Lack of action against gathering bots, it needs to be changed, and soon

[HyoMinPark]

Every time I hit ephemerals on my server for aethersands (or just to farm lightning crystals), I see the same players botting it up. I'll watch them as I wait for GP on a +1 or +2 node and it's just so obvious that they're scripted, I don't know how the STF doesn't catch it. It's quite frustrating, even from someone who doesn't participate too heavily in the market as a seller (I tend to just gather for myself and to help out friends). Same for the crafting bots. I'm not online to check out food/tincture markets, but SB was awful, with them driving infusion prices so low that it cost more to make them...

[BothFawn]

It’s 100% not going to happen. The devs just don’t seem to really care. In the recent live letter, they stated male characters can’t get a stubble/beard because it’s...(drum roll) “too hard.” lol That basically sums up FFXIV’s dedicated, yet lazy, development team.

Were you actually paying attention?

The game suffers from having a very outdated engine, though even calling it "outdated" doesn't do it justice. This is literally a spaghetti code, which heavily limits what the devs are able to add and modify, making things like "beards for male characters", which seem easy to implement, difficult to do.

Like, come on. You guys surely don't think that they cannot introduce such simple additions like beards, or for example an infinite or almost infinite inventory space, like every RPG should have, just because they are "lazy" and they "don't care"?


And just a side-thought- I wonder if this whole bot problem actually pertains to this problematic code, which I mentioned above, and how would the developers actually perform against the fight with the cheaters if we got ourselves a brand new Final Fantasy MMO with a fresh and updated engine(I have recently seen such rumours here and there about it taking place after 6.X version of FFXIV).

[Hash_Browns]

The game suffers from having a very outdated engine, though even calling it "outdated" doesn't do it justice. This is literally a spaghetti code, which heavily limits what the devs are able to add and modify, making things like "beards for male characters", which seem easy to implement, difficult to do.

Gonna call bull on that.

I 100% refuse to believe adding facial hair is too hard/can't be done when they are more then happy to add new clothes/hair to the mogstation.


And I would also like to add:

let's say it's 100% true.

WHY.
WHY has the code of the game been so abandoned and never been updated?

[ForteNightshade]

Were you actually paying attention?

The game suffers from having a very outdated engine, though even calling it "outdated" doesn't do it justice. This is literally a spaghetti code, which heavily limits what the devs are able to add and modify, making things like "beards for male characters", which seem easy to implement, difficult to do.

Like, come on. You guys surely don't think that they cannot introduce such simple additions like beards, or for example an infinite or almost infinite inventory space, like every RPG should have, just because they are "lazy" and they "don't care"?


And just a side-thought- I wonder if this whole bot problem actually pertains to this problematic code, which I mentioned above, and how would the developers actually perform against the fight with the cheaters if we got ourselves a brand new Final Fantasy MMO with a fresh and updated engine(I have recently seen such rumours here and there about it taking place after 6.X version of FFXIV).

Not a single one of these excuses is applicable to the bot crisis. You know why it's become such a pervasive issue? Because GMs literally cannot ban or even warn botters. The entire process is handled by the Special Task Force—a team comprised of only four people that operate in Japan. WoW, for example, is infinitely superior in regards to bots despite being more than double FFXIV's age. Why is that? Their GM can and will ban bots. Square's complete inefficiency and inaction have led more and more people to chance botting because hey, why not? You aren't going to get banned for it.

Bear in mind, I'm not talking about the random gibberish named bots but the players using programs to automate everything. In the end, I wouldn't call it laziness so much as underestimation at just how severe the problem actually is.

[RareItems]

Meanwhile, Raiders are selling Savage Clears for Paypal Transfers on the Party Finder/Discord everyday, but you don't see anyone here caring about the RMT going in there xD.

[HyoMinPark]

Meanwhile, Raiders are selling Savage Clears for Paypal Transfers on the Party Finder/Discord everyday, but you don't see anyone here caring about the RMT going in there xD.

Are you ignoring literally every thread that has been made on the OF in the past complaining about just that?

Regardless, that isn’t the topic of this thread—it’s about DoL/DoH bots and how they’re negatively impacting server economies.

[BothFawn]

Gonna call bull on that.

I 100% refuse to believe adding facial hair is too hard/can't be done when they are more then happy to add new clothes/hair to the mogstation.


And I would also like to add:

let's say it's 100% true.

WHY.
WHY has the code of the game been so abandoned and never been updated?

I am not a programist, but I don't think you can just grab a game's engine with one hand while holding a magic wand in the other one and kindly ask the game's code to update itself. This is what I was referring to in the last paragraph of my previous comment. There is no way we will not have a new FF MMORPG in a less than 4 years, because there needs to be a complete overhaul of the technical aspects of this game.

And the second thing- I have no idea what does Mogstation have to do with all this? Is there some difference between the things obtainable in-game and on Mogstation?

[KageTokage]

I feel like someone needs to bring this subject up in an interview or something where they can't simply ignore it.

The last time we actually got an official response was several months ago in a live letter where the question was wrongly read as bots being a problem in PvP specifically when the original question in the Q&A thread referred to them as a problem in general.

That makes me think that there's some miscommunication issues going on between the English and JP sides of things; ones I'd like to hope are not intentional.

[SomeRandomHuman]

I feel like someone needs to bring this subject up in an interview or something where they can't simply ignore it.

The last time we actually got an official response was several months ago in a live letter where the question was wrongly read as bots being a problem in PvP specifically when the original question in the Q&A thread referred to them as a problem in general.

That makes me think that there's some miscommunication issues going on between the English and JP sides of things; ones I'd like to hope are not intentional.

They have a few times. SE claims that in order to "upgrade" the engine, they'd have to basically make the game again from scratch on a newer engine model so basically make another FFMMO just to "upgrade" an engine that shouldn't have been reused in the first place.

[RareItems]

Are you ignoring literally every thread that has been made on the OF in the past complaining about just that?

Regardless, that isn’t the topic of this thread—it’s about DoL/DoH bots and how they’re negatively impacting server economies.

The Raiders selling clears and Savage drops on the PF for Paypal Transfers, that's RMT right there. Customers pay them RL money and in return they get clears and Savage drops. Literally no difference between them and the Aethersand bots.