Ridiculous amount of Bots...

[Xanikk999]

I don't get why people think bots "buy" more copies of the game. At least a good chunk of accounts are stolen.

If this is true and Square Enix really wants to kill bots why not give out free physical/mobilephone authenticators and make them mandatory to log on. It would be an inconvenience to some but wouldn't it make the likelyhood of peoples accounts being hacked and stolen for gold spamming purposes much less likely?

[MilesSaintboroguh]

If this is true and Square Enix really wants to kill bots why not give out free physical/mobilephone authenticators and make them mandatory to log on. It would be an inconvenience to some but wouldn't it make the likelyhood of peoples accounts being hacked and stolen for gold spamming purposes much less likely?

Because:

A) it still would cost Square money to give people "free" physical security tokens and those costs have to be made up elsewhere (higher price to buy the game or higher subscription fees for example)

B) Believe it or not, not everyone has a cell phone (shocking I know) and others may not want to be hassled with installing more software on their phone. It's like requiring someone to have a Twitter account before they're allowed to play a game they paid for.

C) While security tokens in general are supposed to prevent accounts from being stolen so easily, it won't protect you if the thief gets a hold of your email account or other information they can use to crack into your Square Enix account (phishing and keylogging being a few examples on how the more clever attackers can get to your stuff, even with a security token)


In a nutshell, you can't outright eliminate RMTs/gil sellers/bots completely, but you can make it more difficult for them to profit from the game. A lot of items in game can't be traded or sold to other players, leveling up past 50 requires buying the expansion pack, gathering materials in the new 3.0 areas is more busywork (and somewhat more dangerous) than in 2.0, and so on. While I am on Balmung, a server that is known for having very few RMT spam, as soon as 3.0 launched, I pretty much never gotten a single RMT message ever again. I sometimes see the occasional group of bots hanging around in the 2.0 areas, but nothing more than that. I cannot say this is the same for other servers, but I can safely assume that Square fighting the bots and RMT can involve more than just ban waves. Doesn't mean that everything is perfectly fine, but I can see what they are at least trying to do.