Another ban wave, another disappointment.

[Xeon]

The auto-created RMT spammers and gil farmers are the ones that are difficult to deal with.

There really isn't any excuse for them to be allowing people to get away with blatant botting for gathering/crafting/leveling purposes, though. If those players get banned, they aren't going to come back for a long while if at all, because it takes a ton of time to level DoH/L classes plus progress through the MSQ.

I'm feeling curious as to whether or not they're even investigating the players I report, because they're so obvious that you'd frankly have to be stupid to think they aren't botting.

Naw see thats where you're wrong. Especially with DoH. I can level one up in a few hours from 1 to 70 with minimal crafting.

[KageTokage]

Your random hostility honestly makes you sound like someone who probably supports the existence of bots, (Assuming you don't do it yourself), and you're the one who's coming across as an ass, not me. I'm not a billionaire like special old you, but I sure as heck aren't poor, I do have a house, and I make a decent amount of passive income strictly from desynthing gear and selling materia.

I get really tired of people thinking I'm dumb and immediately assume someone is botting off of one flimsy bit of potential evidence, or that I'm just "jealous" because I'm saying someone who owns a large house is a cheater.

I didn't see just see the empty houses and ridiculous amounts of items being sold by the owners in question and think "Oh, they must be bots". I saw them exhibiting the tell-tale jerky and overly precise movements while I was out gathering, then started tracking them in the player search to see just how much time they spend online and gathering/crafting, and they're generally active 24/7 and almost never offline. It was only much later that I noticed they were using the houses strictly for easy retainer and marketboard access, which irritated me and made me feel especially determined to try to get something done about them. I know who all the richest legit players on my server are, and they don't spend nearly as much time online as these guys do. They thrive off of crafting expensive stuff that requires rarer, unfarmable materials like Gyr Abanian Alchemics, whereas these botters tend to focus on flooding the market with easier crafts that don't require good gear, melds, and/or food (This is partly because they like to convert their craft/gathering gear into grade VI materia as a side source of income).

The difference between a bot and a legit player is like night and day once you've learned to identify the red flags, and I find it really insulting that you're insinuating that I can't tell them apart (I'm pretty sure a bunch of people who regularly stack directly on top of each other in a pile while waiting for nodes in the ARR areas aren't legit.).

[Cakekizyy]

I thi k bots should be allowed as long as not doing anything exploitive like attacking from inside terrain where they can't be hit.

[KageTokage]

They may as well be at this point, considering that there's seemingly no actual damning evidence you can collect against them that would lead to a ban.

It's silly that they'll punish people for talking about illicit activities, but mostly won't punish people for actually doing said illicit activities...

[Tiraelina]

None of these businesses want to actually handle their rampant bots. The latent information gathering just needs to stop being looked at as the only method. They need to hire people to hunt them down and ban them permanently. Letting them run free for months at a time because they think you can just break the software (which will get fixed within hours) just makes the damage they do permanent.

[Shouko]

No way you can know this part. For all you know the player simply has deeper pockets and thus controls the market simply because they know people will buy at their prices. Unless there's some way to track retainer names to their owners that I'm unawares of.

As to the matter of the slow bans. From what they explained before they don't want to simply ban the obvious small fries that show up. They do a lot of investigating and trace work in attempt to find sources. Or at least that's what they've said before.

While not 100% accurate, you can kind of tell the crafter/gatherer types that tend to buy the same stuff over and over and then see a retainer with 3-4 stacks of that item being sold or even when you see a lot of crafted items, look for the name.

[Xeon]

Oh they handle their bot problems. When they have strong enough evidence to do so. What you don't understand, that if they start cutting ties with legit players "because they fit your description as bots," they could potentially be sued. Sorry, but we live in a land where someone assumes the cup of coffee from that chain burger joint isn't hot, spills it on themselves, gets burned, sues, and wins. Not only that, but the angry person decides to hit the servers with a DDoS attack, which screws everybody up.

90% of what you're saying about bots fits me, so you are indirectly calling me a bot. Last time I checked, I wasn't. But if calling me a bot makes you feel any better at the end of the day, then so be it.

[Fourbestintoner]

There is a really obvious bot on Ultros with only blm, miner and botanist at 70 that is gathering ephemeral nodes 24h a day, only stopping to teleport to Limsa to aetherial reduction all their shit, been doing that for months, it's obvious to me that SE just don't care about botters.

[Xeon]

And erratic movements do not constitute a bot. More than likely they, or you, were lagging at those points. Think about it. The in-game NPCs that fight with you. They are bots. That chocobo that sits by your side. He/she is a bot too. The thing is, that with the majority of crafting and gathering actions, is that they can't be interrupted, and don't cause that "jerky" movement you see. Latency and the recent DDoS attacks have much more to do with that. I've seen friends disappear out of sight, even their name, only to return when they engage in battle.. Come to find out that this behavior was caused by a memory leak present with this game on all AMD graphics cards.. I would often see myself disappear only able to see my gear floating about in mid-air. Most everything that you describe as erratic movements can be linked with documented problems with the game or the hardware it runs on.

[Xeon]

Also, take note, that there are many people that play this around the clock because they're disabled and cant work or get out. That's usually not their fault, but the fault of the environment around them, but that's a story for another day. In my time here, I've met more than my fair share of people here.

Also, I'm one of those people who are selling oodles of the lower gear and mats. Sometimes that's easier than making a bunch of top level gear, because, sometimes, it can be a week or more before those are sold, whereas the lower level stuff seems to sell within hours.

Any additional housing will also not help anything. They will all be snapped up within minutes of them going live.