I'm an honest crafter who enjoyed the crafting grind to an extent, though it is still categorically a chore. I'm now approaching rank 35 Goldsmith and I'm quite proud of that. However...

When I see people who have the characters sitting and crafting for hours on end, THEN sit there for another full real-life day or two without doing anything, I just know that it's a person using a bot. Then I go on forums and see people's signatures with Rank 50 craft all round in almost every craft. Is there a way to do that without a bot? Possibly, but I'm not certain someone can devote 24/7 of their life grinding; I mean at least they need to sleep.

As an honest crafter, I feel cheated. It's like you know the store opposite you use artificial additives (if not something downright illegal) in the food they sell, while you work hard to make sure everything you do is proper and right, but there is no law or regulations to do anything to the cheater opposite of you.

Not only that, I think this will be detrimental in the long run. In World of Warcraft, Blizzard allow the use of mods freely, and some come close to cheating the game. In fact, several respectable gamers in the community had pointed out that some boss/raid systems became obsolete as the mods were used, and some are even rendered pointless because of it. By allowing players to add their own systems to an MMO game, the company is limiting themselves as what they can develop.

I have not reported any botters yet, seeing as SE is not doing anything about it, but I'm becoming increasingly concerned about this aspect of 'cheating' in an MMO. When I heard that the same thing happened in FFXI and SE did nothing about this, it just killed me as a crafter.