Ridiculous amount of Bots...

[Welsper59]

I actually haven't received a single tell about buying gil, so thank the twelve for that! But it's just that I see a ton of them lined up with keyboard mashed names all mirroring each other, hopping around the map from one spot to another with their strange instant teleporting.

It saddens me to think that SE would keep bots around just for the sake of them purchasing a subscription. Honestly though, wouldn't it be more money? Since then they would have to pay for another sub in order to continue doing what they're doing. Although I suppose at the end of the day it would have to be profitable enough for them to continue doing it. I'd continue reporting them if I felt like SE was listening, but with how many I've been seeing lately it's hard to believe that they are..

Ignoring conspiracy theories, RMT are generally not a source of income. Most of the time, the credit card information that is used is either stolen or manipulated in some way, which means a LOSS of money for SE if fraudulent claims are made. Likewise, stolen active accounts don't result in more money than what is already being made from the legit owner. It's likely however that the loss does not occur as often as people think and it just results in more of a "meh" situation.

Reporting is unnecessarily tedious in this game, so for that reason alone, it's not worth doing for RMT IMO. I'm not going to waste my time any more than I already had during our naive period with 2.0 launch and reporting the terror that was /shout and /tell spam, hoping to see at least the obvious combat bots banned but never do. Until SE decides to change the way they handle RMT, then realistically, there's no point to it. Report legit players badly behaving if you see it. While they likely won't do anything about bots, they're very adamant about combating harassment and threats between players.

Usually from people keylogged whilst trying to buy RMT on websites that don't have any yet to sell.

Supply and demand, where the demand creates the supply. Ironic, isn't it.

This is actually one of those situations that only have a small part of the whole truth. It's not the usual way accounts are stolen here, it's just one of many. Keylogging can occur from any site. WoW had an instance where users of, I think, MMO-Champion were vulnerable to a hack with an imbedded virus for going to their popular site. The virus itself didn't do much for the users, but could lead to being a backdoor for things like keyloggers and so on. Also, consider hacked Twitter and Facebook accounts. A lot of the time, it's because people clicked or did something they shouldn't have, definitely. Others though, it just happens because of general hack attempts (most of which involved weak passwords).

[Lament]

I've had friends from Tonberry recently migrate to Balmung and they did mention botting is a huge issue on Tonberry. It's apparently so rampant there that actual players (not just RMT) will also commonly bot to make gil.

Their first comment when porting to N Thanalan was about how there was nobody botting there.

[IrisBlanchimont]

The ones I know the "parking place" for on Faerie seem to get replaced once a week or so. They do get banned but they come back almost immediately, new name same appearance. They do want to smack them down in order to improve the quality of experience for real players and punish RMTs, which are bad for business. Sadly, it's impossible to keep up.

[Erudain]

I still get RMT tells every day, so I either switch to busy if they're too pestering or just ignore them.

What I haven't seen much lately are the gathering bots that were so common in 2.xx.
I think SE idea of placing gathering nodes so far apart one from the other with mobs in the middle which will aggro you served its purpose (seems bots can't "mount and fly")

[kazeandi]

I am from Tonberry, too, and Ive never been bothered by bot tells. Some do exist tho, but those are bots used to do fates for the players ... which is something I wont blame them for.

[AskaRay]

Thank you Lich...for not having many RMT sellers....
or at least VOCAL ones.. it's been pretty quiet for me since HW.

[Franchesca]

I'm convinced that nothing will ever be done about the bots or RMT problem. They are here to stay, let's just face the fact. We can bring up the issue infinite times and nothing will be done about it. I stopped voicing my opinion on the matter long ago now since they are ignored along with everyone's. SE could have redeemed themselves with these issues but it has gone way too long now, they could have implemented something during expansion but nope, nothing, zilch, nada.

Deal with it folks.

[Adrasteia]

I'm convinced that nothing will ever be done about the bots or RMT problem. They are here to stay, let's just face the fact. We can bring up the issue infinite times and nothing will be done about it. I stopped voicing my opinion on the matter long ago now since they are ignored along with everyone's. SE could have redeemed themselves with these issues but it has gone way too long now, they could have implemented something during expansion but nope, nothing, zilch, nada.

Deal with it folks.

What do you think they should have implemented to handle the botting problem?

[Syrehn]

What do you think they should have implemented to handle the botting problem?

They should implement their ban-hammer rights. Bot/RMT team gets multiple reports of botting > go investigate (in person if they have to) > confirm = immediate account ban.

I think a lot of the time they play "follow the Bot/RMT trail"; I'd rather they didn't.

[Franchesca]

What do you think they should have implemented to handle the botting problem?

They could have limited the number characters created after ban or have blacklist effect on ban person's account and not just character. I mean seriously, there are countless ways said in the forums.