The amount of bots teleporting around is absolutely unbelievable

[Ultimatecalibur]

Part of what you may be seeing is likely due to the botters trying to get their bots through to the farm grounds before patch 5.3 breaks their scripts.

[TheMightyMollusk]

There was a recent ban wave. The botters have to level up new bots now. They'll be level capped again soon enough.

[Seddrinth]

What if we make a server for bots? They will never get banned there, so they have incentive to move their bots there. Then the rest of us will never have to see bots while we play in our normal server/worlds.

[kelevra13]

I am a bot-spotting baby.
What about their movements is so distinguishable?
How do you know those players were bots?

I, too, would like to know. I just assume, the crafters at least, are just quick synthing 99 pieces all the time.

[Goji1639]

They affect leaderboards, such as Ishgard and have been known to run dungeons and PvP, affecting the gameplay experience for the rest of the team. They fill the server and cause queues. They also frequently cause some dungeons to become choked up and break the instance queue, Amdapor Keep being the most popular botting dungeon.

They also heavily crash the price of gathering materials, not just crafting. As for your idea to award maxed out omnicrafters with gil, there are maxed out omnicraft bots. Not to mention pushing large sums of raw gil into the economy will cause inflation.

The idea with the weekly is to monetize omnicrafting in a way that bots can't ruin, not to punish bots. Maxing out omnicrafting is a legit time investment; omnicrafting bots aren't the ones you see 100's of running around.

Also, there aren't that many omnicrafters in general. It would be easy to push through a few gil sinks for everyone to counterbalance it, and the end result leaves omnicrafters at a financial advantage; as they probably should be.

Beyond that, I rarely deal with server queues and rarely see bots in roulettes, so I have no idea how common it is for them to cause issues there. I do hear that they flood the PvP instances in this game, which is a problem.

What if we make a server for bots? They will never get banned there, so they have incentive to move their bots there. Then the rest of us will never have to see bots while we play in our normal server/worlds.

Well, the point of mass botting is to earn gil from people by flooding the MB, then sell gil to people for real money. A server of only bots means no customers on the MB and no customers for RM transactions, so the botters wouldn't go for it.

[Seddrinth]

Well, the point of mass botting is to earn gil from people by flooding the MB, then sell gil to people for real money. A server of only bots means no customers on the MB and no customers for RM transactions, so the botters wouldn't go for it.

Do a shared mb for all the worlds in a data center cluster. People already hop from world to world to buy stuff anyway so this just makes things easier and will incentivize botters to stay in the bot only server.

[Goji1639]

Do a shared mb for all the worlds in a data center cluster. People already hop from world to world to buy stuff anyway so this just makes things easier and will incentivize botters to stay in the bot only server.

They'd still need to be on a populated server to advertise their real money shops, or send out scam messages so they can steal accounts. A lot of bot farms are on stolen accounts, which is one of the reasons why eliminating them is complicated.

[Jojoya]

The idea with the weekly is to monetize omnicrafting in a way that bots can't ruin, not to punish bots. Maxing out omnicrafting is a legit time investment; omnicrafting bots aren't the ones you see 100's of running around.

Also, there aren't that many omnicrafters in general. It would be easy to push through a few gil sinks for everyone to counterbalance it, and the end result leaves omnicrafters at a financial advantage; as they probably should be.

We don't need more financial advantage than we already have by providing goods that others want but would rather buy than make for themselves.

It makes even less sense when the game doesn't give us ways to spend our wealth. What's the point of getting even more when there's nothing to spend it on?

Do a shared mb for all the worlds in a data center cluster. People already hop from world to world to buy stuff anyway so this just makes things easier and will incentivize botters to stay in the bot only server.

That's what SE was originally trying to do as part of world visit but they ran into technical problems they couldn't solve (the data center marketboard, not the bot only server). It's still one of their goals for the future if they can figure out a solution.

A bot only server doesn't accomplish anything.

[Goji1639]

We don't need more financial advantage than we already have by providing goods that others want but would rather buy than make for themselves.

It makes even less sense when the game doesn't give us ways to spend our wealth. What's the point of getting even more when there's nothing to spend it on?

Bots driving down prices kills the financial incentive for crafting. IF monetary value is going to be the goal it should come from a source that isn't influenced by the player economy.

I'd personally prefer if crafting created quality of life improvements that only the crafter could benefit from.

[KageTokage]

RMT bots are just a sad fact of life in any MMO.

The only thing that varies is how effective the moderation teams are at keeping them in check, and I'd put XIV in the "really bad" camp when they typically let the shout spammers persist for the entire day, have not taken any measures to keep the actual gil farmers from clogging instance queues despite it being a problem since 2.x, and basically never ban the bots that are resorting to "legitimate" methods of earning gil like gathering/crafting.