Final Fantasy XIV has an estimated 44 million subscriber accounts right now (daily player count ~800,000), according to mmo-population.com. Reviewing their Lodestone site, they put out a weekly notice on account bans, and are averaging recently 6,000 per week or 24,000 a month. This is 0.05%, or 1/2000 accounts per month, as a ban rate. The player community there is, I think, pretty satisfied with this, even though there’s still people breaking the ToS and the cheaters still come back with new accounts. But they don’t dominate any part of the game at present.
War Thunder has an estimated 70 million open accounts, with a daily player count of around 500-700,000, so within an order of magnitude in terms of community size of that other game. They are currently banning around 200 accounts a month, or 1/200th the rate of that other game, 1/350,000 accounts per month.
Obviously FFXIV is using more than just individual game video reviews from player reports, as War Thunder is doing; they are detecting behavior using more than just that. This is the core problem. Procedural methods need to be employed. Gaijin is way behind the curve of their industry on these metrics, because it’s a smaller business, of course, but this is the real problem, not the quality of player reporting or the inability to detect.
(And for those who will say FFXIV is a subscription game, yep it is. But it’s free up to level 60 (out of 90), basically the equivalent of if ~BR 6 and below in WT were predominantly F2P, which is sort of true… if you’re playing above that I’ll bet you at least bought a premium or a battlepass at some point, so maybe that’s not not as big a contrast as you might think.)
looking at the market, it also looks like the “transfer GJN from account to account” event is in full swing for bots … all those huge & “nonsensical” skin purchase transactions where someone suddenly for some completely mysterious reason feels the need to dump 200+ GJN or more on random skin (that has either low numbers, or big gaps in in sell values)
looks like the 5+ billion SL certain totally legit squadron had available after several months of totally legit 24/7 nonstop playing is being put to “good use” …
I am tired. I appreciate every effort by gaijin to stop bot players, but from my pov it gets worse every day. I play exclusively Air RB (and props up to rank IV), but the recent days of the grinding event is an absolute nightmare as game results, mission score and the final rank in your team are highly affected by bots.
If you invest 2 minutes and 20 seconds you will see that 4(!!!) highly suspicious players attack the same base - and stayed in bombardier view even under fire, no evasive actions and they lived all four for 2:20 minutes. The had obviously the same script running as they attacked all the same (and nearest) base.
Such incidents resulted to the following:
The enemy team had very early a severe number disadvantage
Some players of my team got way too easy kills
This leads to artificially increased mission scores
Further, less experienced fighter pilots disrupted their climb
This leads to bad positioning later in the fight
All in all - it was no fair fight
Idk where the problem of gaijin is to identify such accounts. The only reaction i see so far that they downtiered the B-25s, from my pov no the right way to deal with the B-25 bot spam…
PS: If you watch the whole replay, you will see how a very hostile tree jumped into my flight path, but this is off topic…
So I see at least one player on this list has had their “banned” icon on their account since removed. Makes you wonder how many of these “bans” last more than a few days.
Of course the unbanned one I noticed was foolhunter. Guy runs a squadron of 100+ pure naval bots that dominate Naval RB right now, so much so that the squadron is #7 in activity worldwide, and even then, he could apparently not stay banned for even one month (or possibly you’re just removing the “banned” gif from all banned accounts now, which would also be a step backwards, I suppose). Really says all that needs to be said about your anti-botting efforts currently, don’t it?
It’s simple, I think there are already more people banned than currently playing, and those banned players are needed because otherwise there are few people left playing the game.
It’s like the people who put images of accounts of banned players connected, mysteriously the day the boycott was made. Even so, it still seems extraordinarily strange to me that these days there are 150,000 players connected, I think gaijin is using the banned accounts to inflate the number of connected players.
I don’t know, but I found it curious that precisely on the day the boycott was carried out (which I certainly did not do) there were more people than on a normal day, which is, because of the boycott, people who were no longer playing connected in defense of the game?
Well, I didn’t know about that, it may be the reason for the rise in players, but even so I don’t have any confidence in the developers after so many years of disappointments, that’s why what I said wouldn’t seem strange to me.
The boycott never really caught on anyway. Hell even some of the guys who purportedly ‘organized’ it were discovered to have played the game on that day.
I’m not telling you that you’re not right, also in my opinion, making a boycott due to the economic issue when there are much more serious problems in the game and that have been in the game for many years without being solved was a bit absurd, although I’m not saying that it is Legitimate, but is that it, why isn’t there a boycott based on the bullet damage model? It’s like the War Thunder community, you couldn’t ask for more.
I’m not gonna comment on that, since the boycott isn’t what I’m trying to argue about here.
My point is that the whole “Gaijin is using banned/bot accounts to inflate player counts” is a pointless and baseless conspiracy theory. Your insistence on bringing that up continously isn’t contributing to anything here.
“Ignoring completely” would be the correct way to describe it. They almost never delete anything that isn’t some kind of trolling. The botting issue was one of the exceptions before they officially acknowledged it.
I’ll believe things when there’s concrete proof of it. Doesn’t matter if it’s from Gaijin or a player. Both can’t be trusted imo.