Rmt bots

[Maeka]

I have found using the report RMT option makes them disappear pretty quickly.

Then another will show up just as instantly.

If you use Kugane, or even Ishgard(Foundation -> Jeweled Cozier) one, then you are guaranteed not to run into them. There is literally 0% chance of someone putting the effort/money into getting to those areas as it would be very fast for them to be caught and account banned.

We shouldn't have to be forced to never use the 3 nations ever again for crafting needs because of RMT scum and their bots. And what if you're a new/returning player who has yet to arrive in Ishgard?

Nothing is more welcoming and encouraging to a new legitimate player than bot spam that is (seemingly to their PoV) unchecked. /sarcasm

[Avatre]

And what if you're a new/returning player who has yet to arrive in Ishgard?

I never said it was a solution, it was just something for those who can get there to do rather than have their chat filled constantly with all that BS.

GMs should make regular(randomly) visits to areas that the bots are(or patrol the cities for any that are lurking elsewhere) to remove them. Sadly, I don't see this happening as much as it should.

[Roegadoom]

Or they should at least make the people running the bots put a little more effort into it. They don't even change their spam messages! It would be super easy to automatically catch and ban them. Yes, the smarter ones will just reprogram their bot to change the message a little every time, but at least it increases the cost of doing business just a little, and will stop the stupider ones. The problem with the current solution is that it costs SE more than it costs the spammers, and there's still spam. Some of it still gets through, and enough people do business with them to make it profitable.

So here's an even better idea: just invisibly mute them, rather than ban them, so that they don't know they've been caught, and won't adapt. They can just sit there spamming their messages to nobody. And, since they won't have the motive to make new characters, it would be easier to track their behavior. Watch them buy and sell, see who they trade with, etc.

[Mikki]

I don't understand why they don't just gag players who spam in general. If you're shouting the same phrase every 20 seconds or so for more than a minute, you should be automatically kicked from the server and issued a warning. Or, as Roegadoom said ... just make their shouts invisible to all players and have it sent in for review.

I don't understand how this issue has gotten so out of hand. It seems like there should be some way to deal with this behavior. :/ And it shouldn't fall to us players to have to CONSTANTLY report them and blacklist them. That's tiring. My BL is full up thanks to these bots. I have filled out so many reports - even since before it was so easy to do it. I report bots farming in the wild, too. I just don't get how SE hasn't found some automated way to handle this...? The behavior is always the same. It should be easy to spot with some algorithm or something. D:

[QT_Melon]

It's out of hand because it's likely to be the way the system is programmed. I mean look how archaic some parts of the UI are now? So it's likely a backend coding problem needs some resolution, and needs to be done without breaking other parts of the game. A lot of times the solution is simple, just not easy to implement.

[ChloeGrace]

They're all just free trial accounts anyway. Ban one and <10 minutes later, another pops up.
SE generally only goes after the bank characters/gil repositories. At least, that's the way it was in XI.

Lately, I've been noticing a ton of market board bots (on my server, anyway) undercutting within seconds of someone else posting the same item at a lower price. It's getting ridiculous.