I heard the Special Task Force is going to hitt the bots hard now, that the patch has

[NamidaTekika]

You all talk like this is new problem that only FFXIV deals with. Botting has been around since the dawn when the very first mmo launched. Make virtual money, in a virtual world and profit from it. Be it in game or outside the game. If the mmo brands haven't solve the problem after all this time, don't expect it will get better any time soon. If they had a solid solution, don't you think they would have solved it long before now?

It will never entirely go away. A bigger, better bot is always there to take it's place.

The blatant levels I see the bots around the market and gathering is kinda like a mockery though. How long they are allowed to run and the like is just silly. I played wow for years and ya I ran into some bots but those were the exception more than how commonplace and open they appear to be in this game. There isn't a solid solution but they could do LEAPS AND BOUNDS more to even crush ones that are active for months and months on end and garnering multiple reports.

[Jojoya]

The blatant levels I see the bots around the market and gathering is kinda like a mockery though. How long they are allowed to run and the like is just silly. I played wow for years and ya I ran into some bots but those were the exception more than how commonplace and open they appear to be in this game. There isn't a solid solution but they could do LEAPS AND BOUNDS more to even crush ones that are active for months and months on end and garnering multiple reports.

Bots in general have been all over the place in WoW. You weren't paying attention if you rarely saw them.

As for the situation with market bots, who needed a market bot in WoW when you were free to download and use add-ons like TSM and Auctioneer that allowed you to operate at near bot efficiency if you took the time to configure them? You might lose the AH deposit if you cancel and relist but those were usually insignificant in value because they were based on sell to vendor value instead of listing price. I knew a few players who spent almost all their time in the AH canceling and relisting their auctions. Making gold was their primary game play.

I've mentioned it before but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a FFXIV version of TSM out there. We know marketboard scanning tools exist because they've fed information to the various marketboard websites that have appeared from time to time and creating a UI that would make it easier to cancel and relist items based on scanning results shouldn't be that difficult. Such a thing would allow a player to change their prices with almost bot like efficiency. Still against the ToS but not actual botting.

[Angelhearth]

Bots in general have been all over the place in WoW. You weren't paying attention if you rarely saw them.

Yes, a long time ago, but Blizzard took some serious action and they never really got back to the level where they were a problem. It might also have had something to do with the fact that Blizzard started selling gold (don't remember the name of the item) so the gold sellers didn't earn much.

As for the situation with market bots, who needed a market bot in WoW when you were free to download and use add-ons like TSM and Auctioneer that allowed you to operate at near bot efficiency if you took the time to configure them? You might lose the AH deposit if you cancel and relist but those were usually insignificant in value because they were based on sell to vendor value instead of listing price. I knew a few players who spent almost all their time in the AH canceling and relisting their auctions. Making gold was their primary game play.

And if SE had allowed add-opns like that (as you suggest), or better yet, implemented them in the game, there wouldn't be any problems with bots on the market anymore.

[Jojoya]

Yes, a long time ago, but Blizzard took some serious action and they never really got back to the level where they were a problem. It might also have had something to do with the fact that Blizzard started selling gold (don't remember the name of the item) so the gold sellers didn't earn much.

Even with the WoW token, the bots were still there.

Can't speak for WoD when the WoW token was added. Let's face, everyone was sitting in their garrison. Who was out there able to see the bots in action? Could be even the bots were doing all their farming in the garrisons.

Legion - a constant string of bots going around, especially in Suramar. Ore and herb prices crashed hard, leather was somewhat better but then leather doesn't have the high demand the other have. Thank goodness they had changed how nodes work so you still had 15 seconds to gather from a node after a first character used it. Otherwise, the bots would have owned that expansion.

BfA - didn't play. If there's a lack of bots in BfA, it's probably because of two things - the player population took a huge hit (rumor was it dropped from about 6 million at start to under 2 million by year's end) and the launch of Classic WoW - which has a major infestation of bots that Blizzard is struggling with right now. Bot operators go where the buyers are and the buyers in current WoW were disappearing rapidly.

And if SE had allowed add-opns like that (as you suggest), or better yet, implemented them in the game, there wouldn't be any problems with bots on the market anymore.

If SE allowed add-ons or implemented similar tools as part of the game, the market bots might be gone but we'd still have the undercutting. We'd still end up with the complaints.

[Liam_Harper]

It will never entirely go away. A bigger, better bot is always there to take it's place.

It will never go away, but it is in the worst state here than it's ever been in. Nearly all the big sellers of crafted items now can be linked to bot fcs (6-9 members comprising of bank alts and 1 maxed DoH/L with nothing but msq done and impossibly high FC activity rating). They've been there months without bans, selling tens of thousands items as cheap as 10% of the next cheapest market price. This only really started seriously late Stormblood, I imagine it's linked to how accessible crafting and exp boosts made setting up bots worthwhile, but that's speculation.

"WoW is bad too" or "MMO's always have bots" doesn't mean it's perfectly fine and a good thing if the game becomes completely overrun with them. I appreciate there isn't a simple fix and SE do care about it but it's still fact there's a serious issue with botting now. I hope they can at least do something to reduce the impact.

[Charlotte_Wells]

Thats the thing. Botting and undercutting has really always been. But having both combined and single chars destroy an entire economy / gamemode with auto undercutting is another dimension and needs to stop.

[Angelhearth]

Even with the WoW token, the bots were still there.

I played WoW from beta until a year ago, with a couple of years away in between, and I never, ever saw anything comparable to what I see here, in FFXIV, never.

[Jojoya]

I played WoW from beta until a year ago, with a couple of years away in between, and I never, ever saw anything comparable to what I see here, in FFXIV, never.

As I've pointed out before, bots are running wild in Classic WoW right now - but only on the NA realms. EU realms seem to be relatively free of them. It could be that retail WoW has been in a similar position all along since players are segregated by regional license. Buy a license in NA and you can only play on the NA realms. Buy a license in EU and you can only play on the EU realms. If you want to play on overseas servers, you've got to buy the other license from an overseas dealer and pay the additional currency transaction fees.

If you were playing on the EU realms while I was playing on the NA realms, it would explain the difference in our experiences.

With FFXIV, it doesn't matter which license you buy. You get your choice of worlds in any data center and there are many NA players (especially those on the East Coast) who prefer the EU worlds because they feel their connection to the servers there is better than it is to the servers on the West Coast or because their daily schedules line up with EU prime time better.

If buying from RMT or running a bot is primarily a NA cultural thing (wouldn't surprise me with the "win at any cost" attitude so common among many here), NA players could be increasing RMT demand on the EU worlds and so you're seeing a lot more bots there than you did in WoW where you'd have very few NA players on the EU worlds.

Regardless, it's still a problem and always will be one as long as there players who would rather cheat than play the game as intended. Remove the cheaters and there's no reason for RMT or bots to exist.

[Voidle]

My guess to the root of the problem - and it's a guess - is that those that sold on the market board, the pros that kept within the rules, earned too much. I easily made 1-2 million a day, and I didn't even work hard for it. Those that really worked hard could easily make 5 million a day. SE saw this and found it to be unacceptable, so they decided to let the bots run free, to keep the prices down. This is a short term solution, as it will have unwanted consequences, something SE probably will find out, if they haven't already. In addition, if I understand it correctly, this isn't much of a problem on the Japanese servers, because the Japanese players are much more willing to follow rules than us westerners, who basically, in most cases, will disregard any rule, if we can get away with it, so SE don't really care much about it. To explain this means I have to get into the word 外人 (gaijin), something I'm hesitant to do, as it's a very sensitive subject for the Japanese.

That's like saying if a professional in the real world spent the time to learn a trade, found a way to market their skills/product and got rich, does not actually deserve to be earning that much. If I spent the time to grind for new gear, learning where all the mats are, how to acquire them, and synth an item efficiently, shouldn't I be allowed to earn more gil for my time?

Also, I doubt letting bots run free is SE solution to lowering MB prices, but just a current lack of resources in terms of improving/expanding their STF team. For a game with millions of players paying monthly subscriptions and purchasing optional items, they could hire a few more employees to address the issue.

[Angelhearth]

That's like saying if a professional in the real world spent the time to learn a trade, found a way to market their skills/product and got rich, does not actually deserve to be earning that much. If I spent the time to grind for new gear, learning where all the mats are, how to acquire them, and synth an item efficiently, shouldn't I be allowed to earn more gil for my time?

Also, I doubt letting bots run free is SE solution to lowering MB prices, but just a current lack of resources in terms of improving/expanding their STF team. For a game with millions of players paying monthly subscriptions and purchasing optional items, they could hire a few more employees to address the issue.

I wonder, would you find it strange if I thought you were one of those that were opposed to SE banning the people behind the bots?