, you'll probably get terminated. Addationally, what reason is there to come onto a third-party site just to lie? SE has been known to blacklist by payment information in the past. And I can put down money that this is exactly what happened here.

Source: http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/rul...?pageID=manner

Haven't known anyone this year to get a 72h email and be permaed from that strike. The perma email just says suspended without a timeframe, presumably so they have no need to rush investigation.

[FNH]

Addendum: I concede on denying the auto-banning system. It's the only thing that makes sense at this point. Yes, you heard it. I admitted I was wrong. See Byrth? I did it. Everyone see? Good.

If it is real, it isn't very good.

[Sephiran]

If it is real, it isn't very good.

If what's real? The auto-banning automaton or my sincerity?

[vivbiibasjiu]

Considering there's still blatant cheaters running around rampant, the auto-ban system is a joke

[NynJa]

Have you maybe kinda considered that this "auto-ban" system maybe doesnt really exist?

[Saevel]

Have you maybe kinda considered that this "auto-ban" system maybe doesnt really exist?

It most certainly exists, its run at least every month, usually near the end, and anyone who pops over a certain score is perma'd. It's designed to catch RMT but lately has been nabbing lots of legitimate players. This is the exact same system that previously banned all those legitimate gardeners.

That being said, a 72 temp ban isn't from that system, it's from a GM or other entity, probably as a result of lots of GM reports. It's no secret that if someone receives a large amount of reports on their account SE will issue a ban, either temp or perma depending on how many reports. I personally know several players who have used this to grief other players they didn't like, and it's been successful. What likely happened was LordE noticed a bunch of people he thought was RMT, sent some tells or otherwise interacted with people, and they mass sent GM reports for "harassment". One player GMing for "harassment" will usually warrant a GM saying "deal with it" or telling the other player to stop, 40+ GM reports on the other hand usually flags the account for review by a senior GM.

Anyhow believe what you want, nothing I say will change your opinion. There are steps people can take to protect themselves and not using 3rd party tools isn't one of them as I know some 360 uses who were hit by that same auto-ban system.

[NynJa]

So you mean these people who bot lair reives 24/7 and fleehack at 300% speed 24/7 are not getting flagged by the auto-ban but mr. "12% flee speed" gets hit by it?


By your own story, if someones getting 40 reports from a GM, maybe its a GM who watches that person. I dont think SE would just put a fucking auto-ban system in place where it kicks in when "X player got 20 GM calls on them, BAN". Thats not even an auto-ban system, that's just a fucking stupid system.

[Saevel]

So you mean these people who bot lair reives 24/7 and fleehack at 300% speed 24/7 are not getting flagged by the auto-ban but mr. "12% flee speed" gets hit by it?


By your own story, if someones getting 40 reports from a GM, maybe its a GM who watches that person. I dont think SE would just put a fucking auto-ban system in place where it kicks in when "X player got 20 GM calls on them, BAN". Thats not even an auto-ban system, that's just a fucking stupid system.

SE has already informed us they implement an auto-ban system. Many years ago they made a grand announcement on how the new Special Task Force created this customized tool that enabled them to automatically detect and ban players for RMT activity. They then proudly announce every month how many accounts get hit with it. Shortly afterward they nuked hundreds of players for gardening for profit. After a huge outcry from the Japanese gaming press they resended the bans and made a public apology. Since then they have used the same tool to detect accounts suspected of producing and selling gil for real money. It has absolutely nothing to do with speed hacking, POS warping or other third party use, it's purely to detect and ban RMT. The method they use is pretty simple, every month they scan the history of all accounts active for that month and based on those histories they create a score that represents a probability of RMT activity. Traded over 10 million gil to another player, that's a hit, did a certain activity over and over again for hours, another hit, stayed logged in for periods of that that are humanly impossible, yet another hit, connection from a non-Japanese IP address, that's a hit too. Those hits add up and if someone's account is ranked over a certain total number, it gets hit with the the STF's auto-ban tool. There is virtually no recourse for this as the STF speaks only Japanese, doesn't have a customer facing entity and because they work from the head office no non-JP customer service personal can overturn them.

Now GM reports are a totally different matter. A single report gets put in the queue and eventually a GM looks at it. If it's just one, then they will politely inquire into the situation and remedy it as best as possible. If it's many reports then it gets automatically forwarded to a senior GM in Japan, and well seeing as they can't be bothered to try to speak to an English speaking player, and they are overworked to begin with, they just click the ban button with a generic auto-generated reason and move on to the next thing on their list of stuff to do before they can go home and relax after a long day in the office.

There is absolutely no auto-detection for speed hacking, it would be computationally expensive to check every movement of every character against it's history and then determine if it's valid or not. SE isn't going to spend the money to upgrade servers to have the required processing power for this and instead just have a simple time based check whenever you hit a zoneline. They primarily rely on GM reports to solve this, which is another reason that a mass amount of GM reports results in the GM hitting the ban button and moving on with their day.

Of course if your Japanese or appear to be Japanese this all changes. Yes East Asian companies are like this, I've been working with them for over a decade now and preferential treatment of customers of certain ethnicity is considered standard practice. You can continue believing whatever you want, it doesn't effect me either way. I'm only posting this here as I feel SE's actions are horrible and would like to inform other high level players how to protect themselves for SE's short sighted policy's.

[Lolwutt]

for about the tenth time, client side timestamp is sent along with each position update, it's not an operation worth even considering to calculate distance traveled over timestamp difference and compare to movement speed

keep up the know-it-all rants, but don't pretend anyone believes them

[Lolwutt]

Threw together a quick example, it simulates 7500 users constantly moving and each sending a movement update packet every 300ms by calculating 250 users every 10ms. It accounts for up to 30 seconds of lag(configurable with no noticable impact on performance) so that lag with flee/mazurka/etc up will not result in a false positive. It uses local time, a real one would obviously just read the timestamp from the packet.

Performance:

It uses less than 1% CPU on my home machine, and only 6MB of ram for all stored data. There is not even a 1ms stutter processing 250 users at a time.

Note that this was written in C# and not optimized for speed in any real way. It also uses a handful of random generation that has some cost associated with it, and would not be relevant overhead in a real situation as the data would be in packets already being parsed. Furthermore, it could be significantly reduced if cleaned up and ported to C++, which FFXI is written in(not that it's necessary from a performance standpoint).

Source Code: https://www.dropbox.com/s/mle9y04h5a...ource.txt?dl=0

Compiled EXE(needs .net): https://www.dropbox.com/s/a0w2jopf01...ample.exe?dl=0

So let's stop with the 'it's not possible' shit. It's not the least bit complicated or costly.

Edit: To get a 1% cpu usage out of it, I needed to bump it up to 75,000 active and moving users. To get a 1ms stutter, had to bump it to 225,000.

[Hoshiku]

I'm sorry but by the metrics of your auto-ban system I should have been banned years ago. I never log out, my IP is not Japanese, and I frequently trade gil above 10 mil from my main to my mule (via my alt) so I won't be tempted to spend it.

[ccl]

Whoever is still cheating at this point is dumb or doesn't care about his account, it's pretty obvious w/e they use is accurate.

[Celebrindor]

Whoever is still cheating at this point is dumb or doesn't care about his account, it's pretty obvious w/e they use is accurate.

This.

We've established the "this game isn't worth playing without XXX cheat" crowd, and you've proven yourselves to be true to your word. Welp, SE after 13 years has got it figured out. Not the best business model many will argue, but their rules.

[NynJa]

stayed logged in for periods of that that are humanly impossible, yet another hit, connection from a non-Japanese IP address, that's a hit too.

I'm in Canada, and here are my login times:
Nynja: 3435 days, 5 hours, 29 minutes, 20 seconds (9.5 years)
Vermy: 2397 days, 15 hours, 18 minutes, 53 seconds (6.5 years)
Kehhiko: 1547 days, 19 hours, 10 minutes, 24 seconds (4.2 years)

I've been Nynja since NA release
Vermy has passed through a couple hands since the original owner quit back in 2005, settling to me around 2006
Kehhiko is my ex's account, who wanted to "bond" with me, and has been in my possession since about 2008


You're a clueless fucking idiot if you think "staying logged in will get you banned". Staying logged in botting CP for 24 hours straight will get you banned. AFKing in a CP camp because you left for work or in your mog house watching your moogle spin will NOT get you banned, neither will afking in lower jeuno running a fucking bazaar will get you banned, because thats the only way you can run a bazaar in lower jeuno: by being fucking logged in.

You dumbass.

[arus2001]

Yeah, simply being logged in is not an accurate metric. It's being logged in and doing something consecutively for seemingly inhuman amounts of time. AFK bazaaring not among such an activity. I could see them being especially cautious of chinese IPs, but not just a blanket not-JP.

[FNH]

Whoever is still cheating at this point is dumb or doesn't care about his account, it's pretty obvious w/e they use is accurate.

Then I must be the sneakiest son of a bitch in vanadiel.

[ccl]

As far as I know they don't even ban "by association"; only the cheaters(but not everyone of them) of every group I play with got banned.

[NynJa]

As far as I know they don't even ban "by association"; only the cheaters(but not everyone of them) of every group I play with got banned.

They have in the original salvage bans. "Supposedly" there were people buying armor from people who were duping salvage armor who got hit.

[dasva]

They have in the original salvage bans. "Supposedly" there were people buying armor from people who were duping salvage armor who got hit.

And sounds like some people got banned for associating with the cleaving rmts thought not all