Another ban wave, another disappointment.

[Tiraelina]

Oh they handle their bot problems. When they have strong enough evidence to do so. What you don't understand, that if they start cutting ties with legit players "because they fit your description as bots," they could potentially be sued. Sorry, but we live in a land where someone assumes the cup of coffee from that chain burger joint isn't hot, spills it on themselves, gets burned, sues, and wins. Not only that, but the angry person decides to hit the servers with a DDoS attack, which screws everybody up.

90% of what you're saying about bots fits me, so you are indirectly calling me a bot. Last time I checked, I wasn't. But if calling me a bot makes you feel any better at the end of the day, then so be it.

It's really not worth arguing with your dismissive attitude. Bots have been running wild since 1.0. You should try observing the city aetherytes, northern thanalan or anywhere in player search with WHM/BLM's.

[Xeon]

And for the record, I'm not for bots either, but as a legacy player, I've seen every kind of behavior that you have listed as criteria for bots from legit players. I have been around since nearly the start of 1.0, which most of you never got to see. If you had been here as long as I have, you would know that SE has continued to reduce the number of bots running around. If you don't like them now, you really wouldn't have liked them back then in a time where they were literally 10 times more of them than present.

I dont miss 1.0. Not really. Only the beautiful graphics it had. Nothing in this game to date compares or even comes close. Who would've thought, that many years into the future when general computing has advanced so much, especially with graphics cards, that we would still be seeing the shit graphics that the current game has to offer.

[Shouko]

And for the record, I'm not for bots either, but as a legacy player, I've seen every kind of behavior that you have listed as criteria for bots from legit players. I have been around since nearly the start of 1.0, which most of you never got to see. If you had been here as long as I have, you would know that SE has continued to reduce the number of bots running around. If you don't like them now, you really wouldn't have liked them back then in a time where they were literally 10 times more of them than present.

Not a legacy but start of ARR when it dropped on the consoles and I remember the sheer amount of bots that were in the game at the time, you had to either turn off the noise for a /tell or move it to a separate tab all together so you didn't get bombarded by bots.

[Xeon]

See now that's the point I'm trying to make. If SE "didn't care," or "didn't do anything," then there would be way more bots than there were then, but there's not. Literally 90% of the bot activity has already been removed from the game and they are still working on the rest.

So OP, you really need to take a chill pill or a puff off the doobie. Quit blowing up at everything you don't understand and saying they're a bot, because there is no proof of what you say that these people are actually bots, and if they are, SE will get to them. They have been doing this all along, but maybe you've not been around long enough to notice.

[Steel_Arrow]

FFXIV just need a bigger team

It has nothing to do with the size of their team. Our server reported several notorious botters for months. I even persistently grabbed GMs to say, hey, come look, catch it in the act. I also posted video evidence to youtube to submit that via their web form, and every other method that the supervisory GM suggested. In at least three separate cases, the botters changed their name, and left the server. After a year of repeated reports from an entire server community, it's safe to say that it's a policy issue, not a team size issue - in other words, that they don't actually care. The only effective thing was the side effect - word got out, and they fled to escape their negative reputation on the server. But they're still doing it, just somewhere else.

[Steel_Arrow]

See now that's the point I'm trying to make. If SE "didn't care," or "didn't do anything," then there would be way more bots than there were then, but there's not. Literally 90% of the bot activity has already been removed from the game and they are still working on the rest.

On the off chance that you're just slow on the up-take, rather than a botter who is trying to claim "nope, no problem here", the issue is that only the most obvious botters get picked up by their algorithms. They don't actually respond to, or even investigate individual reports.

[KageTokage]

I'm not sure how anyone could think that someone who's online for days straight, never idles, and follows the exact same path to each node every time isn't a bot.

You'd probably find a reason to dismiss even the one I saw repeatedly suiciding on FATEs in Yanxia for the better part of a day because their gear was broken and the script that tells them to fix their gear wasn't working (This was during early SB before the aforementioned bots had finished the MSQ).

[Jeycht]

Come on Xeon, there is a lot of players using bot program without trouble, and it's easy to prove it.
Like Kage say they follow the exact same path nodes to nodes, some are sometimes stucks in wall or do some weird not human movement (always with a pattern with same timing blabla)

I know some players using them, some don't even hide it. Alt tab doing something else irl, or going out then come back ig with tons of mats. Years of report, none of them ban.

It was the same on FF11, and some MMO I know, where players using program never got ban. Only RMT bots are.

[ChocoFeru]

I've been reporting people that used bots to level everything to lv60 back then, and now everything lv70 just doing FATEs, and they're still there botting everything.
The same people that bots in gathering, and they're not banned.

I only managed to get somebody banned once while he was clearly botting to break the market.

Maybe there are too many botters and SE can't afford banning a huge amount of people. That would mean a loss for SE, and I can understand that, sadly.

Then there are the "bot-deffenders" that will deffend bots with weird excuses, no matter the context, leveling, gathering, buying houses etc... and probably they will laugh at you because they bot too.


Anyways, if you really want a bot to get banned, show to other players that bot so they can report it too. It worked for me and it helps the SE team since it's not an individual report.

[Saint_Angeles]

If Aethersands\Consumables are expensive on your server, gather\craft your own. Am I missing something as to why you can't do that? Do they have legions of bots that open up trade windows with you when you try to hit ephemeral nodes or something?