Quote Originally Posted by KageTokage View Post
Last I heard, it didn't actually accomplish much because the bot creators simply started distributing the program under a different name on a new website.

Preventative measures seem more effective, honestly. The only reason the gil farmers are even able to function is because of their warp hacks, so if they did something like turned all of out of bounds areas into kill zones, it would put a quick end to the problem. It honestly seems like they don't know how to stop them, though, considering that they tried to slow them down by moving the items they were farming in Amdapor Keep deeper into the dungeon (Which obviously is not going to matter when they can warp wherever the heck they want).

As far as the other bots go, they really need to give the GMs the authority to take action against them, as they seem a lot more active then the STF judging from quickly they tend to respond to queries, not to mention you can actually communicate with them to know things such as whether or not you're even giving them enough/the right information/evidence for them to properly investigate a matter..
There's plenty they could do, but it would either break immersion, make it a pain in the butt for real players, or break how some content works.

The solution to the teleporting problem is to stop believing point-to-point movement from the client. That would also break the aethernet, and how some dungeons are setup (eg Halitali). But you know what, if it stops bots, take the teleport-anywhere aethernet away. Replace ad-hoc teleportation with server-sided teleports that are invoked by buying tickets for the destinations, from that destination. Then they can just audit the ticket use, and people who have teleported one more time than they've purchased tickets = ban. If the teleports are even more stupid, eg blindly accepting moveTo(x,y,z), that's something that needs to be solved in a game client communications.

Probably half the reason it works the way it does is so players can avoid AOE's during combat, but that doesn't excuse it outside of combat.