Botting must go!!!

[Janhyua]

Then who's going to supply us our shards? You farm 1000 for me each day? I give you 10 Gil each

[StouterTaru]

Then who's going to supply us our shards? You farm 1000 for me each day? I give you 10 Gil each

My retainers take care of my shard needs, 1000 is nothing

[RegnumMagik]

My retainers take care of my shard needs, 1000 is nothing

I think a much more realistic answer is 2.1K every few hours if you're actually going for mastercraft.

[Basch1990]

See now if we can get them to start working on a program now to stop it we would be fine.... personally I don't think they really are trying since they continue to get subs from the bots

[coldreactive]

See now if we can get them to start working on a program now to stop it we would be fine.... personally I don't think they really are trying since they continue to get subs from the bots

If you've seen some older free to plays though... they use XTrap, GameGuard, nProtect... and none of them work. In fact, Mabinogi has GameGuard and they have this weird in-game captcha bomb item you can use on a bot if you see one, but they bypass both the GameGuard and captcha. Angels Online had an in-game captcha system too for a while, but removed it after they found out bots were still bypassing it.

So, it's hard to make anti-bot systems. Some games have less bots due to the way they allow real money trading as a part of the game's features (IE: Guild Wars 2 and Perfect World.) But, as FFXIV is a pay to play, this won't cut it. What they could do as well, is add a dot wherever there isn't solid land or anywhere that's outside normal hitboxes... this would make it so that bots that are underground would suffer. (And make it so DOTs actually cancel interactions.)

[Basch1990]

So, it's hard to make anti-bot systems. Some games have less bots due to the way they allow real money trading as a part of the game's features (IE: Guild Wars 2 and Perfect World.) But, as FFXIV is a pay to play, this won't cut it. What they could do as well, is add a dot wherever there isn't solid land or anywhere that's outside normal hitboxes... this would make it so that bots that are underground would suffer.

Yes but WoW has something that actually does help.... as I mentioned it's called The Warden.... I do what it is since I don't bot but I'm sure they can figure it out but they just continue to rely on the reports which in a way they are set in an inconvenient way.... I mean hell put in an easier report system or make an actual afk timer... 30 mins with set to back and you get booted

[coldreactive]

Yes but WoW has something that actually does help.... as I mentioned it's called The Warden.... I do what it is since I don't bot but I'm sure they can figure it out but they just continue to rely on the reports which in a way they are set in an inconvenient way.... I mean hell put in an easier report system or make an actual afk timer... 30 mins with set to back and you get booted

They could first set the AFK timer to boot at 12 hours, if they think that it might cause problems for people. (Only boots people with "AFK" Status.) To test the waters. If they feel it needs to be shorter, they can then try 8 hours, 5 hours, etc.

[Hyunckel]

If you've seen some older free to plays though... they use XTrap, GameGuard, nProtect... and none of them work. In fact, Mabinogi has GameGuard and they have this weird in-game captcha bomb item you can use on a bot if you see one, but they bypass both the GameGuard and captcha. Angels Online had an in-game captcha system too for a while, but removed it after they found out bots were still bypassing it.

So, it's hard to make anti-bot systems. Some games have less bots due to the way they allow real money trading as a part of the game's features (IE: Guild Wars 2 and Perfect World.)

How can they bypass Captcha? o_O

I can confirm never seeing any gold sellers in GW2, well I only played to lv15 but I spent some time in the capital

Whereas in WoW, aside the usual anal "jokes", carry run sellers (same as in FF14) and guild recruitment, you also have gold sellers in trade chat. Of course those also bot, hack accounts and whatnot. It's just less blatant since the world is so huge and there are many players.
Oh, and Alterac Valley & Isle of Conquest are FILLED BY BOTS on Horde side (100% lose rate, 100% free win guaranteed for Alliance there) whereas Alliance has teams of bots in Silver Shard Mines & another BG I forgot, didn't play since after WoD's fiasco launch and dissapointed new features (or lack of).

FF14 is really not that bad. I'm pretty sure SWTOR also had gold sellers, since after the free to play change.

In FF14 I don't see any more than one gil seller message per day, max. I used to see more some weeks ago.

I'm on Odin and I'm pretty sure it's the most populated EU Chaos Data Centre.

Housing has some small plots available but M & L plots still cost an arm & a leg, that's why there are gil sellers. Also because of the high demand for materias and alexandrites for Relic. Which are also a huge waste of time and gil sink lol (opinion)

It seems that SE is indeed removing them. I removed all the gil sellers from my Black List and didn't see them again so yeah.

[StouterTaru]

I think a much more realistic answer is 2.1K every few hours if you're actually going for mastercraft.

OK 8 miner/botanist retainers, 60 shards each/40 minutes. If I had stockpiles of the ingredients, I could still get shards fast enough to keep up with making relish.

[314159265358979323846264338327]

People are vastly overestimating how many shards you can bring in via mining, botany, or retainers.

1000 shards takes 10 minutes to farm, plus if you grind them on 50 nodes you can get a piesteskin, toadskin or boarskin map while you are getting them.

That's 1.6 shards on average every 1 second. Even if you use proper cooldowns and chug cordial on cooldown, you won't get anywhere even remotely close to that many.

I think a much more realistic answer is 2.1K every few hours if you're actually going for mastercraft.

This is the closest thing so far. Over the course of a 24 hour period, a single retainer can bring in 2160 shards if you send them out the split second they get back. If you have 4 mining/botany retainers for some reason, that would be 2160 in 6 hours, or 8640 per day. That's a lot of shards, but it means really being on the ball with sending them out, too.