ZULU Linkshell of Fenrir

[Devek]

According to that case, everyone who uses windower is guilty of copyright infringement..

The important thing about the case is to show how things like "warden" are mostly useless. They had to go to court to get that bot shut down, but there are still some people who are convinced that if SE dedicated the resources to do something similar that ffxi bots would go away.

[fndragon]

According to that case, everyone who uses windower is guilty of copyright infringement..

The important thing about the case is to show how things like "warden" are mostly useless. They had to go to court to get that bot shut down, but there are still some people who are convinced that if SE dedicated the resources to do something similar that ffxi bots would go away.

They're not mostly useless, they're just eventually outfoxed. Which prompts the cycle to run again and a stronger Warden is developed, etc. Eventually the bots will go away because the barrier to entry will be too high.

Do I think it'll cure it 100% on day one? Hardly. Should it clear up 99% of botters after a few cycles of release/detect/improve? Sure. There'll always be "that one guy" who knows way too much about dll injection methods and process cloaking, but the goal of anti-cheat software is not to always stop him, it's to set up roadblocks to stop the other 99% of bot writers.

At this point SE should dedicate the resources to do something about FFXI botting programs because they are causing non-foreign linkshells to turn to RMT, either due to monopolization of mob claims, or due to selling gil to known RMT organizations to afford newer bots to compete against other bots. It's gone a little meta, I'll admit, but this is the level on which SE needs to fight botting programmers at.

[Devek]

What are you talking about, that one guy?

You could go to the store, and buy any of these cds : List of compact discs sold with XCP - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

All you have to do is pop one into your machine, than name your bot something starting in $sys$

Suddenly the barrier for SE to write something to discover your bot has jumped to at least $100,000 with just 5 min of work.

In the game of weapons vs armor, the weapons always win and these type of battles are incredibly expensive because you can't just hire people with computer science degrees and expect any results. Warden probably cost Blizzard at least a half a million dollars, and that doesn't count the upkeep of having people looking for stuff to add to it's database.

It would be a lot cheaper for SE to modify gameplay in a manner that no one would need a bot. A cheap jr programmer could make a few changes in a single day that would obsolete 90% of the bot users.

[Sonomaa]

the easy way to beat bots is to not have content that makes people want to bot

instances are really hard

[Corrderio]

instances are really hard

Ya rly!

[fndragon]

the easy way to beat bots is to not have content that makes people want to bot

instances are really hard

Honestly, from a designer's standpoint, it is difficult. Part of the "shared experience" is fighting things out in the public spaces where anything can happen. Putting everything in instanced zones makes the game less of a MMO. If anybody remembers Guild Wars, they had every zone be instanced, but there was much less of a community since random encounters were prohibited by this forced separation.

And on the other side of the spectrum is the current situation with endgame mobs such as Ixion, Fafnir, Sandworm, Khimera, Cerb, etc.. The economy suffers because of overcompetition at their spawn points. Wait, that's not true. The economy thrives because of overcompetition at their spawn points. For a working economy you have to have supply and demand. The demand for certain items dropped by mobs is high, but the supply is fixed by some "bad actors" in the market. Thus, SE's job is to regulate the market and either increase the supply (instanced HNM's or banning bots to make the supply less monopolistic), or to decrease the demand (alternative ways to get the gear or gear that is comparable).

SE probably looks at all these options and figures out the following:

1) Instance HNM's: Would require a good deal of up-front manhours that they probably don't want to spend creating the framework for. This seems like a feature that needs to touch every point along the development team path, from inventory for the "pop items" to the translation departments for the text updating to the game designers for difficulty tweaking
2) Ban Bots: STF is working on this, but they also have limited manhours. As a percentage, RMT botting linkshells are a lower priority than RMT fishbots and other trial account hacks RMT have.
3) Alternative ways to get the gear: See #1. Would require a feature to be added for the BC fight, translation, battle team to be consulted. Odin was an example of when this was done, and I'm sure Einherjar was more than a "1 week project for some intern named Skippy".
4) Alternative Gear: SE has typically done this since this is an easy match with their express desire to sell more expansions. Put alternative gear inside expansions, get it "funded" by sales of said expansion. See Limbus and Salvage and Campaign.

[Araelus]

I don't view force pop NMs which appear in the worldmap as being the same as instanced content in terms of making new zones (such as the Dynamis problem), even so, perhaps it is a lot of work. Perhaps game developers make a judgment call that it is too much work.

Perhaps they are incorrect.

If we're using economic terms, Square does not seem to be taking externalities into account when they look at how detrimental RMT and other TOS violations are. It should be obvious that when any RMT occurs, it affects the entire economic system. The (effective) influx of Earth money into the Vana'diel economy can cause inflation, the marginal social benefit of consumption is less than the marginal private benefit of consumption. That is, more stuff is being used up, purchased, crafted, traded, than should be. Prices rise and gil is less valuable than it used to be.

The inflation problem was dealt with, and we encountered a deflationary spiral for a while. In this case, the marginal benefits switched values. Now too little spending was occurring. It seems the pendulum is swinging back once more.

If Square would add in the negative effect RMT has on the game's economy as a whole - and here I am just talking about how ingame prices do not represent actual ingame value, which is a hazy concept since part of the game is the real-world "warm glow" (yes that's the technical term) people gain or lose in playing and paying Square at least, to play, and time expenditure and so on - they would see whatever costs are involved in removing the root cause of botting is less than the current deadweight loss in the system.

Rational agents will fix kings and other problematic content. So are the people who can do so rational agents?

tl;dr game design causes incentives for bad people ...Sage Sundi and RMT-Pwnr v1.337 where are you?

[Klefth]

I guess I am a little late, but...

what's even more hilarious is the application reqs, which I perused for the lulz.

Our requirements are as follows:

1. You must have 3+ Lv. 75 jobs including at least one of the following: PLD, WHM, RDM, BLM, and BRD
2. You must have excellent play time
3. You must be flexible job wise (no complaints about going to events on a certain job) and time wise.
4. Appropriate subjobs leveled(rdm/drk, pld/nin, etc.)
5. You must have experience with doing endgame, minimally some wyrm and land king experience.
6. You must have Dynamis-Xarcabard access.
7. You must have Bahamut v2 access.
8. You must have Sea.
9. You must be willing to drop what you are doing and race to Tiamat/Khimaira/Cerberus/Dark Ixion/Sandworm when they pop.
10. Must be willing to scan/stand by during Dark Ixion and Sandworm windows.
11. You must wear the RockNRolla pearl any time you are online.
12. You must attend all linkshell events when you are online.
13. You must have excellent Gear
14. Ventrilo access is an asset
15. Botting is a Great Asset to you app.

I rofl'd.

[Araelus]

16. You must have an excellent signature.

[alt]

god damnit

[Devek]

SE probably looks at all these options and figures out the following:

1) blah
2) blah blah
3) blah blah blah
4) blah blah blah

5) We already have claim protection. Change it from a random value to a set 5 seconds. Every person that claims before the 5 seconds up gets put into a list. At the end of the 5 seconds a random person is picked from the list and their action goes off. Next implement clear pc functionality into the client.

Bam! End game fixed in 10 min of coding. No one needs a bot and everyone has a fair chance to claim a mob. It would be better to fix the client so that monsters show up with some priority over players, but that sort of thing might be more difficult than simply giving us clear pc.

There will be like 5 guys that cheat and use a bot anyway, but they won't break game play as long as they don't bring out an army of like 50 alts to claim with.

I don't like the idea of instancing EVERYTHING. Some stuff stuff should be contested for.

[Corrderio]

5) We already have claim protection. Change it from a random value to a set 5 seconds. Every person that claims before the 5 seconds up gets put into a list. At the end of the 5 seconds a random person is picked from the list and their action goes off. Next implement clear pc functionality into the client.

Bam! End game fixed in 10 min of coding. No one needs a bot and everyone has a fair chance to claim a mob. It would be better to fix the client so that monsters show up with some priority over players, but that sort of thing might be more difficult than simply giving us clear pc.

There will be like 5 guys that cheat and use a bot anyway, but they won't break game play as long as they don't bring out an army of like 50 alts to claim with.

I don't like the idea of instancing EVERYTHING. Some stuff stuff should be contested for.

Oh I agree some competition isn't that bad, but kings take it too far. When I think of competition I think of something minor like camping O.Kote, Sky, Sea, etc. where you don't need to worry about some LS trying to MPK or bot something.

[zantes]

16. You must have an excellent signature.

That should be #1.

[fndragon]

5) We already have claim protection. Change it from a random value to a set 5 seconds. Every person that claims before the 5 seconds up gets put into a list. At the end of the 5 seconds a random person is picked from the list and their action goes off. Next implement clear pc functionality into the client.

Bam! End game fixed in 10 min of coding. No one needs a bot and everyone has a fair chance to claim a mob. It would be better to fix the client so that monsters show up with some priority over players, but that sort of thing might be more difficult than simply giving us clear pc.

I like this idea but it's got a bit of testing to go through before it becomes viable. Does everyone on this "mini-list" of hate have actual hate on the mob? Would each mob need more memory for this initial "mini-hate" list? If you initiate an action at 4.99 seconds and the internet lags you out to 5.10 seconds, do you actually perform that action on the mob? I think some actions are performed with a client-side timestamp and others with a server-side timestamp, although I could be mistaken.

If this would reward people with "more" people at a claim do you want to limit the "mini-list" to people at level 75 or higher? Otherwise we'll go back to having level 5 WAR/--- mules at each claim location.

Again, I'm not saying it's a bad idea but no solution is a 10 minute fix. It's got many different committees, QA, and translation to go through before it gets approved.

As far as the OP goes (my god, it's all relevant!), I think SE will look at these types of bots next since they do promote RMT in a very relevant way.

[Stiker]

the easy way to beat bots is to not have content that makes people want to bot

instances are really hard

This a million times over.

Remember the days when everyone bitched about Ulli? Then SE made you get a pop item...next problem was Despot. SE fixed that and now you are just competing for mobs with a regular spawn timer. Now, this isn't even an instance, but it sure leveled the playing field out.

I'm not saying the exact thing will work for kings. But FFS, would it be that hard to, I don't know, do something like Nyzul except actually give their counterparts the same damned lot pools? Hell, do something like Einherjar -- have a instanced dungeon that the kings "rule" and, again, let them have the same lot pools. You can't tell me that concept isn't more fun than standing around camping for hours.

[Corrderio]

SE didn't change Ulli/DS only from demand, they also did it due to the huge RMT issues where they'd PoS/claim to get them. The only way I see SE changing kings is if RMT start to dominate them.

Personally I don't get SE and I wonder why I still try to figure out their logic. Players complained for years about the king only abjs and instead of fixing it they added Einherjar. While I like Einherjar I just don't understand why they didn't fix kings and do something else with that.

[Khalil]

5) We already have claim protection. Change it from a random value to a set 5 seconds. Every person that claims before the 5 seconds up gets put into a list. At the end of the 5 seconds a random person is picked from the list and their action goes off. Next implement clear pc functionality into the client.

Bam! End game fixed in 10 min of coding. No one needs a bot and everyone has a fair chance to claim a mob. It would be better to fix the client so that monsters show up with some priority over players, but that sort of thing might be more difficult than simply giving us clear pc.

There will be like 5 guys that cheat and use a bot anyway, but they won't break game play as long as they don't bring out an army of like 50 alts to claim with.

I don't like the idea of instancing EVERYTHING. Some stuff stuff should be contested for.

If they actually did this, then you would have people bringing alts and more alts to camps to increase their chances. The main problem would be fixed (no need for bots) but a new one would arise. The perfect solution would be instances.

[fndragon]

SE didn't change Ulli/DS only from demand, they also did it due to the huge RMT issues where they'd PoS/claim to get them. The only way I see SE changing kings is if RMT start to dominate them.

And this is my point. The current linkshells dominating kings are RMT. They're just not foreign RMT.

[Corrderio]

I guess in a sense you're right. Too bad SE doesn't agree with that logic ; ;

[ZhiGaruda]

And this is my point. The current linkshells dominating kings are RMT. They're just not foreign RMT.

As far as proof goes, don't we know of only one dominating LS turning to RMT? (Zulu)