FFXIV: Cheat 2 Win - The New Norm?

[aesteval]

As much as I hate bots I have to admit that it does not stop me from enjoying the game the way I want to. In RL you have bank robbers, poker cheaters, card counters, machines that predict (supposedly) the Lottery numbers, pick pockets, crooks, house vandals, and on and on and on!! This is just a game just remember it is about RE-CREATION. Get in do what you want to do and get out. You are not obligated to deal with these "characters". So much time and effort and back and forth about how someone figured out a way to exploit a game. I say let them do what they do just give us a good enjoyable game with great content that is fun to play 3-4 hours (or whatever many) a day or week and let me have my fun my way.

Unless if one of the things you enjoy is gathering and would like to use it as your source of ingame income. Then those gathering bots are interfering with your enjoyment.

[Zojha]

Unless if one of the things you enjoy is gathering and would like to use it as your source of ingame income.

In which case you can still get the full enjoyment from the gathering - you just get less money.

That's currently the case for the Lore-materials for battle class players - With the anima not requiring another lore grind, lots of spare lore is used on the lore mats instead and thus, the prices of them go down dramatically. Does that infringe the enjoyment of a given lore-giving battle content in any way? I dare say most people don't even remotely take that into consideration.

But let's be honest here - who seriously enjoys gathering to the point they'd gather for the sake of gathering progression as thousands are doing battle content for the sake of battle class progression? One, two people per server? As a rule of thumb, any ingame activity that's considerably profitable is either highly gated (Skill/Time/RNG/Limited Supply (House Flipping goes into the latter category)) or such an unenjoyable drag that the rarity comes from people's unwillingness to put up with the shite (can be freely combined with gating).

[LaylaTsarra]

Unless if one of the things you enjoy is gathering and would like to use it as your source of ingame income. Then those gathering bots are interfering with your enjoyment.

I've made quite a bit of money gathering and bots don't seem to be an issue. I suppose if you're trying to sell crystals and shards. At least that is the case on Siren. Gathering and selling make up a nice chuck of my dailies. Always something to do in this game. I'm curious what mats you're referring to that bots seem to be having an impact on.

[Mwynn]

I've made quite a bit of money gathering and bots don't seem to be an issue. I suppose if you're trying to sell crystals and shards. At least that is the case on Siren. Gathering and selling make up a nice chuck of my dailies. Always something to do in this game. I'm curious what mats you're referring to that bots seem to be having an impact on.

Gilgamesh as example has tons of Aetherial Reduction Bots resulting in a huge dropdown for Aethersands, Crystals and Clusters.
This is different from Server to Server, your Server may have Luck and doesn't have the amounts of Gathering Bots compared to other Servers.

If I look now on Odin, this is actually a huge difference, almost no Gathering Bots around, if maybe 2-3 doing Aetherial Reduction but not with the intention to destroy the Market.

If you see a Player selling 1.200 - 1.500 High Quality Light-Kissed Aethersands or 10.000 - 20.000 Water Clusters on the Marketboard, you can be pretty sure what is happening there.
A Normal Player would never farm 100 Light-Kissed Sands in a Session, that's too much, given the Fact getting High Quality is a different thing on top of that.

Doesn't require a Brain to actually see that something is wrong when there is 99x Stacks of Smithsonite Ore / Meteorite / Luminium Ore / Zeolithe or other stuff driving down the Prices even more...