Eorzea census: window into RMT botting practices

[Gunspec]

I saw this during the live letter stream, but now the data is on the lodestone homepage. Does anyone else find the "Top 15 items in existence" amusing? Maple logs, Jade, and Raw heliodor are the top three items, with 10 times the number farmed than the next most popular item.

Jade is used to create jadeite, which is used in less than a dozen recipes pre-3.0, and only a handful of ilevel 115 jewelry pieces. While practically useless for the general community, compared to other gathering materials, such as iron ore (incidentally not an item on the list), jade sells for 12 gil to vendors. That is over 25.8 billion gil farmed from Jade.

Now consider where Jade is located. Unlike most mining nodes, where the 4 gathering nodes are split on opposite sides of a valley wall, all of the Jade mining nodes are on the same side of the same wall. A botter who slips behind the wall could theoretically run a botting script to walk and farm out of sight, without the fear of being reported by human players. No teleportation hack would be required, so it would not risk detection as easily as other botters.

Now, I knew almost nothing of RMT farming practices before seeing this Census data. But from just a casual glance at the data, I can immediately sense that something is amiss. Yet with this data constantly available to them, they STILL can't figure out how to hurt the RMT? And furthermore, they dress up the data as a light hearted powerpoint document and share it with us to celebrate the anniversary.

I guess what I want to say is... when they find data on player behavior like this, I expect them to take action rather than presenting it to us like nothing is wrong.