How botting may Kill this game (even if the game rebounds)

[Azurymber]

There is no question that FFXIV is one of the most heavily botted games out there right now. However, SE still hasn't done anything about it, and doesn't seem to intend to any time in the near future.

Even with a great new battle system and amazing new content, this game may not ever have success due to the large amount of botting/cheating

here is why:

1.
The large amount of botting has led to serious gil inflation. As a result of this, a large amount of players have well over 20mil (some having upwards of 50 or 100+).

what does this mean?: New players will have an -incredibly- hard time catching up. This means if elite gear (like the equivalent to ffxi p-charm, hauberk, etc) is released, new players (ex. ps3 players) will be unable to afford it for years or without botting themselves.
And i realize many people say "well SE will implement gil sinks". But honestly from an economic perspective, gil sinks will be nearly impossible to properly implement at this point. Further, FFXIV's economic track record is one of -pure failure-. And further, when hyperinflation took place in FFXI they were unable to gil-sink it out and had to mass ban rmt's and wait about 2 years for the economy to stabalize.

2.
New players will feel unable to ever become elite or catch up to the huge amount of people that have multiple rank 50 jobs. This is especially detrimental to people who want to play the game as a crafter main, as it will be practically impossible to compete or profitably level up crafts when your server is full of people who have multiple crafts at rank 50 from botting.

what does this mean? New players will switch to games where they actually have a chance of being "elite" players. Why? Because humans are on average happier by having relative games than absolute gains. That is to say that people want to have more than the other people around them (this has been scientifically proven to be a characteristic of our brains through neuroscience experiments across the world and across cultures). If FFXIV is released and new players see huge numbers of people with 5-10 rank 50 jobs and realize it could take them months just to get one job to rank 50 (especially crafts) they are likely to move to another game where they can be more competitive.

3
Botters will essentially be the players who end up with all the elite stuff, since they have spent months botting millions of gil and will continue to do so since nothing is being done about it.

what does this mean?: Imaginee FFXIV introduced dynamis tomorrow for hardcore elite weapons. Now lets say a legit player wants it. What are the chances they can compete with the 200+ people on every server who are botting/botted all their gil and can afford to pay high prices for currency. The chances are pretty well 0. Elite gear that is sold or gained with gil (ex. dynamis weapons, p-charm, o-kote etc) will first go to those that botted before it will land in the hands of legit players. Since many people won't want to wait, they will take up botting themselves in order to have a chance.

Why can't SE just ban the bots?
Because from what i've read they currently don't have that special team working on finding out who is botting. And I'm assuming it would be very difficult to mass ban people in the future based on recorded data without banning a number of innocent players. So its very likely those who have botted to this point have gotten away with it.

What will be the future?
It's obviously impossible to predict exactly what happens with the game, but there are a few likely scenarios.

First: Botting leads to constant hyperinflation. Gil sinks fail to remove gil out of the game and as such, the game turns to having all elite gear as rare/ex.
As a result crafting and gathering jobs are no longer nearly as important (other than materia wise).

Second: SE manages to magically combat inflation (incredibly unlikely)
However, there are still 100s of people who have botted numerous jobs. As a result a number of jobs (fishing and crafting) that are easily botted end up completely unprofitable resulting in no one leveling them. In essence, the amount of jobs you have to choose from is cut in half.

Third: SE tries to implement a gil-sink. it fails. The game continues to be one of the most heavily botted games out there. New players see no reason to join a game that is filled with obvious cheaters, and the game essentially fails or stays at its current population. (this seems to be the most likely)

Possible Solutions?

There is probably no viable way to fix the gil problem quick enough in time for a PS3 release unless it is delayed 2 years.

SE could make it -really- easy to get to rank 50 and up the cap to 75 making 50 to 75 the "hard part". If they actually banned bots at this point it would at least make the game more "fair" and allow new players to have a chance at competing for "eliteness". Gil would still be an issue but they could put in more of the current NMs just at higher levels, so that people could farm rare/ex gear to level up with.

Note: I believe many on this forum (not mentioning names but should be obvious) will argue that people play this game to look at the pretty forests and have fun, and don't care about "eliteness" or good gear. I would like to point out that FFXI servers had -massive- amounts of drama over gear, and further that many end game linkshells of FFXI had serious drama over items like byakko haidate, with people getting the item, then quitting the ls. Once again it is scientifically proven that people IN GENERAL (not every single person) prefer relative gains to absolute gains. So please don't just point out that "people don't care about having more than others."

What are your thoughts?

[Starlord]

Can we focus one thing at a time? SE still had to rebound first

[Azurymber]

Can we focus one thing at a time? SE still had to rebound first

and the point of this thread is that rebounded won't matter if you have a game dominated by people who botted.

Let me give a real life example of how people prefer to play without cheaters:
When Diablo II was released it came with open and closed battlenet.
Closed battle net (AT THE TIME) was moderated with chars stored on blizzard servers, and was nearly impossible to bot or cheat on.
Open battle net on the other hand used chars stored on your local harddrive to it was -really- easy to cheat.

Guess which battlenet was most popular?
Closed.

Non-cheaters are generally adverse to playing with cheaters because it tends to ruin their experience.

If FFXIV is dominated by cheaters, or by people who have cheated to get where they are, it will prob turn a large number of people away.

And since this isn't a problem that can be fixed overnight, it should be a serious issue that is taken care of now before it gets further out of hand.

Again, i strongly point out that FFXI had -major- problems from hyperinflation due to RMT and Botting (specifically rusty cap botting). And it took years and significant effort to fix.

[Punxsutawney]

This is a tough situation for SE, they can't very well just reduce everyones gil to 3 million and say "tough shit" or they lose even more players, but they can't leave it unchecked, either. The solution could be a gil sink that take a percentage of a players gil. Like for you to get a mount, you have to do a quest where you are swindled out of half your gil, in exchange for what you think is an extremely rare item, but happens to be a chocobo egg. Which in turn, you raise and it becomes you first chocobo mount .

[Azurymber]

This is a tough situation for SE, they can't very well just reduce everyones gil to 3 million and say "tough shit" or they lose even more players, but they can't leave it unchecked, either. The solution could be a gil sink that take a percentage of a players gil. Like for you to get a mount, you have to do a quest where you are swindled out of half your gil, in exchange for what you think is an extremely rare item, but happens to be a chocobo egg. Which in turn, you raise and it becomes you first chocobo mount .

It wouldn't work because people would transfer their gil to a muel or give it to a friend temporarily, get the choco egg, and transfer it back.

[Xatsh]

Botting does not lead to hyper inlfation at all. That is Rmt who sell gil in waves does that.

While botters may get rich, it is the money in the current economy being shifted around.

Example: I sell a weapon for 10k in the ward... that 10k is not added to the economy actully some money (taxes) is left.

So although a botter will make countless millions, it actually removes gil from the game, countering hyperinflation.

Honestly most things in the markets are way undervalued considering the gil from leves coming into the game.

[Azurymber]

Botting does not lead to hyper inlfation at all. That is Rmt who sell gil in waves does that.

While botters may get rich, it is the money in the current economy being shifted around.

Example: I sell a weapon for 10k in the ward... that 10k is not added to the economy actully some money (taxes) is left.

So although a botter will make countless millions, it actually removes gil from the game, countering hyperinflation.

Honestly most things in the markets are way undervalued considering the gil from leves coming into the game.

This is somewhat incorrect. A lot of bots that level up crafting do so by converting farmed items into npcable items and npcing them.
Let me give you an example.

Mrbotter is a rank 42 carpenter.
He goes to the wards and buys 1000 Walnut logs + 10,000 wind shards

Walnut logs are 8000 each and lets say 10% tax. so 800,000 gil drained from the economy
wind shards are 400 each and 10% tax. so 400,000 gil drained from the economy
overall with a 10% tax 1.2mil is drained from the economy.

he can now craft 4000 walnut masks which sell at 1500 each.
that means if he fails none, he makes 6mil.

6mil is significantly higher than 1.2 mil in taxes drained

And thats assuming the botter only buys things from the ah and doent get the shards or mats from botting something like fishing or a job.

[Koronos]

I think the RMT fishing bots are the biggest problem. Take away those and there probably wouldn't be enough crystals to support the non-RMT botters. Also, the non-RMT botters definitely are not getting rich. It takes serious amounts of gil to get a craft to 50 in most cases. (along the lines of 100M for GSM for example, or so a LS mate told me) And once you get to 50 there are not many profitable synths, because there are dozens and dozens of others with crafts leveled. Just my opinion for the most part, but I think people have serious misconceptions about the issues at hand.

[TheVedis]

I think the RMT fishing bots are the biggest problem. Take away those and there probably wouldn't be enough crystals to support the non-RMT botters. Also, the non-RMT botters definitely are not getting rich. It takes serious amounts of gil to get a craft to 50 in most cases. (along the lines of 100M for GSM for example, or so a LS mate told me) And once you get to 50 there are not many profitable synths, because there are dozens and dozens of others with crafts leveled. Just my opinion for the most part, but I think people have serious misconceptions about the issues at hand.

most gear is profitable, you almost never make gear at a loss regardless of what you make
the problem is people arent making uber profit off single pieces, which is what people usualy mean when they talk about profit

i can easily make 20-30k profit a piece, and mass produce tons of easily sellable pieces
the problem is, why do this when i can farm for better profit?

botting is an issue, and alot of the ideas here are utterly rediculous

just report them to the STF and let them deal with it, it isnt our job to be able to do something directly about it as there is NOTHING we can do in all honesty

[Koronos]

most gear is profitable, you almost never make gear at a loss regardless of what you make
the problem is people arent making uber profit off single pieces, which is what people usualy mean when they talk about profit

i can easily make 20-30k profit a piece, and mass produce tons of easily sellable pieces
the problem is, why do this when i can farm for better profit?

botting is an issue, and alot of the ideas here are utterly rediculous

just report them to the STF and let them deal with it, it isnt our job to be able to do something directly about it as there is NOTHING we can do in all honesty

Yes I suppose I was thinking of profit more as it relates to time and effort involved. I made a bunch of lowbie gear at R20 ARM and actually made a couple mil my first two weeks, but its a lot of work and the market gets saturated very easily with such a small player base right now. I agree that botting is a huge issue, and hopefully SE will address it soon.