Crystal farming and gatherers

[LineageRazor]

Require gatherers to have to solve a Captcha every half hour?

Only half-joking...

[Shadygrove]

....

A well scripted bot is far from mindless, but even simple ones can do everything we can do. Botters also use cheats that most of us will not.

A friend who scripts wrote a fishbot for FFXI 6 - 8 years ago. It could isolate certain fish only catching those, when full walk into town, sell them, and walk back to fish again. If its precise spot was occupied it would find another (this he said was the hardest part), and hold a 5 minuet conversation with a GM.

Here we have mining and botany bots that remain underground and either tele between nodes or speed run between them. They can easily gather any particular item and use GPs appropriately.

As to conversation, Eliza, a program from when computers were just out of the vacuum tube era could do that.

[Viridiana]

I don' know exaclty how bots work, but it seems like you could outsmart them by making farming more interactive and rewarding an intelligent human interaction while making the brainless fail. Disincentivize mindless botting. Incentivize thoughtful strategic farming or gathering.

As much as I kinda miss the old 1.0 mini-games we had, I don't think they actually accomplished their mission of stopping bots.

[Tiraelina]

As much as I kinda miss the old 1.0 mini-games we had, I don't think they actually accomplished their mission of stopping bots.

They became entirely predictable once you knew what you were doing (or in the case of the majority, didn't and read it online). I could tell you what item I was going to get before I hit it and not miss. Not saying I didn't prefer it because it had some degree of learning curve unlike now.

Bots can do a lot but 99.99% of the time they are still going to act like bots. One dead giveaway right now other than the teleporting/waypointing/rotating is if they don't cause visual effects while gathering. GM could just teleport around the gathering areas every now and then and knock out majority of them on that alone. But that doesn't happen because they try to gather information and program in counters (you know, those ones that get worked around in <day) rather than attacking them directly. It's extremely damaging to any kind of economy with how long it takes.

[Simaril]

I don't think there's much of an issue with bots affecting crystals. It's just shards IMO.

I was killing time before going to an unspoiled node, and stopped to farm some earth crystals. I used the 2 extra crystals ability and got 12 from one node. At the time they were selling for almost 100gil each. That's MUCH better profit than I got from the unspoiled node. I also grabbed some pigment for dye that I sold 40 X 750gil. Again, way better than what I got in more time and effort from the unspoiled node.

[Fiosha_Maureiba]

I think I would like to see a non-class specific recipe that allows the breaking down of clusters and crystals into shards. I know it may have been reserved for alchemists before.

And then to allow for these recipes to be quick synthable.

A trait for shards may also work or higher level nodes yielding a larger amount of shards overall.

Unfortunately the bots and the people that use them will be bastards, but I wouldn't want their bastardization of shard gathering screw up an opportunity to assist legitimate gatherers in gathering shards quicker.

[Sparky]

I gather my own mats and I discovered fairly quickly that a full stack of shards would take in the region of 10 hours of straight farming. I'd love to gather all the shards I'd ever need, but I cant bear the thought of staring at a rock face for 50+ hours.

[Rudrose]

I started playing on Jan 1st, I'm a level 35 Botanist and Weaver, just so you know where I'm coming from. The concerns for bots seem very valid and SE should of course address them as needed. However, I agree that making farming easier/more enjoyable would encourage more players to do it themselves instead of purchasing. I currently haven't purchased any shards but with each thread I pull as a Weaver costing 4-5 shards a piece, I have been very tempted to go to the market. Even if I'm fully capable as my Botanist, I don't want to slowly farm shards for 4 hours, when those same shards will be gone in a half hour of Weaving.

At the end of the day, I want to enjoy my Botanist. I don't mind that shards give little experience, it should not be such a pain in the butt for me to go gather them. Lower DoH shard costs, increase shard yields, lower GP Ward costs, however you want to do it, but don't make me dread going to farm for shards.

[Sparky]

A lot of bots don't even use wards. Instead, they are able to fire off 5-6 axe swings in the time it takes a human player to swing once. When they are done on that node, they teleport to the next.

This is one of those things you notice if, when during those countless hours you spend farming a few hundred shards, a bot happens to be there too.

So I conclude, that increasing the scope and power of the wards will not encourage more bots. They are already capable of far more than the wards would give them.

[LlenCoram]

I still wish it went back to shards and crystals could be had from breaking fish. It would give all these stupid useless fish some use at least.