Over 500 bots on Balmung. Please let us click report!

[Galdous]

This is getting so tedious beyond belief reporting people who bot. If its this bad on Balmung imagine the servers that can create new people at will. If you do a search of archers and thaums 1-60 at 10 level intervals I counted over 500 before I stopped. All named QWRQWR qwerqe or some variation of nonsense. If you do not have the man power to act fast enough to ban these mass accounts then perhaps creation of so many new characters needs to be altered or something. It is just getting out of hand after so many years.

[Lukha]

I. Um. What? They added this in last patch. Right-click the character's name and select 'report RMT'.

Adamantoise barely has any spammers these days. It's glorious.

[Heliantheae]

I. Um. What? They added this in last patch. Right-click the character's name and select 'report RMT'.

Adamantoise barely has any spammers these days. It's glorious.

It doesn't sound like RMT but botting for mats.

[HaelseMikiro]

I'm sure SE is working on this. The last 2 notices for bans (Oct 27th @ 14567 and Nov 4th @ 19980) have been the 2 largest weekly bans since the launch of 2.0.
Either SE has stepped up their ban efforts in the last couple weeks, the bots are out in stronger force than ever before, or a combination of the two. Either way the ban hammer is swinging more right now then it ever has.

Since the launch of 2.0, 129750 accounts have been banned for advertising alone, and the number for actual botting is....I haven't had the motivation to sum that up, but it's bigger ><

[Atoli]

If you're really bothered by bots that don't even bother you, something's wrong.

You do realize that botting severely influences the player market and therefore DOES bother everyone in a way?

I'm sure SE is working on this. The last 2 notices for bans (Oct 27th @ 14567 and Nov 4th @ 19980) have been the 2 largest weekly bans since the launch of 2.0.

Pretty sure the main reason for that is the introduction of the RMT-report by right-click. Since before, only very few people reported RMT spam and now it gets reported to SE a lot more since it became so easy

[Rita1989]

RMT on balmung havent send tells/spam advertisments since heavensward at least, to valuable for them to waste their bots on that

[reiichi]

RE: Bots on Balmung

...most of them are multibox farmers.

The right-click to report is purely for RMT Spammers/chat-based RMT. Nothing we can do about the hoards of them that usually move in unison in the cities or kill every single mob around the Sultantree. Spent a day once just reporting them. They spawned in Ul'dah faster than I could report. Even with a macro that'd just grab their names for easier reporting. ( /e <t> ). And that was reporting batches of about 15-30.

They're annoying, and they're likely contributing to how full the server is, but thank god they're quiet. Probably not worth the transfer cost to get in to spam.

[UltimateAoe2]

If you're really bothered by bots that don't even bother you, something's wrong.

[SwdVengeance]

If you're really bothered by bots that don't even bother you, something's wrong.

This is one of those kind of comments that really gets under my skin. I don't like to draw assumptions, but I take it if you saw a little old lady getting her pursed mugged, you just whistle and keep on walking since it's none of your business? Wasn't your purse. As Atoli said, Bots like this exponentially inflate the markets but more importantly, almost always are the gil funnels that fuel the RMT market. That in and of itself leads to more RMT spam bots bothering people. I don't think anyone really likes to live in a high crime neighborhood, by intentionally ignoring the fact it exists just because you perceive it hasn't affected you only furthers the problem itself.

[LineageRazor]

This is one of those kind of comments that really gets under my skin. I don't like to draw assumptions, but I take it if you saw a little old lady getting her pursed mugged, you just whistle and keep on walking since it's none of your business? Wasn't your purse. As Atoli said, Bots like this exponentially inflate the markets but more importantly, almost always are the gil funnels that fuel the RMT market. That in and of itself leads to more RMT spam bots bothering people. I don't think anyone really likes to live in a high crime neighborhood, by intentionally ignoring the fact it exists just because you perceive it hasn't affected you only furthers the problem itself.

While it is true that these bots are far from harmless, they are also, practically speaking, unfightable. These low level bots can be mass produced at a rate that FAR exceeds SE's ability to fight them. Keep in mind, that SE is vastly outnumbered in this regard; the total amount of manpower and resources fielded by all the various RMT companies out there vastly outnumbers anything SE could possibly hope to bring to bear.

So, SE does not bother with these mass produced bots, and they SHOULDN'T. Instead, their focus is on seeing where the money flows to - and then destroying that. This hurts RMT much more than sweeping up level one bots does, and is something they actually have a prayer of stopping.

So, when you see hordes of bots teleporting here and there in Thanalan, just ignore them. They aren't going away, and there's no methods currently existent that could stop them. Just take comfort in the fact that SE IS doing something about RMT in general, even if you never see the gil-laden mules that actually get the banstick.