Never seen such a poor support like in this game!

[Thamorian]

It's unrealistic to expect a game to have no cheaters at all, but it is realistic to expect its support team to keep them under control to a degree where people actually feel afraid of trying to do it because of the risk of being banned (Which is clearly not the case when the number of "normal" non-RMT bots on Cactaur and elsewhere has only been increasing as time goes on). The player-owned bots who do things like join PvP matches, control the economy with automated undercutting and/or market flooding using gathered/crafted items are legitimately disruptive to other players but realistically controllable by a competent GM team, whereas the only way they can really axe the RMT bots is to patch the hacks they're using.

There's probably a lot more bots around then you think on Adamantoise. Just do a player search for new adventurers/sprouts, look for the ones with gibberish names, then check how many online players are in their FCs (Assuming they have one). You can also observe how many players are regularly overnighting on crafting classes or moving strangely while gathering (Gather bots always jump in place when taking flight and also do not turn if they aren't in motion, save for what happens automatically when clicking a node).

With the current way they are, they are under control compared to how bad they used to be. Did you play FF14 2.0 is the first couple years? RMT spam and bots used to be a lot worse. Sure things can always be better, but they used to be a lot worse.

[KageTokage]

With the current way they are, they are under control compared to how bad they used to be. Did you play FF14 2.0 is the first couple years? RMT spam and bots used to be a lot worse. Sure things can always be better, but they used to be a lot worse.

I started in 3.3, so I'm wouldn't know.

The only real improvement I've noticed as far as the RMT bots go since then is that they no longer send you tells or try to invite you to parties (Which was obnoxious as all heck) and they've also dropped their habit of trying to sneak into the NN . I'm still counting close to a hundred active RMT bots towards the end of the week and there's now around a dozen crafting/gathering bots active every night as opposed to maybe four or five back in HW.

*snip*

I'm still having doubts about whether or not the RMT bots are actually paying for their accounts or if they're abusing credit card charge-backs or some such to avoid the fees.

Assuming every single bot that was banned last week was paying for a sub, it would've amounted to over $60K in sub fees, and I have a really hard time imagining that the gil selling business is actually making that much money, especially in an environment like XIV's where the currency has very limited uses.

As far as the whole "keeping the market supplied" thing goes, I think infusions are the only item where that might be an issue for legit players and I think they need to remedy that by making infusions craftable in larger quantities to match how quickly raiders burn through them compared to food.