Another ban wave, another disappointment.

[KageTokage]

they're slow in their bans due to an extensive investigation in trying to find sources and actual farmers/sellers.

It's impossible to know if they're even investigating the reported players because of their "no replies" policy. If they send me a message saying that the players in question weren't found to be cheating, then I'd just drop it and not even bother anymore, because it would tell me that they're just inept to get rid of them.

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?

It's not that they're expensive, it's the opposite.

I used to be able to actually make a reasonable amount of money off of selling any type of aethersand, but the sheer number of bots farming them now drove the prices into the dirt to the point where it's not even worth the effort now and other non-bottable sources of income like selling materia from hunts are more viable for the time investment. They could care less about how little they're selling stuff for when they have an infinite amount of time to invest into farming it.

Dismissive attitudes are also largely why nothing is ever actually going to be done about the botting. I've tried to convince other gatherers/crafters to report the major offenders on my server, but most of them simply don't care and just choose to avoid the markets they're involved in instead. Which annoys me, because we shouldn't be allowing cheaters to influence how we choose to play.