A little about the 'botting epidemic' that's going on ATM

For those of you that don't read the reddit or spend too much time in your hideout to notice, there's a lot of botting go on right now.

I'm quite tired of it atm, so I went ahead and recorded a video about it(about 15 min of me observing bots and rambling in A4M) showing how easy it is to find them and how many there are of them.
(If you watch close to the post time I just uploaded the vid, will be in 720p eventually).

There seem to be 4 different builds I've been seeing, and they are all farming either the Dried Lake or The Harvest.
Build 1: Witch with tabula, lioneye shield, goldrim, wand
Build 2: Witch with tabula, 2x wands, rats nest
Build 3: Duelist with tabula, Wings of Entrophy
Build 4: Ranger with Tabula, rat's nest, lioneye bow, drillneck
(there are some variants of these, like duelists with devoto's devotion or bringer of the rain and no tabula; these are the base things they're using)

How to find them:
Control click the A4M waypoint to select town instances. Look for characters with names that are weird, or in characters that people on your sever probably wouldn't be using (like Russian on the Cali server, for instance).
They have very repetitive behavior you can identify pretty fast.
To figure out where they are farming, right click them whisper but do not send to get their name. Then do a /whois once they leave the zone.

I wish we could still right click on characters and report them (you need a chat message to report now).

Your thoughts?

I wouldn't worry much about that. That's is ggg problem. In ssf, no economy, leisurely happily playing. No rushing, having fun with limitations. No one to brag about my accomplishment, except my cat. You worry too much.

If you kill all those bots then the poor Chinese rice farmers using them to farm exalts to sell for hot US dollars will die of starvation!

How could you be so cruel? /s

At least they've given us SSF so we can prove we don't cheat or benefit from cheaters.

"

Shagsbeard wrote:

At least they've given us SSF so we can prove we don't cheat or benefit from cheaters.

wow

I'm not really upset, just amazed at the amount that I've been seeing over the past few days.

Most obvious I've ever seen it.

Unfortunately, it's post like this that will actually increase the use of bots.

I never believed in bots... just thought it was people complaining and whinging.

However, your video is pretty convincing. So I did a search for POE bot and was amazed just what is out there, a long with a whole suite of other things like trade sniping tools etc.

I'm like WTF?! But now I know this shit is available. Thanks for letting me, and the rest of the POE community know.

I'm not one to use them, but unfortunately, I'm pretty sure hundreds of others that read this will be.

Hopefully GGG is watching and bans their master accounts after they transfer loot <3

I think it's pretty embarrassing that GGG are unable to detect such detectable behavior. But hey, I can't code, so who am I to speak.