Bots are a serious issue that needs to be fixed ASAP.

[Pintsized]

Bots artificially inflate the supply and therefore cause prices to go down, hurting actual gatherers who gather with time and sweat.

This needs to be fixed. It's hurting the gatherer economy badly right now. It's why omnigatherer isn't really profitable while omnicrafters make millions. The dev team is willing to go so far as to ban chat in the Feast after the toxicity so it shows they have the capacity to stop botting too especially when more people are complaining about botting than with PvP.

Um .. XIV 1.0 had bots since early on, XIV 2.0 had bots on release day.

This game has always had bots, I've given up hoping SE will ever do anything about it, all they so is ban-waves then the next week there are literally SCORES of new ones power-leveling, you can see them leveling in the Black Shroud on Mondays regularly and by Friday they're 50+: you can see them using Search, there are usually two set of them, one with keyboard-mashed names the others with two names of 4/5 characters where you'll immediately see a pattern to how they've been generated.

One wave I reported over 30, three weeks later the 10 I checked were still here, level 50+ so I gave up reporting since there is no easy way to report bots you can only see a nameplate of that can't be targeted.

I twice reported the Free Companies they form, often with 24/24 active members, those FCs still existed 2 months later so I gave up reporting them.