Bots and Cheaters.

[Valoria3]

As they tell it, they do. There are lodestone reports every 2 weeks where they say how many they banned or suspended. They just do it in waves, so you can still see them between all of these waves.

Yeah 17 bots accounts banned between sep 28 and oct 4 that's ALL across the world.. Today ALONE I've seen over 30 CLEARLY bots running around.

[Xirean]

Yeah 17 bots accounts banned between sep 28 and oct 4 that's ALL across the world.. Today ALONE I've seen over 30 CLEARLY bots running around.

Then report them? It's not like these things can always just be detected automatically. For stuff like this, the player base is basically the filter system.

[Jojoya]

Yeah 17 bots accounts banned between sep 28 and oct 4 that's ALL across the world.. Today ALONE I've seen over 30 CLEARLY bots running around.

That's only the bots that aren't related to RMT. Those involved in RMT are included in the RMT numbers (3993 accounts for that same week).

The vast majority of botting is RMT related. Those underground bots are leveling up to get where they can start farming dungeons like Amdapor Keep that drop a lot of gil plus items that can be sold to vendors for gil.

I don't know why they don't just do a check if the bots are under the map and ban based on that. Plenty of other games ban people who go OOB on the map and there's no real reason to go OOB under the aetheryte unless you want to advertise RMT in say chat.

As others have said, bugs can occasionally cause players to go out of bounds. The need to manually review every OOB to see whether it was due to a bug or if it was a bot would require a lot of manpower when there are simpler ways for SE to detect which characters are bots.

If you want bots out of gaming, then players need to decide they aren't interested in cheating. As long as there are players interested in cheating to get what they want or engage in RMT, there will be sellers appearing to provide those services. Just banning those selling the services does nothing since they'll make new accounts and continue their operations. There's a profit to be made, after all. Remove the buyers, who are far less likely to enjoy constantly losing access to what they had gained, and there's no profit for the sellers to continue their operations.