5 months is a ridiculous amount of time to read reports and ban bots.

[DixieBellOCE]

Eureka is infested, they have been reported since DAY ONE of the Materia Datacenter's release.

How in gods name does a billion dollar company like Square Enix operate if they cant even go out of their way to remove 40 bots from Eureka and SHOW the community that they actually care!

Frustrations are boiling over in the Oceanic community at Square Enix's inability to take action against bots, to the point where multiple members of the Eureka community have just up and quit the game.

Are bots subscriptions really worth more than REAL PLAYERS leaving the game forever?

Step up, take action and PROVE that you are actually paying attention to your community.

FF is a great game, but it suffers from the same 'ignore the issues' attitude that all large companies take nowdays.

BAN THE BOTS.

[Kaurhz]

I wish they would, but they will only create more, and more until it actually impedes too much on in-game systems, and until the only rewards from them are logograms and rare minions/mounts.

This meme aptly captures the issue. Bots do all kinds of nefarious things to gain access to accounts, or to create new ones.

[AngelCheese77]

It might be better to see what the bots are doing in regards to the content and change that. But either way it is a lose/lose situation for us.

[DixieBellOCE]

It might be better to see what the bots are doing in regards to the content and change that. But either way it is a lose/lose situation for us.

South bunny fate in pyros.
Its the ONLY reason they make eureka bots due to the fact its 100% safe and 100% profit every time.

They just need to remove that one fate, and everything goes away and Eureka communities across the world will celebrate.

[Kes13a]

they need to start banning gil buyers.

fighting the bots is pointless. remove their market and you will start to see change

[DPZ2]

they need to start banning gil buyers.

fighting the bots is pointless. remove their market and you will start to see change

How would you propose identifying gil buyers? From the numerous shills I've encountered (and reported) in Ul'dah over the years I haven't seen a message for a single in-game form of communication. I suppose that they could attempt to shut down that one web site, maybe, but a quick perusal of the games it supports (via search, not actually going to the site) doesn't give me much hope that they can do so, especially when the likes of Activision cannot not seem to do so.

[Kes13a]

How would you propose identifying gil buyers? From the numerous shills I've encountered (and reported) in Ul'dah over the years I haven't seen a message for a single in-game form of communication. I suppose that they could attempt to shut down that one web site, maybe, but a quick perusal of the games it supports (via search, not actually going to the site) doesn't give me much hope that they can do so, especially when the likes of Activision cannot not seem to do so.

first rule of everything is... track the money. pretty sure that they have the capability since its THEIR SERVERS. you have one character who collects gobs of gil from easily identified farmers/crafters and the gil goes to seemingly random people. a GM chat should be able to determine if the gil was purchased. "so Mr Mi'qo, you put up a single serving of yak's milk for 50 million gil? and someone bought it? amazing...."

I dont think tracking it is as impossible as you might imagine.

[Chie_M]

One of the main reasons I transferred back to Aether yesterday.

[RitsukoSonoda]

How would you propose identifying gil buyers? From the numerous shills I've encountered (and reported) in Ul'dah over the years I haven't seen a message for a single in-game form of communication. I suppose that they could attempt to shut down that one web site, maybe, but a quick perusal of the games it supports (via search, not actually going to the site) doesn't give me much hope that they can do so, especially when the likes of Activision cannot not seem to do so.

Provided SE does the same things in FFXIV as they did in FFXI they don't take immediate action on RMT whether bot or actual person when they're reported and instead tags them as a watch target to monitor activities then tags other characters and accounts it has suspicious interactions with and repeats the process to try and get as much of the chain as possible. In the case of FFXI this often also resulted in buyers getting bans as well though I think this only happened to repeat buyers.

I've seen other online games take measures like hardware bans or blacklisting credit cards

[Jojoya]

How would you propose identifying gil buyers? From the numerous shills I've encountered (and reported) in Ul'dah over the years I haven't seen a message for a single in-game form of communication. I suppose that they could attempt to shut down that one web site, maybe, but a quick perusal of the games it supports (via search, not actually going to the site) doesn't give me much hope that they can do so, especially when the likes of Activision cannot not seem to do so.

They can identify what characters are bots farming gil.

They can trace where the gil being farmed by those bots goes and look for suspicious gil transactions. It's not like the bot operators are going to give the gil away for free - that's how they earn their money.

As buyers start getting banned and word spreads, fewer players will risk buying for fear of losing what they've already acquired. The fewer buyers there are, the less sense it makes to continue operating bots that aren't profitable.

The market exists because the demand exists. Remove the demand and the market dies out. Keep the demand and someone else will always move in to fill the void because there is profit for the taking.