Why are people rewarded for cheating?

[myahele]

I heard that multiboxing is not against TOS, so I guess cheaters are truly rewarded in this game.

In the end its a game you're play with alot of people. In this case, they're doing thing to have an advantage against other players. It's just like when someone uses a program out of their scrable letters to make words

[Catwho]

There seem to be two groups of people in this thread:

1. Those who have figured out how the XIV economy works, have made their millions, and are puzzled that others complain that the RMT bots are ruining the economy when the way to make REAL gil in this game involves no botting whatsoever.

2. Those who haven't figured out how the XIV economy works, and assume everyone in the first group is buying gil, botting, or some combination of the two.

Shards are the lowest common denominator in the economy. They've been stable at around 100-150 gil each on Lamia server for the last year. A friend of mine, who fits into group #1, figured out how to manipulate the lightning shard market and made six million gil by level 35. People will blindly buy the lowest priced crystals they can, and then other people will blindly trip over themselves to undercut, and if you go into the market with a little bit of up front capital and that knowledge, you can make millions, Wall Street style.

Any shard sold on the market board, regardless of where it was sourced, is being sold to a crafter, whose money likely came from other players. The only botters (or regularly players) that are artificially inflating the economy are the ones who are creating gil out of nothing- farming things to sell directly to NPCs.

[Sadana]

There seem to be two groups of people in this thread:

1. Those who have figured out how the XIV economy works, have made their millions, and are puzzled that others complain that the RMT bots are ruining the economy when the way to make REAL gil in this game involves no botting whatsoever.

2. Those who haven't figured out how the XIV economy works, and assume everyone in the first group is buying gil, botting, or some combination of the two.

Your first supposition is not exactly correct. There are those in this thread that both make decent gil from the mb, don't assume everyone with gil has bought it*, and still don't want bots in game. To me, it's like seeing a fly in my soup. ><;

*Someone with 1 or 2 classes leveled/somewhat leveled and 0 gathering/crafting classes and millions to spend HAS, however, probably bought gil from RMT.

[MrKweh]

There seem to be two groups of people in this thread:

1. Those who have figured out how the XIV economy works, have made their millions, and are puzzled that others complain that the RMT bots are ruining the economy when the way to make REAL gil in this game involves no botting whatsoever.

2. Those who haven't figured out how the XIV economy works, and assume everyone in the first group is buying gil, botting, or some combination of the two.

^^^Someone who knows what they're talking about.

[Aerowaffle]

There seem to be two groups of people in this thread:

1. Those who have figured out how the XIV economy works, have made their millions, and are puzzled that others complain that the RMT bots are ruining the economy when the way to make REAL gil in this game involves no botting whatsoever.

2. Those who haven't figured out how the XIV economy works, and assume everyone in the first group is buying gil, botting, or some combination of the two.

Shards are the lowest common denominator in the economy. They've been stable at around 100-150 gil each on Lamia server for the last year. A friend of mine, who fits into group #1, figured out how to manipulate the lightning shard market and made six million gil by level 35. People will blindly buy the lowest priced crystals they can, and then other people will blindly trip over themselves to undercut, and if you go into the market with a little bit of up front capital and that knowledge, you can make millions, Wall Street style.

Any shard sold on the market board, regardless of where it was sourced, is being sold to a crafter, whose money likely came from other players. The only botters (or regularly players) that are artificially inflating the economy are the ones who are creating gil out of nothing- farming things to sell directly to NPCs.

It's pretty insulting to be generalized into a group that makes assumptions about other aspects of the player. I have bought my own house, funded one of my friends (so that we could both have a house in close proximity before other plots were bought up), and plan on funding my fc's house (that's only composed of me and a few friends).

I understand that crafters can make millions and millions of gil at high levels, I don't deny that. Yes, you can also manipulate the market so that you can earn money that way. But in all areas that the bots farming, you cannot make a suitable profit doing the same thing.

If you were to go out and try and sell shards that you have farmed, while bots are currently selling the same shards, your farming time would have been much better used to do something else, because bots can farm at such a quantity at such a low time cost, that it renders your efforts to farm shards for gil negligible. All aspects of the market are not destroyed, but the presence of bot farmers does make it hard to make money for certain items. Just because other aspects of the market take advantage of the abundance of items that the bots flood the market with doesn't make it right.

Those items shouldn't be in the market in the first place if they are gathered illegitimately through automated process.

[Lanceton]

From my observation I think it is the bots who are supporting the in-game economy... if not for the bots to keep resources at relatively low prices, the economy, and perhaps the game itself, would have collapsed long time ago - nobody would bother to buy things from the market board due to extremely high prices and gil circulation will come to a halt. it will take forever to level a new crafting class and people will have lost their patience along the way, and quit because of that.

as casual as the game stands now, it still fails to keep players subscribed (500k:2.5m isn't a good looking number, it means only 1 out of every 5 persons ever tried the game stay subscribed), and with the expansion on the horizon, further prolong the grinding process will probably make things worse.

therefore the more logical approach is to ensure SE makes a bot-proof (or unfriendly at least) system in 3.0 instead of wasting energy complaining about the game's current state.

[Ashkendor]

*Someone with 1 or 2 classes leveled/somewhat leveled and 0 gathering/crafting classes and millions to spend HAS, however, probably bought gil from RMT.

I don't think this generalization can even be made. It could be an alt. It could be someone that sells runs. It could be someone that was given a lot of money by a friend/spouse. It could be someone that spiritbonds. At one point, a few of my friends had a deal with one friend in particular - we would provide her with gear to spiritbond for materia, provided she spiritbonded it while farming things for us. We're talking basic materials that we go through tons of on a daily basis just crafting. So, for the price of a few sets of gear for her to spiritbond, all of us got to spend more time crafting instead of farming. She got millions of gil worth of materia out of the deal, too.

[Catwho]

If you were to go out and try and sell shards that you have farmed, while bots are currently selling the same shards, your farming time would have been much better used to do something else, because bots can farm at such a quantity at such a low time cost, that it renders your efforts to farm shards for gil negligible. All aspects of the market are not destroyed, but the presence of bot farmers does make it hard to make money for certain items. Just because other aspects of the market take advantage of the abundance of items that the bots flood the market with doesn't make it right.

I provided a counter example to that with the friend who farmed his own shards and made millions manipulating the market. I believe he only farmed about 400 lightning shards at a time.

I'm also not saying I agree with the botters - I too think SE should be more proactive about banning them. But you'll never compete with the RMT miners, even if SE does break their bots, because they have no other aspect of the game to play but the mining and they can run the same character 24/7 in shifts at the gold farms. I figured that out within a month of launch. It's not even worth trying. So I just farm shards for my own use or trade for them, and focus my attention on the aspects of the economy where I can make the most profits.

[tocsin]

I heard that multiboxing is not against TOS, so I guess cheaters are truly rewarded in this game.

In the end its a game you're play with alot of people. In this case, they're doing thing to have an advantage against other players. It's just like when someone uses a program out of their scrable letters to make words

You are correct. multiboxing is not against the ToS. its also NOT cheating. if I want to use multiple accounts, while paying multiple subscriptions, and work harder to keep track of all the accounts at once, thats playing the game with a higher skill requirement, and SHOULD have rewards as such. if you dont have the mental or physical ability to multibox, that doesn't mean that smart people who do are suddenly cheating.

I will freely admit that I have multiboxed before. Running an arcanist and a gladiator at the same time through a dungeon is hard as hell, and I had to use 100% of my focus to do so. it makes the game roughly 1.75 times more difficult. if they were both the same class, it would only likely be 1.5 times as difficult, but rotations dont always go the same. different things happen, and one miss and suddenly each class is at a different point in their rotation and you have to keep track of two rotations, then 3 rotations, then 4 rotations, all at the same time. the logistics of doing so are brutal, and I personally had to take a 30 min break after halatali, due to a headache from focusing too hard.

if thats cheating, then we must be cheating wrong, because thats not making anything easier, just faster.

[Blissa]

OP I honestly think SE could give a FUCK about bots. They are every where, I have reported the same bot 20+ times since summer and he is still there. And any zone that I go to that has money to be made is full of bots as well. And now I just ran into my first bot tank in duty finder. I should just say fuck it and buy my own harvest bot and run it while I sleep because obviously SE doesn't give a fuck!