Special Task Force Announcement (29/01/2009) (And their new website)

[Akanei]

God, I would be so happy if they did what Gravity used to do with RO and have a spreadsheet of character names banned on each server, and why.

Nothing like finding out the scum of your server got banned for something as hilarious as cybering in public chat, or outing the hypocrites.

[Lordwafik]

In before 10 pages on the detectability of claimbots (spoilers: they can't be 100% sure without implementing something like warden).

I don't see an FFXI version of this a bad thing. Hell any decent MMO should have something scanning for bots.

[Devek]

Be careful what you wish for...

Would you want a GM to be able to peek at your hard drive?

There are also some technical limitations. Nothing stops app or w/e from hooking into whatever was scanning and prevent it from reporting that it found anything. Virus scanners run into the same problem, there isn't much they can do about it.

The reality is that it wouldn't stop the good bots, SE doesn't have the technical know how or manpower to stop the average bot, and it would negatively impact people who didn't bot at all.

[Lordwafik]

I wouldn't mind them peeking in, so long as the game was set up like WoW (plugins being legal and such). With the game as it is hellllllll no.

[Gaea]

I think part of the reason there's no app-sniffing software (like the one WoW has), is because its a cross-platform game. It might make more sense for us to have it just so to make it as balanced as possible with the consoles, but I'm sure there's the SE logic that tries to keep all three of them virtually identical. The official "windower" seemed to be a "huge leap" for them.

[Devek]

These are the same people who tried to foil third party apps by randomly changing the title of the ffxi window... AFAIK no bots relied or cared what the title of the ffxi window was...

[Dezzimal]

Older versions of mrargus did, ffxiapp didn't as far as I remember, eventually we got a windower plugin to keep the window name the same.

[Devek]

Well, mrargus kind of sucked imho. The bot we used spanked it hard

[Dezzimal]

Fuzz's midnight special?

[Devek]

I don't think fuzz was on the map in 2004.

[Kurt Cobain]

too bad you didn't start botting before that faggot tuan got his dring, what a waste of gear that kid was