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

[xJimmehx]

I'm not sure why they even permit world travel on trial accounts, honestly.

Trial accounts cannot trade, /tell, reach level 36, use Mb, Join FC, etc. They cant affect the market.

[KageTokage]

Trial accounts cannot trade, /tell, reach level 36, use Mb, Join FC, etc. They cant affect the market.

It's not the market they're affecting, they're just being used to RMT spam congested servers that have locked character creation.

[xJimmehx]

It's not the market they're affecting, they're just being used to RMT spam congested servers that have locked character creation.

Ah I see. I hadn't thought about that.

[Kaedan]

You fail to recognize that many people who craft and gather do it because we enjoy it, gain a personal sense of satisfaction from doing so, and want this aspect of the game to be fair and meaningful. Gil is not something we really need, but many of us use it as a personal scorecard, how does one have fun knowing in the back of our minds that we will always lose to someone who is overtly cheating?

1) If you don't care about gil and only care about the "fun" of crafting/gathering, then bots literally don't matter at all to you and don't affect you in a negative way at all (even in the rare cases they DO significantly drive down prices).

2) Botting isn't actually cheating. Bot gathering doesn't allow you to do anything that player couldn't normally do (unless they are teleport hacking). All it does is automate the process so you don't have to actually be sitting at the computer. Bots (in most cases) follow all the same rules as manually operated players. Botting is actually slower than manual gathering, but the trade off is that you don't have to be present, so you can just let it run a long time to make up for the slowness.

Yes, it's against the ToS just like any 3rd party program. But it isn't cheating (teleport hacks are a completely separate thing and not intrinsic to botting).

[Granyala]

Then why are you complaining so much about things being overpriced?

I'm not complaining. I merely stated the fact that crafters tend to charge rather outlandish prices if they can get away with it. You interpreted it as a complaint because you wanted to see it that way.

You fail to recognize that many people who craft and gather do it because we enjoy it, gain a personal sense of satisfaction from doing so, and want this aspect of the game to be fair and meaningful. Gil is not something we really need, but many of us use it as a personal scorecard, how does one have fun knowing in the back of our minds that we will always lose to someone who is overtly cheating?

If it isn't the bots, it'll be the unemployed 24/7 gamers that "ruin your aspect of gaming".
There will always be someone that has more time on their hands and do stuff you can't.

How does one have fun? Simple: by ignoring the cheaters when it comes to assessing your score. Just as you'd have to ignore the above mentioned unemployed people when you yourself have a worklife and only limited time to play.

An analogy in raiding: how do I enjoy parsing myself when I see other WHMs doing ridiculous amounts of DPS in specific parsing runs where they get fed all the neat buffs and have awesome groups that seemingly never fail a mechanic, necessitating additional healing? By ignoring them.

I know it sucks that there are bots. You and I know that raging on the EN forum isn't going to do a thing about it though. Either SE cares, or SE doesn't care and it is apparent that they only half ass their measures, which leads me to conclude that they don't really give a hoot. Same about the spamming RMT bots. I mean come on, how hard can it be to implement chat filters and automatic ban systems to get rid of these pests? Yet here we are 5 years into the game and I have to read their shite in the tiny amount of time it takes me to port to Ul'dah, click on "Aethernet" and choosing a different destination.

So all we can do is ignore them, hope SE does tend to the matter and in the mean time, use them to our advantage (i.e.: buying mats on the cheap instead of going out and gathering them ourselves).

2) Botting isn't actually cheating. Bot gathering doesn't allow you to do anything that player couldn't normally do

I'm pretty sure that even "24/7" unemployed gamers need to sleep sometime.
So yes: a bot does allow you to do stuff humans can't and subsequently are very much indeed cheating.

Even more so if the bot starts handling the Auction house. We had those in WoW... ugh what a pain.

[Kaedan]

I'm pretty sure that even "24/7" unemployed gamers need to sleep sometime.
So yes: a bot does allow you to do stuff humans can't and subsequently are very much indeed cheating.

Still not cheating because you can replicate the same thing by playing the character in shifts (which is actually EXTREMELY common for World Firsters).

Cheating is the act of breaking the game to allow you to do something that is not possible by any other means, such as teleporting instantly between gather points.

For the record, I do not support or encourage botting. But it's really not nearly as big a deal as people make it out to be. And while it's against the rules SE has laid out, it's still not "cheating" unless you use a cheat program such as a teleport hack.

[Granyala]

Still not cheating because you can replicate the same thing by playing the character in shifts

Account sharing IS cheating and a a bannable offense, since it is vialation of the ToS.
The Achievements of an account are supposed to be tied to a single person.

In fact many a folks cheated arena rankings and ranks in the old PvP system in WoW by letting other players do what they could not.

[KageTokage]

Bots can actually do things that normal players can't as they're basically overriding the default control interfaces to send commands directly to the client and can bypass some of the restrictions they're normally bound by as a side effect.

They're not anything major but I have witnessed them doing things like activating skills during cutscenes/loading screens, targeting things that are not in their line of sight (They still obey LoS when using skills, though), and keeping things targeted well outside of the range that's normally possible (IE, someone had the main aetheryte in Kugane targeted while they were all the way by the Eureka entrance). I've also noticed they're able to use summoning bells without actually targeting them (I can tell because they'll be listing items and changing prices despite them seemingly just idling by the bell).

[Oxidized]

1) If you don't care about gil and only care about the "fun" of crafting/gathering, then bots literally don't matter at all to you and don't affect you in a negative way at all (even in the rare cases they DO significantly drive down prices).

Please do not put words in my mouth, I never said I did not care about the gil. People who do a lot of DoH/DoL content use it as a way to set personal goals and to justify putting time, effort, and yes, gil, into the gear and leveling process. This is where the "fun" of the content is derived from for many of us.

I'm pretty sure that even "24/7" unemployed gamers need to sleep sometime.
So yes: a bot does allow you to do stuff humans can't and subsequently are very much indeed cheating.

Even more so if the bot starts handling the Auction house. We had those in WoW... ugh what a pain.
.
.
.
Account sharing IS cheating and a a bannable offense, since it is vialation of the ToS.
The Achievements of an account are supposed to be tied to a single person.

In fact many a folks cheated arena rankings and ranks in the old PvP system in WoW by letting other players do what they could not.

And this I agree with 100%, all of it. There are more successful crafters on Crystal who dedicate more time to it than I do, and if anything, they are my friends who I harbor no resentment towards whatsoever. They are the people I talk to often about this creeping wave of bots we are seeing, and sadly, I am seeing fewer of them as the expansion goes on. I am not happy that I am seeing less competition on the MB, but upset that I have fewer friends around who I could talk about high-level DoH content with.

Bots, on the other hand, do not integrate themselves into communities; their very existence is to operate outside of them.

[Vnolan]

2) Botting isn't actually cheating.

It's automated, not everyone can use it and it provides an advantage over those that don't use it. If it's not cheating then the word has no meaning.