Rotation bots have killed off the end game in FF

[FFXIVuseryo]

I don't want to make a long post about the evils of inaccurate 3rd party parsing software, and how they mislead the community. But in the past year (more than ever) I have witnessed a steep incline in the performance of players who were really bad at the game. Select free companies and groups are all top ranked in their rotations.

So what am I talking about here? end game raiders in FF are using these advanced rotation bot programs which allow the players to execute perfect rotations without pressing a single button. Because raids like ultimates and savage are so scripted in FF, cheaters are able to beat a boss with a perceived perfect rotation without ever having to press a button. Those who are not doing this are left at a big disadvantage. Community has become fragmented and people have been left behind. And those left behind are quitting the game in large numbers. It is a ghost town.

A streamer of FF was brave enough to comment on this issue, and show an example of the cheating happening in real time. Very brave of him considering how Square Enix bans anyone who speaks poorly of their game regardless of the intentions.



Video:



This botting at the top level is not new. Here are some people launching allegations against each other over rotationbots when they were commonplace in 2020.

https://twitter.com/inhamez/status/1304434786706968578

I want to keep this post about rotationbots; because they hurt the most (imo). But players have been exploiting for ages. Here is a clip of the leader of group with a world first clear actually testing out exploits in 2020

https://twitter.com/ayafromfflogs/st...C14deXnvchAAAA




The player in the video has no actions on his bars. Most of the top raiders in FF have coding backgrounds and it shows. The game is basically helpless and naked against these type of softwares. Now if you talk about this on any of the popular discords you will be immediately told that the game is fine and to immediately shut up. These discord servers are also the ones that literally make it their job to always show the game in a positive light, and to go far and beyond for attracting customers to it. But what they forget is that the experience is what keeps a game alive, not lies and bull.

They need to find a fix. Maybe people can come up with solutions in this thread. We need to talk about this. Sweep this under a rug and it becomes a cancer later. Maybe add random number generator type of actions to keep bots from being the best thing you can do for your dps. Or this game will have the same exact fate FFXI did because of bots; a slow painful death where the only people left playing are the hackers with coding backgrounds.

If every raid tier has drama with hacks, exploits and people doing world first prog behind the scenes with shady tactics, then maybe it is time that Square Enix takes action? It is sad because right now the end game is about who is best at using 3rd party software. And I do not mean ban streamers by taking action rofl. In recent live letter Yoshida said he will not talk about this anymore. But he has to talk about this, he should be talking about this. It is his job to foster a fair competitive end game environment. If the problem is there then why is he not going to talk about it anymore? how will we ever get a solution?

And these problems are not marginal or outliers, not in FF. Almost half the people I knew are delving in it. Very scary and discouraging. There is a reason why it's been a hot topic in the community. And square enix stating that they do not wish to talk about it anymore time after time actually has become an advertisement for "We can't stop hacking. Go ahead and do it"

I fully support integration of ant-cheating softwares that run at the deepest level; similar to Valorant.

Why? because square enix already has so much data on me. I trust them and don't mind an "Invasive" anti-cheat. What I do see again and again is square enix announcing people losing their account access to 3rd party software use. No one knows what is put in these invasive 3rd party softwares, many of the .dlls are not open source and the devs refuse to make them so. They are invasive because FFlogs even has a built in advertisement thing that has been sending me relevant advertisement which is downright creepy. They are not any less invasive. I am sure the actual cheating software are worse.

Edit: And there are people who are asking me why it should bother me. It bothers me because I care about a fair competition and that is what I like about the end game. If I am required to hack without being told so; to be a part of the top teams, then I am just not going to play the game anymore. And not playing the game makes me sad and makes square enix less money. We are both losing from this transaction. The bar keeps going up and up, and like I said; it'd only leave the top coders and hackers in the end game. And I can definitely feel that content is dying way faster than ever before. Can't find people because the big gap between hackers and non-hackers was very discouraging to the end game community these last few months.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

"Competitive raiding" was a mistake. Yes, people using bots and pretending that they are actually skilled at a game is suspect, but at the end of the day this is a video game. You play it for fun. It's not a real sport. A game shouldn't be designed around raiding being the end-all-be-all and certainly shouldn't be designed with this being the endgoal route players pursue at the risk of being banned (people being pressured into using bots to farm top tier raids so they can cosmetics they want).

[Grinning Serpent]

This is guaranteed to happen when you dumb down rotations enough that a macro can run them. Even moreso when 3/4 fights in a tier are designed such that precious baby melee players won't ever have to worry about losing their precious uptime for even one moment.

Not that any of it matters. XIV doesn't have a competitive raiding scene to speak of (imagine not streaming your attempts) and doesn't produce remotely enough content to justify one in the first place.

[Nzx]

"Competitive raiding" was a mistake. Yes, people using bots and pretending that they are actually skilled at a game is suspect, but at the end of the day this is a video game. You play it for fun. It's not a real sport. A game shouldn't be designed around raiding being the end-all-be-all and certainly shouldn't be designed with this being the endgoal route players pursue at the risk of being banned (people being pressured into using bots to farm top tier raids so they can cosmetics they want).

Sorry man but this viewpoint is lame. You can't expect human beings not to compete at anything where comparison exists. We compete over who takes the best pictures of food they didn't make, we're going to compete over who does the most damage in a video game - and if you can't see how much damage you do, we'll compete over how fast you finish it, and if we can't do that for some reason we'll compete over who does it with the least amount of people. It's literally human nature. Competition is fun. Much like football, you can play for fun on a weekend with your mates and never engage in the competition if you want to, but ultimately fighting against people's desire to compete is like trying to deny gravity.

[Aucald]

Aside from intrusive and questionable applications like Warden, there's really no way to defend against this kind of escalation when it comes to the intersection of player competitiveness and general laziness. There's no game currently on the market whose combat or gameplay systems can't be automated by complex algorithms or scripting - and if the tools proliferate due to demand, they can only be countered at the software/server layer coupled with extensive ban waves for those who try to exploit their way past said programs.

[SinR]

And what is Squeenix doing about this?

[Nzx]

Aside from intrusive and questionable applications like Warden, there's really no way to defend against this kind of escalation when it comes to the intersection of player competitiveness and general laziness. There's no game currently on the market whose combat or gameplay systems can't be automated by complex algorithms or scripting - and if the tools proliferate due to demand, they can only be countered at the software/server layer coupled with extensive ban waves for those who try to exploit their way past said programs.

Are you suggesting that the solution is to do nothing, then? Runescape almost 20 years ago at least considered the concept of random events to break up their easily-bottable game. Running a script that plays a character in WoW's mythic raiding to a rank 1 parse would be nigh impossible. Your comment reads like an excusing Square Enix to say that anti-cheat is too 'invasive' and encounter design is too hard so people should just accept it when 9/10 people they play with aren't actually playing their characters. At that point it isn't actually a video-game, it's Bandersnatch with transmog.

[Grinning Serpent]

And what is Squeenix doing about this?

Nothing. The only effective solutions would be invasive programs and tools that would also catch and strike out ACT, XIV Quicklauncher, (probably) xivalexander, Anamnesis, GShade, etc.

XIV would die overnight if they ever did *anything* to fuck up the glamour/gpose community, even moreso than if they killed ACT interactivity. Let alone both...

[Ashana Darkmoon]

Sorry man but this viewpoint is lame. You can't expect human beings not to compete at anything where comparison exists. We compete over who takes the best pictures of food they didn't make, we're going to compete over who does the most damage in a video game - and if you can't see how much damage you do, we'll compete over how fast you finish it, and if we can't do that for some reason we'll compete over who does it with the least amount of people. It's literally human nature. Competition is fun. Much like football, you can play for fun on a weekend with your mates and never engage in the competition if you want to, but ultimately fighting against people's desire to compete is like trying to deny gravity.

Crazy sometimes how few people get this lol. We are a highly competitive species to the core, in every way imaginable.

Anyway wow has hekili, but you still need to actually hit buttons and react to things so it's more of a guideline program

[Aucald]

Are you suggesting that the solution is to do nothing, then? Runescape almost 20 years ago at least considered the concept of random events to break up their easily-bottable game. Running a script that plays a character in WoW's mythic raiding to a rank 1 parse would be nigh impossible. Your comment reads like an excusing Square Enix to say that anti-cheat is too 'invasive' and encounter design is too hard so people should just accept it when 9/10 people they play with aren't actually playing their characters. At that point it isn't actually a video-game, it's Bandersnatch with transmog.

Oh, something can always be done, I'm just saying the solution may prompt issues of its own with certain people, not including those actively exploiting the game and cheating. I've never understood why people are so quick to jump to the "are you a corporate apologist" angle when it comes to noting such things - I'm advising caution that the best current approach to the issue of rampant botting and cheating is often to resort to monitoring tools that a lot of people find intrusive and draconian. Which problem is worse overall is open to debate and discussion.

[Cthulhu 2020]

Saying "People are leaving in droves" and "it's a ghost town" is not just hyperbole, it's wrong. PF and raiding is more popular and populous than ever.

That said, the bot thing is a problem. But it's not as much of a problem as people are making it out to be. Yes, more people using the bot has dramatically raised the skill ceiling and it has allowed unskilled players to suddenly be top parsers. But let me ask this: How does this affect your personal enjoyment of the game? The top parsers, people in the top 10 etc, speed runners and so forth are all well known within the community.

The one solution is for SE to implement a very invasive anti cheat program (most of which don't work unless they're kernel level). When it comes to raiding, people's usage of bots doesn't bother me since raiding is ultimately a cooperative activity within the game. While some people may "enjoy" parsing, I don't see it as being a primary draw. I like hanging with my friends, learning and beating bosses, and getting phat loot.

Where I DO see the bot being a problem is in PvP. This rotation bot is the same bot that also does the crazy PvP shenanigans. I somehow made it into top 100 crystal rankings despite the rampant obvious cheating going on from the "top" PvPers. White mages are particularly egregious. Go to use your limit break? Boom, INSTANT polymorph. Do people seriously think it's not noticeable when they have inhuman reflexes for polymorphing or stunning during limit breaks? No, they know we notice. They just know they're not going to catch any punishment for it.

[Necromantic]

Sorry man but this viewpoint is lame. You can't expect human beings not to compete at anything where comparison exists. We compete over who takes the best pictures of food they didn't make, we're going to compete over who does the most damage in a video game - and if you can't see how much damage you do, we'll compete over how fast you finish it, and if we can't do that for some reason we'll compete over who does it with the least amount of people. It's literally human nature. Competition is fun. Much like football, you can play for fun on a weekend with your mates and never engage in the competition if you want to, but ultimately fighting against people's desire to compete is like trying to deny gravity.

You're right, many of us are competitive by nature. Competition between athletes isn't the same as competition between video gamers. I think most of us know what kind of people play games a lot. We can sit here and pretend like we don't or claim "stereotype" but we know it's true whether we want to be honest and admit it or not. That does not mean everyone is like that but we all know there are tons. People like that combined with "internet tough guy syndrome" make "competition" a less politically correct term.

[Ghost of Cow]

This is guaranteed to happen when you dumb down rotations enough that a macro can run them. Even moreso when 3/4 fights in a tier are designed such that precious baby melee players won't ever have to worry about losing their precious uptime for even one moment.

This is really the crux of the issue. The game can be so rigid, so...rehearsed?...in every way that it's no surprise people can just bot it like that.

It's funny, I almost never want to bother doing a new raid fight in XIV anymore because I feel like 0% of prior experience is relevant from one fight to another. It's just all one extremely strict dance of "stand here, now stand there" that's unique from one fight to another and always just comes down to learning it by dying to it the first time.

[Necromantic]

This is really the crux of the issue. The game can be so rigid, so...rehearsed?...in every way that it's no surprise people can just bot it like that.

It's funny, I almost never want to bother doing a new raid fight in XIV anymore because I feel like 0% of prior experience is relevant from one fight to another. It's just all one extremely strict dance of "stand here, now stand there" that's unique from one fight to another and always just comes down to learning it by dying to it the first time.

That's correct but on the same token, (not saying you personally) but some people strongly dislike that yet still play and complain that it's like that instead of admitting "this game obviously isn't for me" and moving onto something that is. I mean, it's one thing to have a gripe about it but overall enjoy the game but I've read some who loathe it along with many core concepts. I think for some of them, addiction prevents them from moving on.

[mik999]

Okay, it is obvious bait topic but I will bite, just for fun of it.

I will preface this post by saying, that I'm playing on European DCs (so situation may be different). I've cleared this savage tier Week 6 (ahead of the curve, as Tier lasts around 8 months), using only Party Finder (partying up with random people) It was around 60 hours of progression. If statements of topic creator were true I had high chance of being discriminated and in disadvantage against people who are using bots. Maybe even be asked to use bot like that.

In practice there were 3 different cases when somebody in the group touched upon using any third party software:
* When waiting for a party, somebody joked about Cactbot (kind of DBM for FF XIV), as something negative that makes people play worse. Especially in weeks when it doesn't work
* During progression of last fight, one person heavily suggested that he runs DPS meter, to advice DPSs to stop being so greedy and focus on mechanics instead of parsing as we can easily clear enrage
* And once again during progression of last fight, somebody suggested to Party Leader to check logs of people, to see if they cleared Phase 1. This suggestion met with heavy negativity and person who suggested it was close to being kicked from party

In addition, if people are leaving in troves, I should have hard time finding people to raid with. In my experience, even at late hour (after midnight) there were groups up in Party Fidner. Only time I had trouble with finding group was when I was looking for clear groups for last fight, as there were small number of players who progressed to that part and didn't clear it yet.

Finding people to reclear fights for loot is even easier, only once I had trouble with it. And by trouble I mean it took me two evenings instead of one to do all the fights.

I do not claim that problem does not exist, but scale and effect of it is marginal. And it also existed in WoW, as I remember a friend in Pandaria who used rotation bots to clear Hexos in Brawler's Guild. And I'm pretty sure that is not something that killed WoW. If people are going to pay to not play the game, they are also paying to be able to play... Well, it's their choice

[Granyala]

To play devil's advocate: Who cares?
Competitive PVE is not a thing unless you are talking about world first rading, which only a handful of people take part in.

IMHO people obsess over their performance and logs to an unhealthy degree.
You only need a performance good enough so that the raid boss bites the dust. Anything beyond that is completely irrelevant and just ends up being e-peen stroking.

[hzjf]

since there is no anti cheat programm checking anything you can be sure theres alot more stuff going on.

and who cares ? If people wanna clear content by cheating let them. as long as it doesnt impact the overall Game

[threads]

ffxiv has literally 0 cheat detection and botters almost never get banned. the devs just say "please dont cheat". ive seen people bot gathering since heavensward that never get punished. you would not believe the amount of "legend" ultimate raiders that basically just move their character wherever robot voice tells them.

[doodle90]

ffxiv has literally 0 cheat detection and botters almost never get banned. the devs just say "please dont cheat". ive seen people bot gathering since heavensward that never get punished. you would not believe the amount of "legend" ultimate raiders that basically just move their character wherever robot voice tells them.

Lol.. Why even play if you're gonna cheat? Makes zero sense. As long as they arent in my group cheating telling me everything Im fine. I do fights to do the fights. FF14 raids rewards are meh at best...

I mean if you want an addon that tells you when to move and everything for fights why not just play wow where addons doing the work for you is embraced. And the raid gear actually matters because gear matters in pvp and open world. FF14 open world stuff has lvl caps...and pvp gear means nothing...So youre basically just ruining your own fun.

[Itori]

This is honestly the first time im hearing about rotation bots. How popular is it? Why risk getting banned so you can get a superficial score on a parse website? Final question, what kind of person would even use this in a game thats easy to learn the rotation of any job? Seriously this game is not hard, sweat lords will be sweat lords i suppose.