This topic contains 59 replies, has 44 voices, and was last updated by 
Arc 4 years, 8 months ago.
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Hello everyone!
As you might have noticed, I am currently working as a tentative community manager and I have engaged in a lot of debate with the Miqobot development team. We already discussed a lot of features, divided a lot of work and organized quite a few forum threads.
First and foremost a word of thanks from me and of course also the Miqobot Dev Team to the community. While working on organizing the gathering grids and scenarios index threads, I have gotten an overview of the amount of work you have put into providing grids, presets and scenarios for Miqobot and I am simply amazed by this community. You’re putting a huge amount of effort into this project and in no other bot community I have seen so much passion for it.___________________________________
But let’s end the flattering here and get to business. Currently Miqobot Devs are facing an issue, that has sparked large debates and raised a lot of concerns. It is about our stance on Open World Combat and MSQ/quest support.
Just for clarification, Open World Combat and MSQ/quest support include the following features:
– Automated Main Scenario Quest execution
– Automated Quest execution
– FATE grind
– Materials Hunting
– Eureka SupportThere are several reasons, why these topics raised high concerns with the Miqobot Development Team. These include the following:
1. With the release of the new expansion Shadowbringers bot activity of other bots has spiked. Reports of countless, soulless Main Scenario farming bots swarming open world areas and impeding other players to complete their MSQ, as well as a huge amount of large multibox armies farming materials have increased severely over the last couple of months.
Players on Reddit started to share screenshots of these more and more often, banwaves for these have started to increase and the Miqobot Dev Team is also concerned, that our Bot could turn into just another tool, for such soulless behaviour, which it was never intended to, if Open World Combat and MSQ support is released.2. With the increased amount of players utilizing Miqobot, more people have reported their bans to the official Miqobot tech-support. Most of these do not engage into discussions here on the forums. Also recently people started asking, if they are entitled to get a refund from Miqobot, if their accounts get banned and this has raised more concerns within the Dev Team.
If Miqobot keeps releasing features that are susceptible to abuse which leads to bans, more people will get banned and be unsatisfied with Miqobot. Because of this the question was raised, if Miqobot should protect their users from getting bans, by refraining to release such dangerous features.
In a certain sense it is the same matter as with PvP features. Of course it would be extremely easy for the Dev Team to implement the combat assist and the scenario system for PvP areas. However by doing so, Miqobot would tap into an extremely dangerous territory, where reports from other players are much more likely to happen. Miqobot would also be very likely to become a target of witch hunting, which would eventually destroy the bot, since no one would be able to safely use it anymore.To solve these problems, we have come up with 3 different options and neither of these are perfect or completely satisfying:
Option 1:
Completely refrain from releasing MSQ support and Open World Content. This would be the safest option for everyone, however we do understand, that it would lead to a lot of disappointment, since we understand that many of you are eagerly waiting for a feature to get rid of that annoying material-farming, FATE currency farming and MSQ grind for alts.Option 2:
Release the aforementioned features in a restricted mode, so they are not available for Multiboxing, but only for single-instance use. This option would still be very safe, if used with the same care as the gathering and the scenario features. However, it might cause a lot of disappointment for people that use Miqobot for multiboxing.
Also, we currently do not have the means to know, how many people would actually want to utilize these features, since Miqobot does not monitor your activity. We could implement such a feature, however this would be a real problem due to privacy issues and a lot of people would most likely disapprove of such a feature.Option 3:
Release the aforementioned features completely unrestricted and let players who use Miqobot carelessly fall to their own demise. From an individual standpoint this might sound the most interesting, but from a larger community standpoint this would be highly dangerous, due to the concerns we mentioned before. More people would use Miqobot in an unwise fashion, which would result in more people getting bans and getting angry with Miqobot, requesting refunds and ultimately crushing the bot sooner or later.___________________________________
With that said, I want to spark discussion in this thread and hear your opinions.
The Miqobot Dev Team highly values your opinions and the Development often shifts based on your input, so we want to involve you into this difficult matter.Also, in case you might have an even better solution for this problem, we would be very grateful for your input, so feel free to give us suggestions.
However, you should also keep in mind, that the people enganging into discussions here on the forums are just a vocal minority, whereas the majority silently uses the bot without ever engaging into any kind of discussion. We do not want to exclude any opinion from this matter, which is why we will come up with additional means to get community opinions, but nevertheless your input is important, to give us a first impression, what the community’s stance on this matter is.
Thank you for reading and I’m looking forward to read your opinions.
Best Regards from the Miqobot Dev Team and me!
Personally, i dont really care for open world combat, im more interested in a upgraded gathering system where we wont need to create every grid for each node, rather a click and go list.
However, its a bot at the end of the day, we know the risks that come with botting despite this one being undetectable.
That said, i think you should stick to the plan with whats been promised, with regards to refunds if you feel youre obligated to offer a refund for a banned account from using this bot… well we know the risk but it might be easier to offer the refund dived by how many days remain on the sub, say they have 10 days sub left, refund the remaining days, at the end of the day its not your fault we get banned, its ours / SE.Bot safe.
Edit: option 3
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This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by
infuriated.
I think turning this community of users into the same mindless zombies you see with SdJIFHSfgjdkf SFKJSJHFGhdsz names rolling through zones would be a bad thing.
I do however think if Trust support gets released that would make 99% of this community happy. I know I have leveled 4 jobs to 80 and all my DoL/H manually, but would like to trust farm the rest.
Fate grind shouldnt be botted. I feel like a lot of people around here use this tool to assist them, and could be competent without it. Taking that aspect away cheapens the idea behind it. Personally this tool is just to help me multi task. I work a ton and sometimes need to work while gaming and if I can set my miqo to gather or craft on my split screen it helps me accomplish things that would take up my free gaming time and make it next to impossible to enjoy this game.
Just my 2 cents
2. With the increased amount of players utilizing Miqobot, more people have reported their bans to the official Miqobot tech-support. Most of these do not engage into discussions here on the forums.
Well TOO BAD! I doubt that an official ban report topic would turn away new potential users (every botter knows that he’s at ban risk every day), but at least we could learn from eachother’s mistakes if we knew what led to ban (too much grind per day? GM checks? player tells? what exactly do they tell? just simply too much gil sold? sold which way? etc)
Now, to the point. An opinion of someone who stopped to renew licences because of lack of features needed:
1) Open world grinding is ok (most of us grind the open world, just we grind mats rather than mobs), MSQ support is not. First, as you’ve said, there is another bot for that; second and most important – it would require INSANE amount of time to implement (because there is a lot of quests, and w/o teleport hack it would need covering whole zones with grids). I can just repeat what I’ve always said: forget hi-effort tasks, go for “low effort, high impact”. It shouldn’t be that hard to buy a jump potion, or to buy complete account if someone is that desperate.2) Don’t start any monitoring – it makes AV software alert, and generally it’s just a bad habit (we’ve got enough of this crap from M$ side already). Multiboxing is personal decision and personal risk (and, indeed, nobody should get refunds because of bans).
In my opinion, the only thing really necessary besides what’s already here is a lvl60ish squadron dungeon (because well, Somh Al starts to be slow after a while lol) and one or two trust dungeons.
The other mentioned features sounds to me like both complicated to do (and so, requiring a lot of resources) and, as you said, potentially dangerous because let’s face it, if it’s there, there will always be people ready to abuse it.
So I would say option 1.
And thanks for your hard work !
I do however think if Trust support gets released that would make 99% of this community happy. I know I have leveled 4 jobs to 80 and all my DoL/H manually, but would like to trust farm the rest.
In my opinion, the only thing really necessary besides what’s already here is a lvl60ish squadron dungeon (because well, Somh Al starts to be slow after a while lol) and one or two trust dungeons.
Just fyi: It’s not a question of “if” it will get released, but rather “when”. Trust support is currently one of the absolute top requested features and therefore also on the top of the priority list. With the upcoming release level 70 combat support is going to be released and Holminster Switch as first trust dungeon is also extremely high on the priority list. Priorities can change, but currently due to the amount of requests it’s one of the features most worked on right now.
MSQ support is not. First, as you’ve said, there is another bot for that; second and most important – it would require INSANE amount of time to implement (because there is a lot of quests, and w/o teleport hack it would need covering whole zones with grids).
The other mentioned features sounds to me like both complicated to do (and so, requiring a lot of resources) and, as you said, potentially dangerous because let’s face it, if it’s there, there will always be people ready to abuse it.
Just for making things clear: MSQ support was one of the first features in development and it’s already halfway done. You can see some of the progress in this over 3 years old thread:
However, work on it is currently deprioritized, because other features like Trust support and many features that were released in the past always were much higher on the request list.
Still, thanks for the input so far. I’m eager to listen to more opinions.
I really dont have much of an opinion on any of these matters. I’d like to see them released, and if abused, and it leads to bans– well then that’s on the user. I do see tho how it could reflect badly on miqo. Perhaps the better option would be to release them, and limit them to one instance.
My Opinion may or may not be biased tho as I dont really care much about the features spoke of in the OP.
I appreciate the MiqoBots Teams work in all areas. People disabled like myself are unable to keep up with all the button pushing and remembering rotations as we once could when we where young and our brains and fingers worked as fast as lightning.
With that being said:
Keep what you guys have now and improve on it:
1. Updated Skills and Rotations Combat/Crafting/Gathering to level caps.
2. Work on one more Squad Instance to get people to 70-71 a bit faster (optional)
3. Work on The Trust System – this will just piggy back on the Squad System
4. Make MiqoBot run 1 account instance per machine – DO your best to stop Multi-Box Armies.Thoughts on the issues listed:
NO – Automated Main Scenario Quest execution: Will turn into thousands of reported accounts and bot Armies.
NO – Automated Quest execution: Will turn into thousands of reported accounts and bot Armies.
NO – FATE grind: Will turn into thousands of reported accounts and bot Armies.
YES – Materials Hunting: Already in place / Do not run “One Click in Go” because everyone will be on the same paths and it will be obvious that the person(s) are botting. The only thing that keeps most people from being reported is they are tweaking and/or making their own navigation maps.
No – Eureka Support: Will turn into thousands of reported accountsJust my thoughts been gaming since 1997 and I’ve seen all kinds of bots in games. This bot is great and 99.9% undetectable and/or provable that you where using one.
I really do not understand the need for MSQ support!!
Miqo is a bot for people who loves FF14. FF14 in its core is the story/MSQ why should i let the bot do it? It is a onetime thing.
Let the bot do the Grind.
In my opinion is trust the most important thing a) for leveliung up b) for getting the tokens in the upcomming 80 dungeons.
and as it is inside an instance the system is very safe for botting.Fate support in the open world is more dangerous i think but not more than gathering.
Multiboxing support does not raise the problem of getting caught in my opinion. If Miqo implemets a group supprt within the comabt system i think it would make it safer. As nobody expect a group of 3-4 Players be played by a bot.
Also the Quality of life Patches wich are so eagerly awaitet by Gray:-), will make the bot safer as it will behave much more naturalyy in the open world when it comes to buy or sell stuff from NPC.
So my private List is:
1. Trust
2. Trust
3 Group support
4. Quality of Life like vendor supportno to:
MSQ Support
PvP
Quest Support-
This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by
4DDCom.
I honestly don’t think MSQ features should even be added, it feels like a lot of work for so little payoff (at least for the average miqobot user); and if they are added, they should definitely be limited to a single instance.
If people want an alt, they’ll only use it once, so it’s wasted dev time. If they want to pump out a lot of alts, they’re probably trying to sell gil and that feels like such a minority (I could be wrong) that I don’t think it’s worth prioritizing features for them.
Also, if legit gil sellers (not people trying to make a couple of bucks) start using this program to pump out characters, you will be drawing unwanted attention, mainly because they won’t care about being discreet, since they don’t actually give a shit about the account, they just want to make gil to sell; judging by the PvP kill switch, you guys don’t want negative attention.
As for my opinion on future features:
1) While trusts should definitely be next up, they’re just a band-aid fix. What we really need is mesh grids, so the players themselves can automate any dungeon they want. Imagine if every time an expansion dropped the devs had to create gathering grids for every single node. So what we really need is “scenarios” for dungeons with mesh grids.2) Vendor interactions, hopefully something that lets you interact with a nearby vendor by name, then list an item in its inventory, along with how many of it you want to buy.
3) Lvl 80 rotations. I realize that unless you’re a physical ranged dps/tank, rotation optimization will never be good enough to net you a 90% parse, simply because for the remaining jobs the rotation isn’t really the hard part, it’s doing the rotation while dealing with movement, and in the case of healers, CD usage changes fight by fight, so the bot will never be optimal in savage content. Still, I don’t want to get carpal tunnel syndrome so it’d be nice to have combat rotations to use outside of savage.
Also on a somewhat unrelated sidenote:
If people get banned and complain, literally laugh in their face. I’ve seen so many idiots use this program. It took me 1 run of the aetherflow scenario to realize that that shit was not safe. On the marjoram step, the grid flies into a tree trunk and stealth walks 20+ feet to the node. The chances of a player doing that is 0%. I could go to the marjoram node next time it spawns and over the course of 10 minutes find over a dozen people using miqobot. Now I know unless you yourself are using Miqobot you probably won’t know what’s going on right away, but I’m not risking even having a fellow miqobot user know I’m botting. Some people are assholes, what if another botter reports me because they want to reduce competition? I can guarantee you that has happened.-
This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by
AirForceOne.
No on MSQ – MSQ BOTs are too common and very dangerous
No on FATES – we have so many good options for leveling and this will help just a few people at a huge cost to bot safety
Yes on materials hunt – single instance restriction
Yes on eureka – single instance
NO NO NO PVP – I bot for my own convenience. Actively screwing other players is over the line for me.We should all be ready to get banned at any time. The only reason we have not been banned is because we play smart. I doubt most people getting banned are altering their grids, or are running them safely. I like that this bot has an actual community. No refunds unless we get to the point where the app itself is the problem and not the users fault. After adding in the Trust system I would like to see a gathering option that looks a little more realistic. For example, I could make three paths to a node and one is selected at random. Or if we could get the bot to no stop on the beacon node if it sees another viable one. My aethersand grid looks super botlike and I want better options on that.
I think alot of people already said what I’ve been thinking about MSQ support, so I’ll just address the other portions.
Fates and material grinding are iffy. Unlike gathering, killing monsters would definitely directly impact legit players and would lead to more outcry against bots. There are many ways to make gil and level up with Miqo, in addition to the amount of work the developers have to add to Miqo like trusts, I don’t think we really need these features.
I think its definitely a good thing that the Miqo devs are thinking about protecting its users and botting as a whole. Its a miracle that Square Enix don’t detect and punish bots as severely (as long as its not RMT) as other games like Runescape. Most Miqo users enjoy the game but don’t want to deal with the more grindy stuff, and I’d like to think we want to keep the current status quo by keeping our impact to a minimum to legit players.
If Miqo devs wants to proceeds with material hunting, I’m ok with restrictions like single instance only as long as my privacy is maintained. If people want to figure out a way to abuse Miqo for RMT, they would probably figure out a way even with monitoring and there isn’t much you can do to deter them.
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This reply was modified 4 years, 8 months ago by
The topic ‘Asking the community: Thoughts on Open World Combat and User Protection’ is closed to new replies.