Bot or cheat have been reported but didn't get ban or take any action

[Volcano]

A bunch of us reported a guy that was botting to farm Aldgoat Skins. He's still active as of this evening. We reported him a little over three weeks ago.

Your faith is misplaced.

Yep, it's alot more then "couple of days" even if they ban in waves they have plenty of time to do more then enough damage, then when they finnaly do ban them a few months later they are replaced asap and then continues untill another month or 2 later. If they are handling this they are doing a very poor job of it. it's almost like it's ok to cheat in this game, since there is no fear of punishment.

[RyuujinZERO]

On Balmung there's a group of bots in South Shroud that've been grinding the deathmice there for approaching 2 weeks now... It makes me question whether I should waste my time filing reports if the Gm's can't find the time to act upon them :/

The Gm's need to be seen to more pro-active if they want the community to continue to work with them.

[Reiterpallasch]

A bunch of us reported a guy that was botting to farm Aldgoat Skins. He's still active as of this evening. We reported him a little over three weeks ago.

Your faith is misplaced.

For all you know a GM could have tried talking to him, and the guy was there to respond. It's all it would really take to get off "innocent".

[Freakiie]

For all you know a GM could have tried talking to him, and the guy was there to respond. It's all it would really take to get off "innocent".

While he's teleporting all over the place? Yup, definitely sounds innocent to me!

[APilgrim]

There's more than one issue here and it's not the teleporting gathering bots that discourage me the most - it's the ones that don't teleport (and instead just use a recorded patrol path with set hotspots) that are so rampant right now. The teleporting ones - which seemed to be mostly run by RMT at first actually seem to be declining in numbers from what I've personally seen on my server. The less blatant (but still blatant) patrol path/hotspot bots however are increasingly common - at most gathering locations I go to there is more of this type of botting going on day after day from node to node nonstop by the same "players".

Looking at forums online, the impression is you can safely bot on your character during your offtime/sleep with no repercussions in this game as SE isn't taking any action if you aren't blatantly RMT associated (a lot like the environment in FFXI for years).

[Tiraelina]

Personally I haven't seen any less teleporting bots, just the addition of more of them using waypoints to bot. I'm really just getting tired of reporting these absurd amount of bots that are still there well over 2 weeks later. It's so painfully obvious they are bots, there isn't even a single degree of investigation required. This is feeling like every other game where they focus on trying to prevent it instead of banning all of them ruining the economy for months.

[APilgrim]

Personally I haven't seen any less teleporting bots, just the addition of more of them using waypoints to bot. I'm really just getting tired of reporting these absurd amount of bots that are still there well over 2 weeks later. It's so painfully obvious they are bots, there isn't even a single degree of investigation required. This is feeling like every other game where they focus on trying to prevent it instead of banning all of them ruining the economy for months.

I do still see teleporting bots and usually end up sending in multiple reports a day regarding them. Now that I think about it though, me seeing less of them than I used to probably has more to do with me leveling up my mining/botany past the first low level mining/botany areas (since there's no point in leveling up a shard-collecting bot and XP is so low for shards anyway) than due to any action by SE...

Irregardless, I've definitely noticed a dramatic increase in the the relative amount of patrol/waypoint/hotspot bots (that are often characters with high level DoW jobs) on top of the already existing problem of teleporting bots (that are often throw-away, low level, RMT-type accounts). I guess the moral of the story is that botting in general is getting worse, starting from bad.

I just find it frustrating that actual players (who otherwise might be legitimate players) are so blatantly botting/cheating. I guess I expect it from RMT. But this shouldn't be happening by players in an MMO to this degree without fear of repercussion. Many that you see are even in prominent Free Companies (one was even an officer of a prominent one), so it seems to be something the community as a whole has already become resigned to, or worse, actively embracing and accepting.

My apologies in advance for ranting. I just wish SE would do something more effective before botting becomes even more established into the culture of this game.

[Annah]

Do you realize how many reports they get a day. Also it's the weekend. Also they need to follow procedures to invgestage each report before takeing action.

TLDR: IT will be handled. It just takes a couple days.

This is a tell tale sign that SE is woefully inadequate when it comes to the employ of GMs. When I was a GM in Everquest 2 we were always present (although invisible) and we caught tons of bots red handed. If someone files a report on our server we can see it in a matter of a few minutes.

It's not that hard. You stick a GM near the fleece sheep....just hang out there for three hours and end up banning seven people. When we banned people, we placed them in a GM prison and then filed our paperwork to get their account and visa card banned.

When I see the same bot on the Gilgamesh server botting fleece with a teleport hack FIVE days after my group and I and several other people reported him then I KNOW SE has a great big problem.

Waiting until they get a bunch for a massban is not a good idea. It's laziness. It's poor management.

[Annah]

Bans come in waves. They need time to properly investigate to avoid wrongful banning.

Just like any other MMO, the best you can do is to report and move on. If the person(s) is a legit botter, they will eventually be removed from game.

no excuse....they can have a couple GMs patrol the two heavily botted spots throughout the day.

[APilgrim]

This is a tell tale sign that SE is woefully inadequate when it comes to the employ of GMs. ...

Are there any (proactive?) GMs in this game at all? Serious question - not trying to be sarcastic. I haven't seen any evidence of GMs at any point so far.