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

[Kes13a]

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.

exactly. a five day vacation for the first offense of buying gil (and breaking the terms of the ToS) would definitely make most reconsider the "ease" of purchasing gil when they could lose their character. vacations for buyers works, plain and simple. actions against bots never will.

people dont want monitoring additions to the software, and rightfully so. the only actions SE can do, and should be doing, exists within their database, and would be a lot easier for some version of their STF to monitor and take actions against.

[Moonlite]

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.

This is it. The time SE takes to ban bots, if they do ban them, damage has been done. If bot farms X item 24/7 and tanks the price for 6 months thats 6 months worth of gil lost from other players. Not to mention 6 months of legitimately earned gil cycled into the hands of cheaters. It would be impossible to roll back everyone the cheater interacted with. But man the amount of destruction they allow before doing anything.

[Raoabolic]

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.

Ban none, and you have 3 bots that know there is nothing stopping them from making 3 more. Turning the other cheek will not stop bad people.

[DixieBellOCE]

easiest way to stop RMT is stop it at its source.

Ban the bots before they get to pyros.

[UNDEAD10000]

easiest way to stop RMT is stop it at its source.

Ban the bots before they get to pyros.

Actually it's not when even if Eureka bunny fate get removed, bots start grind gil from other sources.

Banning just only bots before they get to Eureka is pretty much impossible when FFXIV devs needs to track down the bot first, make sure the player is a bot and then ban it and even they get few bots banned 2-5x more bots comes back instantly.
And we all know there will never be some one, who is willing to observe bots for 24/7 and i'm pretty sure Square Enix don't want hire hundreds of employees just to observe and ban bots.

So only real way to stop RMT bots is by getting rid of their income by banning players who keeps buying gil and other services with real money from RMT bots and to do so Square Enix needs to give permanent ban on first offense for players who buy gil and other services with real money from RMT bots.
And once players won't buy gil and other services for real money from RMT bots, the RMT bot problem will start disappear.

Other way to get rid of RMT bots is by removing market board and make gil untradeable but then this would make gil pretty much useless in-game currency when there would be almost nothing to spend gil for.

[Kaurhz]

Ban none, and you have 3 bots that know there is nothing stopping them from making 3 more. Turning the other cheek will not stop bad people.

I don't think I ever stated that they should not be banned, just that it is a difficult undertaking to reliably and consistently do so. I wish they would, but the reality is a good portion of them will just be bot farms and in reality, could just continue to churn it out regardless of whether they get banned. By the time you've caught many of these in their tracks and banned them, many of them will have made the necessary money to create a good turnover regardless of whether they do or do not get banned. The reality is many of these folk just don't care.

They should be looking at ways to trace the Gil back to the source and then banning those that buy the Gil in the first place in order to dissuade the behavior from even happening. Whilst players think it is OK to buy Gil, regardless of the source of said Gil, then you will always create the demand for bot-farms.

[geekgirl101]

Want to know what infuriates me more? Is that we see time and time again the same bots in the game and characters with incomprehensible names floating through scenery and warping en-mass to NPCs and no matter how many times they're reported they're still there for months, whilst a player seen on youtube or live streaming using a parser is immediately banned. Now granted bots just keep on recreating more accounts so once one lot are purged they just move onto the next that are already leveled and ready to take over, so it's a futile battle to constantly ban them when they're being regenerated just as quickly. But the fact that a player who isn't cheating or botting caught using a parser, raid alerts, or even mods to filter out all the spam that's being regularly churned out by bots is cause for an immediate ban is both descriminatory and petty.

I wish that SE would change its stance on mods and be a bit more lenient on what can and can't be allowed since mods are not hacks or cheats, they're for most visual improvements and a little extra info for what is a basic and dated UI. It's the warp hacks, automated playing, and gold mining by bots that needs to be stomped on, not paying people who want to play the game and wanting to know their own DPS or if they need to run away to avoid dying to a mechanic.

[NekoMataMata]

It's strange because I always heard before I played that FFXIV was fantastic about dealing with bots and RMT.

I understand why it's rough though. Bots are notorious for being incredibly persistent with how quickly they create accounts and start heavy operations. You can't really blame any MMO devs out there for not wanting to commit to what's going to be a constant struggle. Every game that I know out there that takes a heavy stance against it ends up taking out plenty of innocents in process, either via account removals or sometimes not even allowing certain people to register and play at all.

Demand is never going to disappear though. When demand slows down the prices will go up sustaining the bots just as much as before. Square and other MMO devs can sit there and go through a war of attrition with the bots, but it's not one they can win at this point. MMO communities have to be the ones to stop providing demand for these services. And on a lesser note, assuming more serious action was taken against bots, it would also be up to the community to assist those actions in good faith. You know, by not throwing false reports around, trying to use whatever bot catching system is put in place to get people you don't like banned and so forth.

[geekgirl101]

Other way to get rid of RMT bots is by removing market board and make gil untradeable but then this would make gil pretty much useless in-game currency when there would be almost nothing to spend gil for.

No, definitely no! tbh gil isn't a big issue in the game unless you're at endgame needing to buy gear, materia and consumables, or you're a glamaholic or needing furnishings for your house. Gil isn't that hard to make. It's players who are too impatient to play the game who buy level/story skips and then want the best gear they can get before raiding who are most likely to buy gil and they often don't stick around because they're unskilled and got nothing to do once they got max level, so they'll just throw their gil away either to friends or bet it all on casinos and never come back again.

[AngelCheese77]

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.

Usually there is a “paper trail” of where the money goes in game. As far as not only who is collecting it, but where large sums go.