I give up, the bots win AKA: My flight is scheduled for departure

[Kaurhz]

There's a thousand and one threads of people saying they're unsubbing because of this and that. That's what I'm referring to. It's still part of the typical nonsense that floats around.

Except this "typical nonsense" is a perfectly valid thread to create, irrespective of how many duplicate threads there are; it's a significant enough issue, and people shall continue to do so whilst it remains an issue like they do any other topic. It's a breath of freshair to have a post like this considering some of the posts as of late, being about trying to create false narratives on the blacklist, and whitelist terms, and so forth.

Except Square won't invest anything. Why would they, when bots quite literally make them money?

Every bot is an extra $15 a month. On top of that, as already pointed out, a good chunk of the player base actually enjoys bots existing because that means stuff is painfully cheap, so they don't have to try to make money themselves for things that they want. They don't even care if the bot cheats anymore, only if it's actually using legit money instead of stolen money that gets chargeback (As evidence that the map bots get their maps from a bot under the ground, which I showed in my own thread.)

Sure.

False, sure, they will lose some money, but many and I mean many bots operate via trial accounts thus there is no profit barring that which can be used to overinflate their population numbers. So going to disagree with this one.

What you don't accommodate for is that whilst bots will go, players making money will factor in for economic shifts so it'd put people in a position where they're more likely to resort to that previous avenue that was bot infested to make Gil. Sure, shard prices will rise up, then this price will incentivize players to actually gather it in order to make Gil, and in many cases allow some newer and lower level players to flourish. It's not as simple as this market will just die. Similarly if items from maps spike then equally more people will do maps as an avenue to make Gil once again. Besides, crafting being so 'profitless' is largely lent to the oversimplification and ease of the system as much as it is anything else