Botting is getting worse.

[Vlady]

To be fair, without them the economy would likely crash for a good bit as no one in their right mind would sit and grind thousands of shards/crystals/clusters when that time can be invested elsewhere but i digress

No. People would play the game the way it was meant to be played and we would not have materia costing 5 million gil from inflation. Prices would actually be more reasonable because less gil would be on the server and prices go down then.

[Iagainsti]

No. People would play the game the way it was meant to be played and we would not have materia costing 5 million gil from inflation. Prices would actually be more reasonable because less gil would be on the server and prices go down then.

Actually Basic economics: More of an item in stock decreases the price. They may make whatever grand number you speculated without a confirmed source, but truth be told, bots farm and sell stuff I really don't want to bother getting myself, like carbonized matter(insert any grade). In terms of materia, the price drops because any rmt worth his grain will under cut an actual player, again decreasing the value of the item. The real problem stems from the playerbase who will buy the gil, and that is what inflates prices on goods and adds the influx of gil to any server. Keep in mind the bot(s) are in the business of selling the items cheaply to get the gil fast to sell for real currency; it's the playerbase that buys said gil who will in turn not care to pay 25-30 million for a Coffin Lid(e.g) It does defy the ToS and the servers would be better off without them, but your ire is deflected on the wrong party.

I agree OP, and it's the people who keep buying from Gil Sellers that are equally as guilty for ruining the gaming experience for us

[Galdous]

Actually Basic economics: More of an item in stock decreases the price. They may make whatever grand number you speculated without a confirmed source, but truth be told, bots farm and sell stuff I really don't want to bother getting myself, like carbonized matter(insert any grade). In terms of materia, the price drops because any rmt worth his grain will under cut an actual player, again decreasing the value of the item. The real problem stems from the playerbase who will buy the gil, and that is what inflates prices on goods and adds the influx of gil to any server. Keep in mind the bot(s) are in the business of selling the items cheaply to get the gil fast to sell for real currency; it's the playerbase that buys said gil who will in turn not care to pay 25-30 million for a Coffin Lid(e.g) It does defy the ToS and the servers would be better off without them, but your ire is deflected on the wrong party.

There are as many casual botters now as RMT botters. Both are bad for business on the legit player side of things and just because he is using the casual side of botting for his ire it does not denigrate the argument. When people who bot and are known botters on one of the largest servers possess multiple houses it still affects the normal player. The person might not have been able to afford said houses if they were forced to play the way legit players are. It is this overwhelming advantage that ruins the MMO market the same as first person shooter market dealing with aim bots and teleport hacks.

And chances are the rmt botters are using in house systems so possibly altering how commands in the client ids are handled may help break the mold of bots. Api based programs that inject directives into the dll files can be broken but would require a massive rewrite of the client and possibly encrypted commands which would be an arm and leg to costs..

[Iagainsti]

snip..

Sorry, I'm having hard time following what you said and why I was quoted. For one, I don't understand what housing has to do with my points, nor do I understand the relevance of your second paragraph. I am by no way a casual botter, yet I was able to afford to pay well over 40% of the cost of our FC house and buy a Large Plot when personal housing dropped the "legit"(this needs defining) way, and subsequently destroy it with no resentment when I saw other young FCs hurting for a house that I never used anyway, besides just wanting from the hype. So besides it defying the ToS, I do not see why a casual botter impacts the community if he is not reselling the gil for real currency.

[Gunspec]

Actually Basic economics: More of an item in stock decreases the price.

Also basic economics, more money entering an economy leads to inflation and higher prices.



Jade sells for 12 gil, making it one of the most expensive items for a miner to farm. 25 Billion gil entered the economy via just this one botting exploit. And if you don't think this powerpoint slide is evidence of botting, consider that if this game had 10 million players it would require each player to farm an average of 215 Jade each for this statistic to make sense, and 645 maple logs as well. Raw gemstones should never exist in quantities higher than basic ore and metals.

[Caitlinzulu]

Its not that hard to grind out 1000 shards, it takes a retainer 16 ventures, thats all. Getting crystals is even easier, with an ephemeral node can give you up to 200-300. I have got, without huge effort, 9k fire and earth crystals. The same nodes can also give clusters at a slightly slower rate.
So we dont need bots to get our shards/crystals/clusters.

[Welsper59]

Botting in SE games rarely ever goes punished, just because of the fact that it's more of a hassle than necessary. Bad behavior, outside of RL violations such as threats, is often swept under the rug in these games. Win-trading, for example, is practically encouraged here in XIV. Short of it breaking the game in someway (like the old marketboard one), hacks are also not a big concern of theirs and will often go unpunished, despite any feeble attempts to report it. Maybe the GM/STF are just being lazy due to how tedious and (often) impossible it is to track bots/hack attempts on what's likely a system that was not designed to do so... maybe they're being told to not really bother... who knows. Either way, people can and will almost always get away with cheating in SE titles, just because of how they poorly deal with in-game problems.

To be fair, without them the economy would likely crash for a good bit as no one in their right mind would sit and grind thousands of shards/crystals/clusters when that time can be invested elsewhere but i digress

That's actually where the devs would have to change things up, similar to how they did for crystals and clusters. RMT have long been the suppliers of very cheap shards across every single server (though not as rampant now, as it was before). As a result of that, the devs never really bothered to change how you obtain them since it is impossible to be rid of RMT presence in a game like this. It's kind of ridiculous that, given how necessary shards are/were for housing stuff, there's no efficient way to obtain them in a timely manner that can be considered worthwhile for their use.

Its not that hard to grind out 1000 shards, it takes a retainer 16 ventures, thats all. Getting crystals is even easier, with an ephemeral node can give you up to 200-300. I have got, without huge effort, 9k fire and earth crystals. The same nodes can also give clusters at a slightly slower rate.
So we dont need bots to get our shards/crystals/clusters.

Remember though that shards are used at ~10x the rate of crystals and clusters per synth. While that 1000 shards might sound like a lot, the length that it'll take you ends much shorter than the others tiers.

[Imsyu]

Its not that hard to grind out 1000 shards, it takes a retainer 16 ventures, thats all. Getting crystals is even easier, with an ephemeral node can give you up to 200-300. I have got, without huge effort, 9k fire and earth crystals. The same nodes can also give clusters at a slightly slower rate.
So we dont need bots to get our shards/crystals/clusters.

1000 shards would last me 15minutes, same for crystals and clusters lol unless they make it so you can obtain x10 like someone said then yeah thats not a practical way for crafters especially to obtain shards/crystals/clusters if they use x10 that a hour sometimes more then that a day

[Zeonx]

1000 shards would last me 15minutes, same for crystals and clusters lol unless they make it so you can obtain x10 like someone said then yeah thats not a practical way for crafters especially to obtain shards/crystals/clusters if they use x10 that a hour sometimes more then that a day

I mine crystals but cannot sit there for 1000 of them, I get extremely bored and mind begins to go numb, highest I get is like 300 or 500 before I have had enough.

Then you have people who mine up 9000+ crystals all down the board and I say no damn way they didn't do this legit, I do understand there are treasure maps that drop crystals and maybe they do that over time but then you check next day and they have same amount the next day then I say to myself time to find another source of farming GiL or undercut them.

[AsteriaStarfall]

I mine crystals but cannot sit there for 1000 of them, I get extremely bored and mind begins to go numb, highest I get is like 300 or 500 before I have had enough.

Then you have people who mine up 9000+ crystals all down the board and I say no damn way they didn't do this legit, I do understand there are treasure maps that drop crystals and maybe they do that over time but then you check next day and they have same amount the next day then I say to myself time to find another source of farming GiL or undercut them.

There is another better way. Go to an atherial node and mine it. Reduce it and depending on quality youll receive a nice chunk of crystals or clusters. Just tag a single node from the pair of nodes on opposite sides of the atherial and go right back and collect again. 15 minutes netted me about 800 fire crystals. I think it was fire...could have been water. Not sure now which one it was but you get the idea.