Dev Tracker - Discussion

I buy that something naughty people are doing may be causing weird behavior. I also buy that the servers may get overloaded (what you're describing doesn't happen on Lakshmi).

However, POS hacking seems like an unlikely culprit in all this. Maybe if people are using it to pull really big groups really fast. . . ? Otherwise it doesn't seem like it would notably affect server load.

The tools using community has been doing things like aggroing very large groups of mobs, pos hacking away, then abusing the game's Z-axis mob positional reset by changing the player's Z-axis location up/down to get all aggroed mobs to instantly teleport to their location.

This is to make grouping up mobs for AOEing faster. How many mobs you have aggroed == how many positional updates the game has to send, all at once, for every player abusing this mechanic.

It is not outside the realm of possibility that abuse of POS hacking in this way has a very large effect on server performance. Bigger server -> more players doing this -> more load.

Z-axis changing doesn't even get picked up as a POS hack by any existing automated detection, so is seen as "safe".

OK, but they could do the same thing with maintenance mode. The real problem you guys have is with ***, so report them!

That's, funny

Meanwhile, on Asura/Odin/Bahamut..

Do they not ban based on reports anymore? How do people get banned, then?

Get caught by automated hack detection is the only way I have seen anyone get banned in the past.. 7-8 years or so.

Really? I had assumed it was all report-based because the only correlation I have seen is that the more bold people are with their haxxors, the more likely they are to get got.

Fairly confident they ban on reports as well still. I believe its more on the lines of someone gets reported for some random bs, someone looks at the logs and see's pos hax and bans for that

Whatever cope helps you get through the day, I guess

I'm not so sure of that. There is that thread on the OF where dude reported the same guys daily for years. I've done reporting sprees with a variety of residential IPs and varied messages with no results. Salvage bots do seem to get banned consistently, but I don't know if it's caused by the reports or just correlated since others don't.

As much as I hate to agree with Eiryl, it seems to be the dartboard approach for basic offenses. I imagine they have a pretty long list of known offenders and ban a handful at a time to scare the rest. We already know they auto-detect POS and speed since they added that silly disconnect trigger. It wouldn't make much sense for them not to log it.

That's exactly what it is. If someone (anyone) has a grudge against you or reports you for any reason and you're not doing anything, you're good. If they report you and within say 15-20 days prior (when they check all the logs) you speed hacked or used some clipping or 3pt to manipulate the game, you get got. If you do it every day you're an easy target. If you do it here and there you have a risk of ban but not a high risk. Now if you're completely 6 boxing everything and nobody knows who you are or ever groups with you to know you're cheating, you're probably still running at max speed merely because you've not been reported. There is no "automated detection system" that catches you. It's all reports.

This is stated with way too much confidence. They had an autobanner that disclosed it was an autobanner as far back as 2008. They have a currently active system that disconnects you for speed hacks. So, there is no doubt that they already have code in place to automatically detect that behavior.

You're speculating on what method they use to decide which of the detected players get banned. Unless you have info from SE, it's just speculation.

So wrong honestly, I don't know where you got all your misinformation from

I got suspended once for speed/position/waypoint hacks, and I did it regularly for questing and other travel around the game for an extended period of time (years). I never sniffed a ban during this time. I did a sortie with a guy who posted a video of it on YouTube, where he was openly using 3pt. I did not use any during the Sortie run. Entire pug got hit with a ban (mine was temp, others were permanent). The only correlation is that I was reported in that YouTube video by association, and someone checked the logs and saw what I did sometime prior. There's no other way I was "randomly detected" and magically my group all got banned. It was clearly a report by someone based on what they saw from the video

You're using a sample size of 1 and multiple unfounded assumptions to make an argument. Why do you think that's a better source of information than the amount of characters and experience others have?

I'm not saying your experience didn't happen, just that you're making a lot of assumptions that may or may not be true:

1. You assume the PUG got hit at once because they were in the same PUG, rather than a series of bans going through at once (bans are always processed in chunks on tues-thurs at ~2am est).
2. You assume that being in Sortie was what got you flagged, rather than previous cheating you'd admitted to.
3. You assume that the report is what triggered it, rather than a general selection of Sortie offenders.

Some of these might be accurate. They might all be accurate. That doesn't mean that other methods of detection don't play into it, and others have much larger samples of both cheating and bans than you do.

If you truly believe reports matter, start sending them on known offenders and track the results. My experience has been that they don't.

They rarely ban on the spot in mmorpgs unless you're being ridiculous, cause dedicated people will do a/b testing to find out the limits of the ban systems if they do. They log the ban and wait for a pre-determined time to ban a load of people at once.

Also people who do not get banned for doing something are likely to boast about it (also some people try trick others into doing things to troll), while people who do get banned never say anything or lie and said they didn't do nuffin.

Kind of like "my grandfather smoked 20 a day and lived till he was 80, so smoking is actually harmless" stories.

No, I said the latter. Nothing I did in Sortie was nefarious. But I was prior. The video of the run posted probably alerted someone who saw a member using 3PT and the group got hit like a day or two later. That had to be from a report against all of us, unless I'm to believe the dart board magically hit us because I clipped across Lufaise Meadows two weeks prior and they were waiting to roll out the ban. I don't see that as being likely.

Unironically, I am willing to believe that. Turnaround is almost never as fast as 1-2 days and the video just adds confirmation bias because it clearly upset you (as it should, since you weren't the one cheating in it).

Took the game down to fix the deeds bug.

The deeds exploit itself still works. Just for the original 10 and not 3800. (I assume, I can set it but I'm not going to do it right now, it's bed time)

On my first day on Asura in 2012, a character named Bigmomma invited me to her linkshell. She gave me a 10-minute speech in /tell about how she reports everyone she suspects of using third party tools.

We all know about the dude on the official forums who writes STF reports every day for 2-3 years now. I don't want to see the community diminish, so I'll just put it out here for people who still don't get it:

TLDR:

• Some people don't play the game, they just login every day to report people. Other people watch videos and submit STF reports.
  

• Every online service employs log aggregation software or scripts. If someone at SE is collecting a paycheck and has access to the servers, they can and often will correlate any TOS-breaking action with past logs.
  

• If anyone assumes these things don't exist or are not happening, please either delete your account or give it to me for future safe-keeping.

Something tells me "Bigmomma" invited you to more than her linkshell, wink wink.

And some are apparently looking for exploits and want to cheat in a game they pay a monthly subscription for.

This IS the game!

(hopefully you heard that in the cadence of the Fairly Oddparents quote I was aiming for)

...but seriously, everybody's got their own line, and some people derive more joy from breaking a thing than actually doing the thing. I ain't gonna throw stones.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/64026-%E3%82%A8%E3%83%9F%E3%83%8D%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B9%E3%83%BB%E3%83%AC%E3%82%B3%E3%83%BC%E3%83%89%E3%81%AE%E3%83%9E%E3%83%B3%E3%82%B9%E3%83%AA%E3%83%BC%E7%9B%AE%E6%A8%99%E3%81%AE%E5%A0%B1%E9%85%AC%EF%BC%88%E3%83%95%E3%82%A7%E3%82%A4%E3%82%B9%E6%89%8B%E5%BC%95%E6%9B%B8%EF%BC%89%E3%81%8C%E5%8F%97%E3%81%91%E5%8F%96%E3%82%8C%E3%81%BE%E3%81%9B%E3%82%93

I wonder if this dude got banned lol
The RoE only affected the 6 you arent supposed to be able to set through the client.

This is just my theory.

-Zoning too fast will cause an error. This is possibly logged.
-Exceeding legit possible movement speed will also probably set off some flags.
-Noclipping to the Goblin Priest in the Temple of Ugly causes a crash and probably gets logged. There are probably more NPCs like this
-Interacting with NPCs only visible via All Seeing Eye probably gets some logs sent. Especially if they were cut scene only.

If you are going to Speed Hack/POS put up in invisible/sneak first. ? People can see you T Posing across the zone lmao.

Make a throwaway character.for boundary breaking, and see how long it lasts honestly.

With the 20+ years of this games life you think nobody did that? It's been documented already and a general consensus was met ages ago. If the guy thinks theres no automated system and that an actual GM is looking thru logs and reports... give me a break. Gotta love when people pretend to know more than others who have had way more experience.

All his post is just misinformation. You know how many people report me every single day, even just sitting in town doing nothing? I've had countless reports, I had threads created about me on various forums etc. The only thing thats for sure is that its an automated process for the majority of the bans/suspensions. They couldn't care less to expend resources to have someone look into cases, they probably have someone who does a final check and thats it, maybe not even.

Like really, it always astounds me that people honestly think with the budget they have that this team looks at youtube videos and uses that to ban people in this game. They always cite Eijins case, but I am almost sure he was doing something automated that he thought was safe and it flagged him.

This same discussion repeats every few years lol. Basically, stay away from any type of POS hack.

The thing everyone *** up is all or nothing.

You think they check zero reports, no.
You think they check all reports, no.
Every 4006 every failed zone every movement irregularity is logged but only a very small percentage are actioned.
You think they sink man hours into "investigations", no.
You think they hire people to just watch you run around and/or stream, no.
They randomly pop a couple heads to keep you scared and it's the most effective tool you can use. You don't know if luck is on your side this time or not.

I will say though, if you're stupid enough to record yourself cheating, and jp find you and the proof is literally right there, your odds up significantly. But it's never a certainty.

Bans are Sunday and Thursday.