Okay now the botting is getting a little out of hand...

[Akamukai]

Odd, I have yet to see more than two bots at a time and I'm on Light DC.

Maybe it's because I don't get on until around 11 PM for you guys (NA player).

[KitiaraIornsight]

Odd, I have yet to see more than two bots at a time and I'm on Light DC.

Maybe it's because I don't get on until around 11 PM for you guys (NA player).

I was on between 7:00pm central and 11:30pm central
It was bad. I spent over an hour sending reports.

[Jybril]

I have laughed so hard at this, I'm in tears haha!

[Sunarine]

Make Gil not trade-able. Or, you know, have the server check if the client is in an area it's not supposed to be able to be in and ban them. It boggles my mind that the bots client is like.. hey server I'm moonwalking up in the clouds here and clipping through all the things and the server is just like.. Okay cool have fun!.

[KitiaraIornsight]

Make Gil not trade-able. Or, you know, have the server check if the client is in an area it's not supposed to be able to be in and ban them. It boggles my mind that the bots client is like.. hey server I'm moonwalking up in the clouds here and clipping through all the things and the server is just like.. Okay cool have fun!.

That would kill crafting commissions. Gil needs to be tradable.
What needs to be done is server checks for things like physics anomalies such as flying in a no flying zone or under the map, etc. or maybe just have an actual GM staff that’s logged into the game checking zones for that crap instead of GMs that only show up if a harassment report is made.

[Kaiserdrache]

RMT bots do use full accounts. Otherwise they couldn't actually give their gil to the buyer. They're usually bought with stolen credit info or fraudulent cards, but that doesn't really help us.

I know that this one alone is no solution, but together with tye other things it makes botting n rmt spamming alot mor difficult to impossible and massively less attractive.
Yes, that one thing can be circumvented, but also only with criminal energy of making no stop at even crossing the jail line of fraud or even stealing

The point is, rmt spammers n cheat botters won't be stoppable only nwith 1 or 2 partwise to fully circumventable solutions and just only banning trial accounts and stolen accounts, thats like scratching on the tip of n iceberg and wondering yourself, why the ice doesn't get lesser, when the ice practically regrows back xxx times faster, than you can remove it or stop it from regrowing.

You can stop it only, if you destroy the issue immediately at its root by a multitude of player and accountbased measuments against rmt n cheating, that help in detecting rule violating accounts faster and help players to totally isolate themself out of reach from rmt spammers, because thats the sole purpose why they exist - the user of the bot wants to make only cheap advertising, that many people ingame get to see this spam crap.

So what happens, if you take away from a flame (Spammer) the access to oxygen (Players they want to advertise)? Right, the flame will stop to exist, because wheres no oxygen, can exist also no flame, spammers will lose their interest in FF14, if they absolutely can't reach anymore any players with their garbage, because players got powerful tools to their hands to decide over it who can even chat to them.

If those spammers are whether my friend, my guildie or in my group, alone such a strong chat filter will cut down rmt spammers by approximately 90%, which will instantly not be able to spam theit shit anymore because they will basically spam only with themself, as nobody else will see what those bots have spammed, it gets just filtered out due to not fulfilling the requirements to ignore your personal chat settings, if you decide for youself, that only your friends for example should be able to chat with you.
Could be only circumvented by stealing an account of a friend of yours.

Is it an extreme radical solution? Yes, is it effective? YES! Deserve players to be fully able to decide over it who can chat with them? HELL YEEEES!!!

PS: these options are naturally the most powerful filters possible, players should naturally know too as well, that such powerful filters have naturally also their own disadvantage of making the game instantly extreme silent for you too by their counterside of forcing you first to enable manually each player first to become able to chat with you, for example by forming a group, or by making a player temporarely your friend
Such tools mean more personal constant chat organization for those who want to have everywhere in the game anytime guaranteed silence from rmt spammers.

[ICountFrom0]

Right now the bots are so bad that they can actually hold Squenix hostage. They can occupy a zone so fully, with so many people, that nobody else can get in. They can own this spot until they are tired of it or square gives in to the demands and they leave by themselves.

It only takes 300 bots to close a zone. I've seen it done twice now. They are completely helpless. GM's arn't allowed to do anything, and the task force can't respond in less then a week.

By only doing ban waves, they've become helpless.

[deadman1204]

do you have any actual proof to this? Or are you just making stuff up?

[Soulgirl]

This is totally unnaceptable and ruining the experience for everyone.
Lately it has been such an amazing amount of bots everywhere, that completely kills the immersion of playing this game.
This seems more like a F2P game than a subscription one.
They appear in the hundreds at a time, going through walls, the floors, teleporting in the air, etc...
SE needs to do something about this FAST!

How is this accepted by SE?

[null4646]

Honestly, when all is said and done, SE does not care.

People can argue that bots are in all MMORPGs. They sure are. Or that the RMT bots are "harmless" because they make things cheaper on the market. That they do.

In the end, not all of us play this game for numbers. A lot of us play for immersion... to feel a part of a world, not even hardcore RP, but just that general feeling that drives all towards any sort of high fantasy setting.

When I log in and see 100s of bots everywhere, many maxed at level 50, running the MSQ, killing mobs, overloading instances, obliterating the market, that immersion goes to hell. And that makes the game not fun. I'm taking a long break. Not rage quitting... just tired. There are other games with fewer bots and greater immersion.

I think at the end of the day, we can see that SE doesn't care. They have absolutely no cheat detection client or server side (and yes, I know client side can be terrible). Players with crowns run gathering bots with impunity and brag about it in their FCs. Players use a certain third party add on to read system memory, grabbing numbers that get posted to a site without a player's permission, set triggers for call outs in discord before a mob even even occurs, locate hunt targets automatically without having to move at all. Gathering bots, PvP bots, FATE bots. It is cheating. I'm sorry, flame me. But it is cheating by definition of the word. (Yes, I truly understand that it is absurd this game doesn't have a proper API for legit add ons like general parsers and the such, let's not go down this rabbit hole, just pointing out the obvious... cheating is when you break the rules of a game even if those rules are absurdly restrictive).

Why do they allow this? My guess is money. It costs money to enforce rules and hire staff. They lose money by getting rid of the 1000's of bot accounts. 90% of the player base would revolt and rage quit if they took away the add ons. By doing nothing, this is the new normal.

In the end... seriously, it is fine. It is a game. And everyone is different. For some, the means don't matter, just the end. And if hacking the game gets you to that end, so be it. But for others, it just trashes what is really a beautiful game. I'm so tired of it. The bots are out of control because SE lets them be out of control. There is nothing we, as a player base can do to fix the situation. Reporting is a joke. Report a real player for botting... 2 years later, they'll still be botting. Entire FCs bot. All of those hours you put into grinding crafting and gathering... a joke compared to the bot driven market. We can say, "well if people stopped buying Gil (which is mostly pointless anyway), the bots will go away. Won't happen. Only SE can do something, and year after year passes, and they don't.

In a sad way, I hope the botting gets worse and worse until the game is so adversely affected that people start leaving and new players are turned off. Perhaps they'll wake up then.