RMT companies are not the only botters but seems SE doesnt care about casual cheating

[Galdous]

There is this one person I know who has been a long term botter and use to be in the same free company as I was when we raided together last year. He use to brag about being able to get all of his jobs/professions to 50 while people waste their time playing the game the hard way. He even would brag on team speak about getting 7 atmas and the light grinding out of the way.

He uses a bot that lets him have rotation perfect game play and just manually takes over parts that require burst phases or timed phases on raids and oddly the leaders would let him get away with it because he helped bot out half the payment required for the company's mansion. Myself and several others reported him during the times he would bot (because you could trade with him and cause him to die 30 minutes straight and watch him get stuck in rocks) but this has been going on since day 2 of a realm reborn.

SE knows he bots and has been reported by itleast 25 people over last year and half but if SE does not care about the non RMT cheaters then what recourse of action do we have. We have acknowledgement of him botting in teamspeak when he use to brag until he found out that several of us reported it. You can literally catch him from 8 pm server time til almost noon the next morning botting mining/bot/fishing but yet nothing has ever happened to him.
Are we to just grow so numb to cheaters that it should not matter anymore if cheating goes on in this game as long as SE gets their monthly paycheck from them?

[Risvertasashi]

It might just be that they don't have the evidence to take action. Personally, I like that SE asks questions before shooting.

If he brags about botting... report that, along with the timestamp on those messages. Him admitting it should be pretty damning.

[Galdous]

He admitted it outside of the game. But there is evidence because we would report him as he botted afk for several hours a night. They would respond to me in a mail within 2 hours before so they have ample time to catch him. This is not even shooting gun off early its literally watching someone robbed an entire neighborhood and thinking you need more evidence. I am not sure how much more evidence you need before taking action.

[Mahri]

There's a fair point to be made regarding the frustration cheating causes.

But saying "<x game company> doesn't care" universally fails to impress. Be constructive.

[Ophie-Mio]

Unfortunately, because he only admitted it outside of game, there's no evidence within the game where the GMs hold jurisdiction. He would also have to be very explicit about his botting ways for the GMs to take action since anything less tends to be looked at as "not enough evidence."

As for botting after you've reported him...
The issue with that is timing and where he's physically at. He's obviously very intelligent and been doing it a while and obviously GMs have looked into him if you've reported him. They would look just out of principle after a report had been filed.

Now, you said that they responded to you within 2 hrs... Well, unless he's gone all the time from his chair, then whenever a GM messaged him to check to see if he was there or really botting, he could have just turned around and acted like things were normal. Even if they were afk at the start, they could have come back within 2 hrs. I knew some people that when they botted on FFXI, they would just sit in the same chair and watch a movie and look at their characters every so often to make sure that everything was okay.
GMs would send him messages and he would always be able to respond, hence, no action was ever taken against him.

[KaedrianLiang]

i feel you op, while i was doing WHM Nexus, there was this player that was auto-queing trials and pretty much afk without moving from the entrance position. Nothing we could do but let it die. It was doing this for weeks on end, then one time we were calling it out and it responded, so a bot being watched while he worked/at school irl, when he respond he admitted to being a bot and claimed it had 100mil gil as if that makes him better than everyone else in the trial working towards their zodiac weapon.

Forgot it's name but i haven't seen or heard of it since.

As for SE's banning method, they regularly ban obvious more intrusive botting. Like those quartets of blm bots im sure youve seen floating around, they come and go with every announced mass banning. When it comes to individual players, they wait for them to accumulate a massive amount of wealth then they suspend (or ban, depending on severity), then they take everything from them, highly valued items and empty their gil.

Thats how it was in XI. It encourages players to never do it again if they slam them hard by taking away hundreds of hours of accumulated wealth.

Just observe and report and know that you are the better player no matter what they possess.

[Catwho]

Unless he outright states he's using a bot, the external evidence can't be used against him. SE does have some minor detection algorithms in place but the more sophisticated bots can fool them, as the OP is describing.

[synesthetic]

I have yet to see a cheater banned, with or without undisputable evidence.
Sure you can say you can't prove 100% that someone is botting and can't do anything unless they admit to it, but I've reported a guy with a video clearly showing him teleport-hacking even and nothing happens to him. (And no, he wasn't lagging. You don't "lag" to safety repeatedly in "Any Way the Wind Blows".)

[Elusana_Celah]

Hope he doesn't look at the forums here cuz he'll see you and some others have been trying to report him and likely up his game on trying not to get caught :P

[Ophie-Mio]

I have yet to see a cheater banned, with or without undisputable evidence.
Sure you can say you can't prove 100% that someone is botting and can't do anything unless they admit to it, but I've reported a guy with a video clearly showing him teleport-hacking even and nothing happens to him. (And no, he wasn't lagging. You don't "lag" to safety repeatedly in "Any Way the Wind Blows".)

Videos aren't evidence as they can be tampered with. A person botting or teleport hacking, unless they openly admit it in chat, can only be banned when the GM themselves witness it.

Issue is with that... GMs arrive too late.