Quote Originally Posted by KageTokage View Post
Perhaps it is not incompetence that's the issue and more that they need such overwhelmingly undeniable evidence of cheating/illicit activity that they simply aren't willing to ban the vast majority of bots.

There was a noticeable increase in the number of bans during the week of the second Ishgard Restoration rankings where the Diadem bots had gone mainstream, but were prone to glitching out and getting stuck on terrain or in an endless loop of mounting/dismounting. People actually got removed from the rankings for cheating then, but come the third ranking session the bots had been refined, were no longer glitching out, and the number of bans remained as low as always.
Yeah the bar could be set to high to get rid of bots, but theres a few problems with that take too. For starters, ToS allows SE to do whatever it wants with very little repercussions legally. So if they think youre a botter negatively impacting the game, they can ban you on that suspicion if they wanted too. Waiting for overwhelming evidence to ban a bot seems a bit to safe if bots are such a negative impact on the game as being suggested. Theyve banned people for less. Then theres how they actually handle banning. Unless Ive misunderstood this, it happens in waves. So collect evidence and ban all at once. Why? And even then, it appears they do actually get the evidence necessary to ban bots without issue, they just dont act upon it. If anything, batch banning like this appears more like a culling effect rather than resolving it completely. Cut down the number of bots rather than outright stop bots.

Then there's the issue of actually detecting them. While I dont have an answer to why bots are so prolific overall, I am skeptical that the entire MMO industry over the past 20+ years havent devised methods to quickly and accurately detect bots. That the best method of finding them is player reporting? Especially when many of you have stated that you can find them with a very basic search. And then even with that consideration, since ban waves do happen, SE must be doing something to find and detect these bots on their end. So they do have some method of finding them that has to be evolving alongside the bots, otherwise ban waves would get subsequently smaller ever time as SEs detection method becomes outdated. Theyre obviously refining their detection methods to pick up bots if the number of bots at the very least remains static as bot complexity increases.

I get that the simplest answer is probably closest to being right, but if bots are so detrimental and literally sapping profit from SE, this would be something that they would address.