Anyone notice botting DoL has gotten exponentially worse recently?

In the last week, I've found things like shards significantly overbotted. Much much moreso than before. I used to be able to farm a couple hundred while I waited for queues and they'd sell fast for a decent chunk, but suddenly a dozen new retainers popped up posting stacks of 2,000, 3,000, even 9,999 thousand for 9 or 10 gil each (about 1/4 what they were going for).

This morning, I see a retainer with a keyboard mashed name (something like "lhasdfklhjas") who is posting no less than 57,000 lightning shards in stacks of 9,000. I don't even know how he does it being only able to hold 9,999 in your inventory.

Does SE comment in this forum? Do they plan to do anything about it? Or will this be like FFXI where everyone knew the RMT and they stayed for years?

Edit: Crunching the numbers, a human can farm about 7-800 shards/hr. This guy would've had to farm for 76 hours earning 12,000 gil/hr to do this legitly for lightning shards alone. And he's got similar postings for every other shard type.

If you see shards for 9-10 gil quit complaining, buy it use it or flip it. I'd kill for that price. But yeah the botters are getting out of hand, on my server stacks go for 50-150 each :(

You can't flip shards when one guy using a teleport hack is literally farming 20-30,000 shards a day (something is wrong when the demand of a whole server is being met by one or two guys).

I'm mad about hyper deflated shards because I leveled my professions the hard way. Farming most of my own shards, buying a few here and there at more normal prices. Now, anyone with 100k gil can buy all the shards they'd need to level every profession to 50 which further devalues my professions. It may seem cool for you, but you don't live in a bubble. What you can do for cheap, anyone can. Think about what the economy as a whole will be like in this game if every player had all maxed professions. Literally the only market would be materia farming. Nobody would buy what they can make.

You assume everyone wants to make everything. Plenty of players fill a niche and sell piles of their product to afford all the other ones they need- a functioning economy. Even if I push all my crafts to 50 and can make everything, I'll still be more likely to do the above rather than run to Northern Than to grab some ore, then to Southern Grid to grab some logs before crafting my new sword.

Shards and their rarity are currently a problem. Those should not be the greatest limiting factor in crafting, it should be the materials themselves. Whether it be you yourself running outside to grind out shards for two hours or some guy you pay for his time. However, solving that problem is a huge undertaking and SE needs time to work on it. RMT's flooding the market certainly aren't all good, but they aren't devil-spawn either.

Also, you certainly can flip those shards. I for one would never buy a stack of 10K even at 10 gil per. Buy his stack and dole it out in 1K stacks for 15 gil.

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You assume everyone wants to make everything. Plenty of players fill a niche and sell piles of their product to afford all the other ones they need- a functioning economy. Even if I push all my crafts to 50 and can make everything, I'll still be more likely to do the above rather than run to Northern Than to grab some ore, then to Southern Grid to grab some logs before crafting my new sword.

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Of course regular players won't farm the materials on their own. That's the main point I'm trying to make. With RMT supplying the shards and ore for next to nothing prices, players will just buy all the materials and craft the end products themselves. There will be no market for HQ gear when everyone can make their own. There will be no market for materials when teleport bots will sell them for less than any human would want to farm them for.

Sorry for the broken up response. These forums don't allow long posts:

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Shards and their rarity are currently a problem. Those should not be the greatest limiting factor in crafting, it should be the materials themselves. Whether it be you yourself running outside to grind out shards for two hours or some guy you pay for his time. However, solving that problem is a huge undertaking and SE needs time to work on it. RMT's flooding the market certainly aren't all good, but they aren't devil-spawn either.

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That's your opinion and against the design of the game. If you want to justify cheating as okay because it makes your life easier, that's fine, but remember that SE designed crafting professions around the idea that they should be somewhat hard to level and not be maxed on everyone (creating some kind of specialization for trade in the marketplace). That means they decided recipes should require specific ingredients (ore, skins, etc.) as well as reagents (shards, crystals, clusters). They were trying to avoid the whole notion of just farming up 400 silver ore and then having all you'd need to level a craft 15 levels.

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Also, you certainly can flip those shards. I for one would never buy a stack of 10K even at 10 gil per. Buy his stack and dole it out in 1K stacks for 15 gil.

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Again, I'll reiterate that these teleport botters are farming 30,000+ shards per day. Their limiting factor is actually finding people to sell them to. They are farming faster than they can sell them. So me buying all their supply to "flip" would just end with me owning 50,000 shards and them immediately posting 50,000 more.

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Originally Posted by Lyein

Shards and their rarity are currently a problem. Those should not be the greatest limiting factor in crafting, it should be the materials themselves. Whether it be you yourself running outside to grind out shards for two hours or some guy you pay for his time. However, solving that problem is a huge undertaking and SE needs time to work on it. RMT's flooding the market certainly aren't all good, but they aren't devil-spawn either.

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I agree with Spald, I don't think current design of crafting which draw high demand on both shards and materials is a problem that needed to be fixed near future, it slows the players' progression down, maintaining the crafting profession, stabilizing the market, and thus extending the longevity of the game. I am a bit shaky though, seeing SE unable to respond effectively to overwhelming farming bots.

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Originally Posted by Spald

but remember that SE designed crafting professions around the idea that they should be somewhat hard to level and not be maxed on everyone

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LOL. This is funny..!

Botting tools are getting more advanced recently too. There used to be teleporting botters that were partially embedded underground where you can just see their nametags but now they're completely underground and cannot be seen. All you can see are their gathering "swings". They also gather more than 1 item per swing too.

Not only that, the Gil seller tell spam is getting ridiculous and my blacklist is full at 200/200. I contact SE support to tell them my blacklist is full and if there's another way to block the tells. Their response was a cut and paste answer to "use the blacklist". I would if it WASN'T EFFING FULL. They're not even reading complaints anymore.

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Originally Posted by Spald

So me buying all their supply to "flip" would just end with me owning 50,000 shards and them immediately posting 50,000 more.

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Not what I said. You buy one stack- 9999 for 10 per shard then repost them in stacks of 500 or 1000 costing 15 per shard. The point is that someone can buy the shards they _need_ for 7500 instead of far more than they would ever use for 100,000. NOT buying all 50K shards.

Shard rarity IS a problem if the materials are selling for 20 gil and the shards are selling for 70. They're supposed to strike a balance, which they have not. Now if SE wanted material gathering to be DoL's questline and shards to be the real medium, then they hit the nail on the head.

Slowing progress down isn't a bad thing. DoH and DoL both level faster than an MMO should really allow. But slowing it down by making players burn hours running node to node farming up shards isn't the way to do it (even if you aren't doing it yourself, someone else is doing it for you). The only mitigation I've seen to that problem is the occasional leve which rewards an appreciable stack of shards.

And don't say I'm justifying cheating. RMT's are cancer. I'm just not shedding any tears over all the people who don't get to grind out shards for six hours.

Material costs being significantly lower than shard costs are a result of a new game with many people leveling gathering classes. Anyone trying to level up those classes can only mine shards until about level 5, after that the exp is just too low, so instead they're farming up the same ore or log for 5 levels. This means that right now are a side effect of leveling the gathering class while most of the shards are directly mined as a source of income.

Materials are temporarily low and (without RMT assistance) will inevitably rise as the game gets older and everyone their brother aren't leveling up their gathering classes. It's not that shards are way too expensive, but that materials are way too cheap right now.

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Originally Posted by Spald

*snip*

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Or another Hypothesis: RMT1 has 5 active characters, all leveled up to have retainers and a chocobo. with a std subscription that is 5 x world. So RMT1 acts as 'bridge/warehouse' for a given numbers of BOTs who farm and converge all resources to his CHARA1 TO CHARA5. So RMT1 handles 10 retainers= 200 market entry slots,in 1 wave. if you consider an initial week or 2 to level/stock up on supply (1750 total storage slots) and add convenient prices to rack up whatever the market trend setting is, you get the picture. RMT1 sits there all day cashing in and placing new entries, while the squad grinds (or bots) mats to converge
to them it's not leisure, it's a job. need gil fast to sell it so anything goes at any level

yup bots are growing

Shard price drop to 14gil each on my server, so I will say yes...

Just saw, kinda, my first bot this weekend. They were in Central Thanalan right outside the gates, mining. They were invisible, bouncing between nodes, mining at a faster-than-should-be-possible pace. Unfortunately, I couldn't see their name, as it was invisible too. I couldn't even target them. I could just see the strikes they would make as they mined, and for some reason, one letter from their name, a D. It almost looked like the name was coming out of the wall.

It's exacerbated by the fact many players by this stage have turned off "other people" visual effects to stop them being blinded during FATEs, but the same option hides the impacts on nodes caused by the hidden bot miners, so even more cases go unreported (I mean, even more than usual; by this stage people are getting seriously apathetic towards reporting botters given how you can report them til your fingers fall off and your keyboard breaks and nobody is going to deal with them)

I've mined all my own shards, and I only have three crafts left to take to 50, Weaver (which needs more shards) isn't one of them. It's odd that shards are almost worthless on your server, on mine they're a pretty steady source of income for a lot of people.

I basically gather or farm all of my own shit. I check the market board prices and always end up changing to WHM/BTN/MIN to farm the mats, if an npc doesn't sell them. The only exception being if it's necessary to synth a quest item, and I can't make it myself (cobalt for example).

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Originally Posted by Spald

You can't flip shards when one guy using a teleport hack is literally farming 20-30,000 shards a day (something is wrong when the demand of a whole server is being met by one or two guys).

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Like hell you can't bought 10000 lightning shards at 14 each, flipped 1000 of them for 45 each. Still going back up. Gotta watch the market. As the mass sellers sell out prices rise, then they flood the market and prices drop. Don't fight the system, work the system. Botters will NEVER!!!!! be gone. Use it to your advantage.

I won't sell them all since I use about 500 every day but as I want an extra 40,50,60k I'll dump them on the market when pricing goes back up.

They might do something as soon as another game comes out that starts stealing sheep, other than that happening they figure if your willing to pay to complain at least your paying, and that's all they care about.

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Originally Posted by Githiun

Like hell you can't bought 10000 lightning shards at 14 each, flipped 1000 of them for 45 each.

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Again I'll reiterate why this doesn't work. The botters are are limited in sales by the number of buyers on the market, not the number of shards they own. They can literally mine faster than they can sell using hacks. This is precisely why they're selling them for 1/3 the market prices of the next closest sellers. If I bought out all 30,000 they have for sale that day, they would immediately be able to repost another 30,000. And while I could probably make a couple of thousand gil just buying one stack of 3,000 at 10 gil and selling them in stacks of 100 for 20 gil, I would be very hard pressed to find anyone willing to pay much more. Very few people would be willing to turn down a deal of 75% off if they buy in bulk which shows in my server's sales history.

leave shards bots alone! I do like buying tons of shards for 8 gil each ;)

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Originally Posted by Luthia

leave shards bots alone! I do like buying tons of shards for 8 gil each ;)

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And so does every other crafter. When shards and ore/lumber/etc. are basically free, don't be upset when every player has all the crafts maxed out and yours become valueless.

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Originally Posted by Naberrie

Just saw, kinda, my first bot this weekend. They were in Central Thanalan right outside the gates, mining. They were invisible, bouncing between nodes, mining at a faster-than-should-be-possible pace. Unfortunately, I couldn't see their name, as it was invisible too. I couldn't even target them. I could just see the strikes they would make as they mined, and for some reason, one letter from their name, a D. It almost looked like the name was coming out of the wall.

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It's ok, I saw him and he did pop out of the wall long enough in one location to see his name. I then re-confirmed his name with a player search on all miners in the local map area, just to be doubly sure I had it right. Once I had the name confirmed, I reported him. Not seem him since.


Saw another botting mining on Zalera yesterday around the East Shroud area near the Sylph village. Guy would run to every possible mining node point on the loop, even if they weren't there for that time around on the loop, and would run a VERY specific fixed path (straight, turn, straight, turn) including away from node points to reach a point where the node could be reached in a clear-path straight line. Watched him for 20 minutes to confirm it was a fixed pattern, and reported.

Since that post which was a while ago the shard market has completely bottomed out. Now that bots are farming anything other than shards (at least on my server) the shard price doesn't change. Everything is under 10each now.

I found shard costs 10 gils yesterday in Tonberry :o

Unchecked botting will probably be the eventual nail in the coffin on this game for me (seems MMOs are getting more and more botted as time goes on). I'm able to distract myself with other stuff for now, but that'll only work for so long. I can't respect the integrity of the game world and immerse myself if the people in charge of managing it don't take care of it.

It's quite apparent when I try to go farm materials that aren't uncontested DoL nodes, such as Fleece and the like. At that point I can't even ignore the botters and farm my own stuff (not that always I do, I've bought plenty of shards that were almost certainly botted) because the supply is limited. I am either forced to buy their stuff or compete with bots directly and try to outfarm them. Just makes what should be a cathartic activity (likely while watching something) very irritating instead.


Awhile ago I saw a 50 Archer farming Fleece. Not a Bard, an Archer. Had no other classes and had no GC (so no story quests done). Screams bot, but was still there plinking away days later.

I hear some people drop their job because it can actually increase their dps. From what i've been told it's not viable to do for grouping/raiding but farming it can be. Main instance i've personally seen is PLD's grinding at farming mobs as a Gladiator.

Personally haven't looked into it just 3rd party information so please correct me if i'm not understanding this point.

Each report has to be investigated before SE implements a ban on any character or account. It's in the ToS. And I doubt that it takes any time at all for RMT's to boot up another character or account and start the process all over, again. The RMTs are putting bots out faster than they can be removed.

Want to find out who's botting? Search all of the gathering classes between levels 20-50 in any region and find anyone on the list who is, 1. Not in an FC, 2. Has 1 class at lvl10 and a gathering class any where between probably 30-50. It's generally always the same classes, too. In Thanalan, lv.10 GLD. In Shroud, it's always lv.10 Archer. 3. Send them a /t, they'll respond 30-45 mins later to make themselves seem like they aren't botting(at least in my experience). They generally point themselves out.

Botting will always be a problem in mmos, and this is no different. The programmers, gil sellers, and just players using them, will usually be ahead of the company that makes the game, just too many of them. Heck, do a google search, and see for yourself, many bots will act just like players, not teleporting and making it easy to report.

I personally think companies should take the approach Blizzard took, sue them for more than it's worth for them to make the bots. Blizz has won in almost every case, I don't know if Square has the push, or legal reach, but i would love to see it.

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Originally Posted by rabbitzero

Botting will always be a problem in mmos, and this is no different. The programmers, gil sellers, and just players using them, will usually be ahead of the company that makes the game, just too many of them. Heck, do a google search, and see for yourself, many bots will act just like players, not teleporting and making it easy to report.

I personally think companies should take the approach Blizzard took, sue them for more than it's worth for them to make the bots. Blizz has won in almost every case, I don't know if Square has the push, or legal reach, but i would love to see it.

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Quick question, how do you sue them? They aren't breaking any laws. Don't get me wrong I don't like them at all, but i'm trying to figure out what the legal standing is that they could use? Is breaking ToS on a game enough to go to court, or do they have to prove that it is costing them money?

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Originally Posted by Niadissa

Quick question, how do you sue them? They aren't breaking any laws. Don't get me wrong I don't like them at all, but i'm trying to figure out what the legal standing is that they could use? Is breaking ToS on a game enough to go to court, or do they have to prove that it is costing them money?

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The ToS is a binding legal contract. If SE managed to find out who the botters are (wink wink to China), it is totally possible to sue them.

I do think that if SE managed to show that some players no longer subscribe with their complaints being "BOTS EVERYWHERE!!!!!111!!" SE has grounds in saying it costs them money.

The problem however, is not the makers of the bot, but the abusers of bot (RMT). Suppose to say you used a bot to walk from Steel Vigil to Camp Dragonhead because you want to take a piss, nobody's going to go apeshit to you about that.

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Think about what the economy as a whole will be like in this game if every player had all maxed professions. Literally the only market would be materia farming. Nobody would buy what they can make.

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I understand the mentaility of "why buy it when you could make it", but this is simply not true, because a single person cannot hold the ingredients necessary to make every craftable item. Also, most materials only sell in quantities higher than what you need for a single item so you spend more buying mats than just buying the item.

People are impatient, why would I spend 10+ minutes gathering the material and checking prices etc to see if I could make it for less, if I could simply spend 30 seconds looking at the MB and hitting "Buy" when I have the money?

Time is money, just because you can make it for less doesn't mean you should invest the time to save that money when you could be using that time doing something more profitable.

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Originally Posted by Spald

Material costs being significantly lower than shard costs are a result of a new game with many people leveling gathering classes.

Materials are temporarily low and (without RMT assistance) will inevitably rise as the game gets older and everyone their brother aren't leveling up their gathering classes. It's not that shards are way too expensive, but that materials are way too cheap right now.

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Shards are overpriced, even at 8gil. Why? Because you can go to a vendor and buy any other low level gather-able for around 4 gil. Heck with all the new vendors they added in 2.1 you can buy almost everything you need for the 1st 30 levels of any crafting class for about 22gil or less. So prices on mats are never going to rise. Not even High level, since those crashed to, because everyone farming for maps. You can't even make a profit on HQs, since idiots price them the same or lower than NQ.