Botters/Cheaters/3rd party programs

[Shougun]

People are actually getting punished for 3rd party apps? Youtube is filled with people and their names uncensored using apps lol. I don't think SE really wants to ban people from the game and do it as a last resort, which is good for not getting mistakenly banned because you did something funny but not against the ToS. For third party tools though Yoshida pretty much said if you don't get caught we won't do anything, and he expects people to be using them. To be clear he didn't say bots, he was talking more like aggro tables and parsers - but he didn't say they were allowed as much as SE's priority wasn't to punish these tools.

Imo SE would be more successful catching bots with a VATs/Warden but there would be a number of players who will quit because those tools are very similar to spyware (if not technically already are).

Bots that use gil generating tasks do have a negative impact on everyone though, legacy servers had years of bots doing leves which is strictly a gil generator. Can cause weird things like some players looking at materia/housing as cheap (being part of the market wards = win) or hilariously eye stabbing (get into the market wards yo, lol).