Player Feedback: Gathering Bots

[Malzian]

We're not talking about one or two. It's dozens. Outright banning the people doing it would be quite the impact. It would directly reduce the botting by removing the bots, would have people think twice before doing it...

And this is where you would be wrong... The bot characters made are generic "throw away" characters and the accounts made for them are trivial in their cost compared to the amount of money the companies making them stand to (and often do) gain. Accounts are banned for RMT by the thousands, you can see the reports. Has that stopped RMT? No, and it will not stop botting. Bans on these small, autonomous bots is like putting out small fires on the edges while the main fire burns... No matter how many of the little ones you stop, the big fire will always start more. These bots you're referring to are a symptom of the problem, not the root cause... which is in fact that it is simply more efficient for a player to buy gil in the game economy than to try and make it themselves, so the RMT will almost always have buyers for the money these disposable bots generate. Only when it is no longer profitable for these companies to bot and RMT will it stop.