Quote Originally Posted by Kaedan View Post
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).
Alright, we have reached a point in the discussion where a person openly starts defending cheaters.

Guess I'm just gonna make 50 characters in one date centre, set up a gathering bot on them running 24 hours a day, 7 days per week, then go sell the stuff they gathered on the marketboard and I would still get defended by him, because "I'm not doing anything that player couldn't normally do".