Another ban wave, another disappointment.

[KageTokage]

Let me shed a little bit of light on this, just from my little bit of experience. I used to be a GM for Maplestory for a little while. Most of the time, I would be looking place to place specifically for spam bots. Same with Atlantica. The problem is that these bots have made the users a lot of money, especially with players still doing RMT today. It's nothing to them to get banned - they'll just change one letter or number on a new character and go back to doing it. And it's not just one character - one account could have 8 characters under it. All they need to do is buy a 30-day subscription, grind out trials with a macro, and get stuff. It may not just be that the staffing is an issue, but that these accounts just make new ones. It's not hard to just get under a new IP, make a new account, and go again.

This is true in the case of the RMT spammers and gil farmers, but in the case of the gather/craft bots, they aren't so easily replaced, as they need to get into SB content to make any real profit, and even then, it still takes a long while to level their DoH/L classes.

How are they cornering the market? It's not like a aethersand is limited quantity from the nodes. I'm all for banning bots but cornering the market, really?

I suppose cornering might not be the appropriate term for it, but they've driven the prices on the stuff so low by flooding the market with it that it's not even worth the time investment to farm for selling purposes anymore.

Everdeep aethersands are the only ones that are worth anything, presumably due to the scrip bait and random nature of fishing making them difficult to bot.

Sadly, video/picture evidence cannot be used when making a case, because of the fact that it can be edited. GMs have stated multiple times that they cannot accept anything other than evidence from directly inside the game with regards to any sort of report, be it for cheating/botting, harassment, or anything else reportable/bannable..

Well, then I don't know why the heck they have a field for including a link in your report. I assumed it was for providing extra evidence, but now I have no clue.

[Mature]

In ULTROS a bunch of us have reported TEN people boting by farming torreya log for Everborn aethersand same as the other sands. You can always tell when they are boting cause of the way the character moves and it's "journey" from node to node. What it is sad is that these members arent new they are veterans!!!

Honestly I don't know what else we can do because , not only they break the economy of the game but they are encouraging others to bot like them as they are not being punished for it.

[Xlantaa]

You see the things too simple. It is very hard fix this problem.

[Texa]

This makes Square Enix look like EA, EA being the most corporate "game" company there is.

SE probably has been following some of EA's business models.
-Microtransactions out the nose even with single player games. Drakengard 3 was probably the worst offender back when it came out. A large amount of story was locked behind $30 worth of dlc.

-Pointless pvp and/or online connectivity. Sometimes this is handled well! Bravely Default found a really creative way to work the feature in. But there's also been huge messy "why did you even bother?" examples in single player games that had multiplayer tacked on like 2013's Tomb Raider.
- Here's a good thread https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBat...tell_you_what/ (warning there is cursing in the link) on the recent Star Wars kerfluffle and how EA has spun the scenario to make themselves look better that feels pretty similar to how SE has handled some issues on our end in the past.

[dotsforlife]

SE is notorious about being very restrictive when it comes to resources. It should come as no surprise the FFXIV departments are lacking in staff.

[Ayer2015]

Blame the people that buy the gil. It may not be popular, but they are the reason the sellers exist.

[Stormfur]

There's an entire FC on our server made up of the gathering bots.

[ElazulHP]

There's an entire FC on our server made up of the gathering bots.

I've noticed one or two of these on Sarg as well. One in particular is always 24/7 mining the ephemeral nodes and is probably responsible for crashing the Aethersand market.

[VertoIncantation]

Blame the people that buy the gil. It may not be popular, but they are the reason the sellers exist.

They would need to ban the buyer too. But they never do .

[Chiramu]

SE probably has been following some of EA's business models.

I wonder if because Square Enix is Japanese that they don't understand that EA was voted the worst company of 2016.