Is it OK to use bots in FFXIV?

[Canadane]

There are a lot of "players" who bot, and over the years it's become sadly evident that SE isn't doing anything serious in regards to stopping them.
The obvious RMT farms from china are swiftly dealt with, but actual players who opt to use bots seems to get no actual punishment.

Maybe one day SE will crack down on these and they'll get the ban they deserve. It's very sad that legit players are surpassed by others using nonstop bots.

Part of the issue may very well be that the STF and director/producer/god Yoshi-P are both mostly isolated to the experiences of Japanese servers.
You look around you don't see RMT (as much) or cheaters botting their way nonstop (as much). It exists but from what I've gathered it's not by any degree close to other data centres.
So if the people in charge of dealing with it don't see a problem, then there is no problem. This is why things don't really get done unless brought directly to him by say a fan at a Q&A or a technical issue at an important time.
I like how the sound output issue we've had for years was solved within a week of Yoshi-P having experienced it during a Live Letter.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

There are a lot of "players" who bot, and over the years it's become sadly evident that SE isn't doing anything serious in regards to stopping them.
The obvious RMT farms from china are swiftly dealt with, but actual players who opt to use bots seems to get no actual punishment.

Maybe one day SE will crack down on these and they'll get the ban they deserve. It's very sad that legit players are surpassed by others using nonstop bots.

Part of the issue may very well be that the STF and director/producer/god Yoshi-P are both mostly isolated to the experiences of Japanese servers.
You look around you don't see RMT (as much) or cheaters botting their way nonstop (as much). It exists but from what I've gathered it's not by any degree close to other data centres.
So if the people in charge of dealing with it don't see a problem, then there is no problem. This is why things don't really get done unless brought directly to him by say a fan at a Q&A or a technical issue at an important time.
I like how the sound output issue we've had for years was solved within a week of Yoshi-P having experienced it during a Live Letter.

This isn't true, the livestream debuted the benchmark, and that already had the fix in place. They fixed it prior to the audio issues.

[ZeroRaziel]

Ehhh. Those are the easily noticeable RMT bots that mostly stand around Limsa. SE is horrendous was it comes to market board bots, gather bots and crafting bots. Even outright cheaters often got on to be ignored for years despite numerous reports. And the thing is, all they have to do is shadow these "players" to see them botting as it's fairly obvious.

Unfortunately, it seems the GMs aren't given much authority in this regard, and it's the STF that handles these bans. Which is hilariously understaffed. All in all, SE doesn't do a whole lot about bots.

There are a lot of "players" who bot, and over the years it's become sadly evident that SE isn't doing anything serious in regards to stopping them.
The obvious RMT farms from china are swiftly dealt with, but actual players who opt to use bots seems to get no actual punishment.

Maybe one day SE will crack down on these and they'll get the ban they deserve. It's very sad that legit players are surpassed by others using nonstop bots.

Part of the issue may very well be that the STF and director/producer/god Yoshi-P are both mostly isolated to the experiences of Japanese servers.
You look around you don't see RMT (as much) or cheaters botting their way nonstop (as much). It exists but from what I've gathered it's not by any degree close to other data centres.
So if the people in charge of dealing with it don't see a problem, then there is no problem. This is why things don't really get done unless brought directly to him by say a fan at a Q&A or a technical issue at an important time.
I like how the sound output issue we've had for years was solved within a week of Yoshi-P having experienced it during a Live Letter.

Well, thanks for your honest thoughts. Had some similar suspicions when was making this thread...
Yet, it's still better to hear this, than some delusional conclusions of people claiming that there are no crafting/gathering/market bots. Just very dedicated players who can be active for 750+ hours in a row repeating 1 singe action every minute.

[Canadane]

Well, thanks for your honest thoughts. Had some similar suspicions when was making this thread...
Yet, it's still better to hear this, than some delusional conclusions of people claiming that there are no crafting/gathering/market bots. Just very dedicated players who can be active for 750+ hours in a row repeating 1 singe action every minute.

There are absolutely people who do this. Maybe not 750 hours but I can sit and craft all day long sometimes I feel like a bot lol
But there is absolutely botting software out there, to deny it it would be crazy. Apparently the good stuff is paid for so someone’s making money off it. But hey, you just make back that money with some RMT of your own after taking advantage of the software right?
The things I’m told by some unscrupulous players is pretty disgusting at best, and I honestly do wish SE would do something.

[ZeroRaziel]

There are absolutely people who do this. Maybe not 750 hours but I can sit and craft all day long sometimes I feel like a bot lol
But there is absolutely botting software out there, to deny it it would be crazy. Apparently the good stuff is paid for so someone’s making money off it. But hey, you just make back that money with some RMT of your own after taking advantage of the software right?
The things I’m told by some unscrupulous players is pretty disgusting at best, and I honestly do wish SE would do something.

Heh, I think we all can be like that sometimes... But one, two or even three days isn't 50. Plus real people usually care to answer at least one out of twenty tells from different people (or at least put them on black-list o_o).
And I don't think that you use an army of those 22 lvl chars to scan if someone undercut you precisely every 5 minutes =P

You can't really take advantage of the undercut bots because they're able to set a price floor that they will not go under.

True, also tried that only to find out there was a certain limit they won't cross.
Though that player from Chaos server (reddit post from earlier) stumbled upon a bot-owner careless enough to ignore this threshold.
That's is how it turned out:
https://imgur.com/a/xkDLOE1

[ZeroRaziel]

There are a lot of "players" who bot, and over the years it's become sadly evident that SE isn't doing anything serious in regards to stopping them.
The obvious RMT farms from china are swiftly dealt with, but actual players who opt to use bots seems to get no actual punishment.

Maybe one day SE will crack down on these and they'll get the ban they deserve. It's very sad that legit players are surpassed by others using nonstop bots.

Part of the issue may very well be that the STF and director/producer/god Yoshi-P are both mostly isolated to the experiences of Japanese servers.
You look around you don't see RMT (as much) or cheaters botting their way nonstop (as much). It exists but from what I've gathered it's not by any degree close to other data centres.
So if the people in charge of dealing with it don't see a problem, then there is no problem. This is why things don't really get done unless brought directly to him by say a fan at a Q&A or a technical issue at an important time.
I like how the sound output issue we've had for years was solved within a week of Yoshi-P having experienced it during a Live Letter.

Huh. Guess you are mostly right here... Made a character on JPN Data Centers and wasn't able to find even one Market Board bot not even on a single world. Damn, don't think that I even seen one RMT spammer in Limsa there...
And it seems that whole STF team (the one responsible for keeping an eye on botting, cheating and all that exciting stuff) consists just of 3 japanese employees



(I think it was 4 as of Stormblood)... And this 3-4 members seems more than enough to keep botting and RMT problem under control mostly on 3 japanese Data Centers.
Could we possibly get a something like "Special Task Force West" team or something?

P.S. Another funny fact: approximately at the same time Market Board botting became more severe on NA & EU servers (around 6 weeks ago) those warping around lvl 1-50 Conjurers and Thaumaturges (they prefer Archers since of ShB for some reason) suddenly gone missing.
I mean this bad boys:



Before you could just use a player search limited to levels 1-50, Conjurer & Thaumaturge & Archer and 90% of matches were those:




But since those 6 weeks they all went M.I.A. and now you can't find those pretty much anywhere (which is a good thing in its own).
Just as if people who were using those found a better ways of making gill.