How botting may Kill this game (even if the game rebounds)

[Azurymber]

There is no question that FFXIV is one of the most heavily botted games out there right now. However, SE still hasn't done anything about it, and doesn't seem to intend to any time in the near future.

Even with a great new battle system and amazing new content, this game may not ever have success due to the large amount of botting/cheating

here is why:

1.
The large amount of botting has led to serious gil inflation. As a result of this, a large amount of players have well over 20mil (some having upwards of 50 or 100+).

what does this mean?: New players will have an -incredibly- hard time catching up. This means if elite gear (like the equivalent to ffxi p-charm, hauberk, etc) is released, new players (ex. ps3 players) will be unable to afford it for years or without botting themselves.
And i realize many people say "well SE will implement gil sinks". But honestly from an economic perspective, gil sinks will be nearly impossible to properly implement at this point. Further, FFXIV's economic track record is one of -pure failure-. And further, when hyperinflation took place in FFXI they were unable to gil-sink it out and had to mass ban rmt's and wait about 2 years for the economy to stabalize.

2.
New players will feel unable to ever become elite or catch up to the huge amount of people that have multiple rank 50 jobs. This is especially detrimental to people who want to play the game as a crafter main, as it will be practically impossible to compete or profitably level up crafts when your server is full of people who have multiple crafts at rank 50 from botting.

what does this mean? New players will switch to games where they actually have a chance of being "elite" players. Why? Because humans are on average happier by having relative games than absolute gains. That is to say that people want to have more than the other people around them (this has been scientifically proven to be a characteristic of our brains through neuroscience experiments across the world and across cultures). If FFXIV is released and new players see huge numbers of people with 5-10 rank 50 jobs and realize it could take them months just to get one job to rank 50 (especially crafts) they are likely to move to another game where they can be more competitive.

3
Botters will essentially be the players who end up with all the elite stuff, since they have spent months botting millions of gil and will continue to do so since nothing is being done about it.

what does this mean?: Imaginee FFXIV introduced dynamis tomorrow for hardcore elite weapons. Now lets say a legit player wants it. What are the chances they can compete with the 200+ people on every server who are botting/botted all their gil and can afford to pay high prices for currency. The chances are pretty well 0. Elite gear that is sold or gained with gil (ex. dynamis weapons, p-charm, o-kote etc) will first go to those that botted before it will land in the hands of legit players. Since many people won't want to wait, they will take up botting themselves in order to have a chance.

Why can't SE just ban the bots?
Because from what i've read they currently don't have that special team working on finding out who is botting. And I'm assuming it would be very difficult to mass ban people in the future based on recorded data without banning a number of innocent players. So its very likely those who have botted to this point have gotten away with it.

What will be the future?
It's obviously impossible to predict exactly what happens with the game, but there are a few likely scenarios.

First: Botting leads to constant hyperinflation. Gil sinks fail to remove gil out of the game and as such, the game turns to having all elite gear as rare/ex.
As a result crafting and gathering jobs are no longer nearly as important (other than materia wise).

Second: SE manages to magically combat inflation (incredibly unlikely)
However, there are still 100s of people who have botted numerous jobs. As a result a number of jobs (fishing and crafting) that are easily botted end up completely unprofitable resulting in no one leveling them. In essence, the amount of jobs you have to choose from is cut in half.

Third: SE tries to implement a gil-sink. it fails. The game continues to be one of the most heavily botted games out there. New players see no reason to join a game that is filled with obvious cheaters, and the game essentially fails or stays at its current population. (this seems to be the most likely)

Possible Solutions?

There is probably no viable way to fix the gil problem quick enough in time for a PS3 release unless it is delayed 2 years.

SE could make it -really- easy to get to rank 50 and up the cap to 75 making 50 to 75 the "hard part". If they actually banned bots at this point it would at least make the game more "fair" and allow new players to have a chance at competing for "eliteness". Gil would still be an issue but they could put in more of the current NMs just at higher levels, so that people could farm rare/ex gear to level up with.

Note: I believe many on this forum (not mentioning names but should be obvious) will argue that people play this game to look at the pretty forests and have fun, and don't care about "eliteness" or good gear. I would like to point out that FFXI servers had -massive- amounts of drama over gear, and further that many end game linkshells of FFXI had serious drama over items like byakko haidate, with people getting the item, then quitting the ls. Once again it is scientifically proven that people IN GENERAL (not every single person) prefer relative gains to absolute gains. So please don't just point out that "people don't care about having more than others."

What are your thoughts?

[Starlord]

Can we focus one thing at a time? SE still had to rebound first

[Punxsutawney]

This is a tough situation for SE, they can't very well just reduce everyones gil to 3 million and say "tough shit" or they lose even more players, but they can't leave it unchecked, either. The solution could be a gil sink that take a percentage of a players gil. Like for you to get a mount, you have to do a quest where you are swindled out of half your gil, in exchange for what you think is an extremely rare item, but happens to be a chocobo egg. Which in turn, you raise and it becomes you first chocobo mount .

[Azurymber]

Can we focus one thing at a time? SE still had to rebound first

and the point of this thread is that rebounded won't matter if you have a game dominated by people who botted.

Let me give a real life example of how people prefer to play without cheaters:
When Diablo II was released it came with open and closed battlenet.
Closed battle net (AT THE TIME) was moderated with chars stored on blizzard servers, and was nearly impossible to bot or cheat on.
Open battle net on the other hand used chars stored on your local harddrive to it was -really- easy to cheat.

Guess which battlenet was most popular?
Closed.

Non-cheaters are generally adverse to playing with cheaters because it tends to ruin their experience.

If FFXIV is dominated by cheaters, or by people who have cheated to get where they are, it will prob turn a large number of people away.

And since this isn't a problem that can be fixed overnight, it should be a serious issue that is taken care of now before it gets further out of hand.

Again, i strongly point out that FFXI had -major- problems from hyperinflation due to RMT and Botting (specifically rusty cap botting). And it took years and significant effort to fix.

[Azurymber]

This is a tough situation for SE, they can't very well just reduce everyones gil to 3 million and say "tough shit" or they lose even more players, but they can't leave it unchecked, either. The solution could be a gil sink that take a percentage of a players gil. Like for you to get a mount, you have to do a quest where you are swindled out of half your gil, in exchange for what you think is an extremely rare item, but happens to be a chocobo egg. Which in turn, you raise and it becomes you first chocobo mount .

It wouldn't work because people would transfer their gil to a muel or give it to a friend temporarily, get the choco egg, and transfer it back.

[Xatsh]

Botting does not lead to hyper inlfation at all. That is Rmt who sell gil in waves does that.

While botters may get rich, it is the money in the current economy being shifted around.

Example: I sell a weapon for 10k in the ward... that 10k is not added to the economy actully some money (taxes) is left.

So although a botter will make countless millions, it actually removes gil from the game, countering hyperinflation.

Honestly most things in the markets are way undervalued considering the gil from leves coming into the game.

[Peregrine]

Well I applaud the effort, but we can't seem to get the devs to move on this very large issue and threat to the game. Right behind the lack of quality being the number one threat to the game's future, and contributing to it, is the rampant botting. For whatever reason, Square Enix has been dead silent on this issue since day 1 of this game's release.

I don't know if it's because they think they don't need to prioritize removing cheaters from their game, if they already have a list of players they're about to ban, or if they figure the cheaters don't know when to stop so they can be banned any time SE wishes to actually do something...

None of those things are true. This was a huge developmental mistake, to have the STF essentially distracted during the time that catching and stopping cheaters needs the most attention--launch.

Fact of the matter is that this game is a haven for cheaters, and its reputation will start to precede down THAT path if the game ever gets good.

Devs have chosen to largely ignore the problem. The chance that they have a running list of hundreds of players and thousands of accounts that need their entire assets destroyed is slim to none.

Most players...most...with over 4 crafts at 50 should have already been banned if not suspended. That's a fact.

[Azurymber]

Botting does not lead to hyper inlfation at all. That is Rmt who sell gil in waves does that.

While botters may get rich, it is the money in the current economy being shifted around.

Example: I sell a weapon for 10k in the ward... that 10k is not added to the economy actully some money (taxes) is left.

So although a botter will make countless millions, it actually removes gil from the game, countering hyperinflation.

Honestly most things in the markets are way undervalued considering the gil from leves coming into the game.

This is somewhat incorrect. A lot of bots that level up crafting do so by converting farmed items into npcable items and npcing them.
Let me give you an example.

Mrbotter is a rank 42 carpenter.
He goes to the wards and buys 1000 Walnut logs + 10,000 wind shards

Walnut logs are 8000 each and lets say 10% tax. so 800,000 gil drained from the economy
wind shards are 400 each and 10% tax. so 400,000 gil drained from the economy
overall with a 10% tax 1.2mil is drained from the economy.

he can now craft 4000 walnut masks which sell at 1500 each.
that means if he fails none, he makes 6mil.

6mil is significantly higher than 1.2 mil in taxes drained

And thats assuming the botter only buys things from the ah and doent get the shards or mats from botting something like fishing or a job.

[Punxsutawney]

Well, you are correct in that assessment, that people will transfer gil and give it to friends temporarily but you just make the NPC not even acknowlegde them unless they have a certain amount of gil, lets say 5 million.
So if you talk to the quest Npc with only 2.213 million gil he says something in the lines of: I have no concern in the dealings of Eorzea's poor, bottom feeding trash, come back and see me if you ever get some wealth to your name.
If you have 5 mil, he proceeds on with the quest. Sure 2.5 million is nothing to those that have 50 million but it does pull gil out of the game. People may also think that it's too harsh on newer, casual players, it really isn't. I have probably 5 million in gear in my inventory and 2.5 million in my wallet and I have done nothing to make gil, but payment frim leves. All the lower level gear I bought, I sold back for exactly what I payed for it. This idea probably wouldn't help much, I am just throwing out ideas to try and help this games economy, because right now it is shitty.

[Azurymber]

Well, you are correct in that assessment, that people will transfer gil and give it to friends temporarily but you just make the NPC not even acknowlegde them unless they have a certain amount of gil, lets say 5 million.
So if you talk to the quest Npc with only 2.213 million gil he says something in the lines of: I have no concern in the dealings of Eorzea's poor, bottom feeding trash, come back and see me if you ever get some wealth to your name.
If you have 5 mil, he proceeds on with the quest. Sure 2.5 million is nothing to those that have 50 million but it does pull gil out of the game. People may also think that it's too harsh on newer, casual players, it really isn't. I have probably 5 million in gear in my inventory and 2.5 million in my wallet and I have done nothing to make gil, but payment frim leves. All the lower level gear I bought, I sold back for exactly what I payed for it. This idea probably wouldn't help much, I am just throwing out ideas to try and help this games economy, because right now it is shitty.

nah thats actually a pretty good idea.