5.1 Crafting Feedback Thread

[KageTokage]

Almost nothing is going to break well-coded bots. Bots are just something you have to accept, sadly. It's getting harder and harder to detect them.

They're only difficult to detect through whatever methods SE uses, because their repetitive movement patterns and abnormal amounts of activity would be readily exposing them to any half-way competent enforcement team.

The rankings are only going to make this even more egregious once people with ridiculous point disparities start dominating the leaderboards. You can already see this in the Lodestone FC rankings from nonsense like tiny FCs with single digit member counts maintaining top spots over massive FCs with hundreds of members via 24/7 DoL/H spam (And yes, I did actually check to verify that the suspect FCs on my DC were involved in foul play because boredom).

On the other hand the rewards are not tradeable, so there probably isn't a whole lot of incentive for botters to obtain them. Or are you suggesting they'd enact some sort of ransom scheme where the bots will dominate the leaderboard unless you pay their owners to make them go away?

From what I've heard, they aren't going to allow the same people to keep monopolizing the top spot for the special title rewards after they win it once, but there's still liable to be a waiting queue before legitimate players can actually get said title depending on whether or not only the top player has access to it or if it's something broader like top 10 or some such. I honestly think it would be better to just let everyone who contributes *insert ridiculous number of collectibles* within a 10 day "season" have access to the best rewards and to leave the leaderboards strictly as a bragging rights thing, especially if it's going to be publicized on the Lodestone.

There's also a somewhat common misconception that all bots are related to RMT/gil farming when there's a non-negligible amount of actual players who rely almost entirely on bots to do their DoL/H work and just leave them running overnight on a regular basis.

It's not that they can't do ANYTHING about bots. It's just that gameplay changes won't do anything about them.

Anything a human can do, a bot can do.

One of few things they seem incapable of doing is distinguishing tugs because every FSH bot I've seen just reels in literally everything they hook instead of gauging tug time/strength to increase the odds of hooking something desirable.

That said, I think I'm going to shoot for the FSH rankings first if anything as the amount of time/GP they waste hooking/mooching useless fish might actually offset their activity advantage enough to make competing with them feasible.