Another ban wave, another disappointment.

[Kyuuen]

You can when you see them selling several dozen stacks of 99 consumables with their name on it, coupled with the fact that whenever they aren't gathering, they're sitting in/outside their houses and crafting for hours on end.

I know some people are devoted to making money and all, but these guys are online and active 24/7. Even the richest legit (?) players on my server don't spend more then a few hours crafting daily.

Hence why I mentioned why they're slow with their bans. They're trying to decipher who is legit and who is not. Being online constantly isn't a rule breaking offense, just because player A is on for 18 hours a day doesn't make them a farmer/seller. Controlling the market certainly, but there's no rules against that.

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.

Which shows that it may be a player attempting to control the market, which isn't illegal. If we follow that logic a lot of people are gil farmers/sellers. As mentioned in my reply, they're slow in their bans due to an extensive investigation in trying to find sources and actual farmers/sellers.

[Shouko]

Hence why I mentioned why they're slow with their bans. They're trying to decipher who is legit and who is not. Being online constantly isn't a rule breaking offense, just because player A is on for 18 hours a day doesn't make them a farmer/seller. Controlling the market certainly, but there's no rules against that.



Which shows that it may be a player attempting to control the market, which isn't illegal. If we follow that logic a lot of people are gil farmers/sellers. As mentioned in my reply, they're slow in their bans due to an extensive investigation in trying to find sources and actual farmers/sellers.

I never claimed they were bots, I'm saying that you can find out to a small degree which retainers belong to which retainers.

[KageTokage]

they're slow in their bans due to an extensive investigation in trying to find sources and actual farmers/sellers.

It's impossible to know if they're even investigating the reported players because of their "no replies" policy. If they send me a message saying that the players in question weren't found to be cheating, then I'd just drop it and not even bother anymore, because it would tell me that they're just inept to get rid of them.

If Aethersands\Consumables are expensive on your server, gather\craft your own. Am I missing something as to why you can't do that? Do they have legions of bots that open up trade windows with you when you try to hit ephemeral nodes or something?

It's not that they're expensive, it's the opposite.

I used to be able to actually make a reasonable amount of money off of selling any type of aethersand, but the sheer number of bots farming them now drove the prices into the dirt to the point where it's not even worth the effort now and other non-bottable sources of income like selling materia from hunts are more viable for the time investment. They could care less about how little they're selling stuff for when they have an infinite amount of time to invest into farming it.

Dismissive attitudes are also largely why nothing is ever actually going to be done about the botting. I've tried to convince other gatherers/crafters to report the major offenders on my server, but most of them simply don't care and just choose to avoid the markets they're involved in instead. Which annoys me, because we shouldn't be allowing cheaters to influence how we choose to play.

[Shouko]

Dismissive attitudes are also largely why nothing is ever actually going to be done about the botting. I've tried to convince other gatherers/crafters to report the major offenders on my server, but most of them simply don't care and just choose to avoid the markets they're involved in instead. Which annoys me, because we shouldn't be allowing cheaters to influence how we choose to play.

The reason why bots continue to exist is because people continue to buy gil for various reasons, if you kill the reason aka kill off buying gil then it becomes a dead market for them, that's literally the only reason they continue to farm 24/7 for it. Reporting them won't make a world of difference, banning them does little to no good, there's not much else you can do. For every one bot you ban 10 more are right there willing to take it's place. Also they pay a sub so they're not going to be quick to ban a sub when they can earn money off it.

[Xeon]

Alright well, today is the last day that I spend posting on this subject, because nothing you say will be considered.

You think everything you can't explain is a bot, just like you think anybody from SE actually checks this forum... Which for those who don't know, they don't.

[Xeon]

To the guy who says they are seeing a bot on 24/7, never going idle, hitting the same nodes, taking the same path, I guess that means you're on 24/7, never idle, and are always going in the exact path following this bot, which, by your own definition, makes you a bot. Ima be honest. If I see you stalking me like that and IDK you, and I see the term "bot" in my chat window, Ima report you for harassment, contact a GM, and probably have you banned as a result. I may, or may not be on your world. I'm a legacy player, and with all other legacy players, I get 8. Count em, 8 characters per world. Not per data center, but per world. Some of us legacy players use them for nothing but gathering and storage, because our 2 or more retainers AND our personal storage is maxed out, for both storing and selling. Some of them have gibberish names, because, really, they're not for interaction with any other person.

[Xeon]

there comes a point where everything is leveled, and everything worthwhile has been completed with the game, and the only thing to do is to hit those nodes that come available and make money until the next patch comes out, so when we are online, whether it be for 2 or 24 hours, we're hitting the same nodes over and over again. I, for one, work out a system for nodes. When I mass gather, I'm always hitting them in the same order that they pop. I'm always teleporting to the same spot, and am always taking the shortest path between that spot and the nodes, and yes, that means taking the same path virtually everytime, so because of this and other reasons, you're obviously calling me a bot, and you've suggested that for no reason, even with no concrete proof of such. OP has been a part of this game for what? Not even a year? And you think this is enough for you to make a judgement call over what is going on here? More of a right than a legacy player that's been here since the start?

[Sarteck]

Some of us legacy players use them for nothing but gathering and storage, because our 2 or more retainers AND our personal storage is maxed out, for both storing and selling. Some of them have gibberish names, because, really, they're not for interaction with any other person.

So, uh..... What exactly do you do with the stuff you are gathering/storing on those characters, if they're not for interacting with others?

[Xeon]

Your OPINION is that I'm a bot.
Your OPINION is that I support bots.

You're wrong on both assumptions. So, what's next?
Your OPINION is that this response is an auto-generated bot response?

How the HELL do you expect me to consider any of the points that you've made, still a noob in this game, when you consider nothing I say? I, having been here BEFORE the start of ARR? Literally, and I mean that strongly, 90% of the bots have been removed, and that figure is probably lower than the actual amount of them that are in service. If you hate bots now, then you'd really have hated them in FFXIV 1.0 and the early days of ARR, when there were literally 40-50 bots standing around the nodes, and I mean that! I do not believe that all those bots were "just the top tier," or "only RMT accounts" either.

[Xeon]

There are no bots that can make you walk through walls or disappear. This happens because of hardware problems with all AMD hardware. PS4 is not immune to this because it uses the same hardware from the same manufacturer of computer graphics cards. I know this because I used to run this hardware, and it did the very thing that you're describing. Lag is also very guilty of this too, because your PC or PS4 isn't receiving correct data from the server. Reporting of player position is handled server side, not so much client side. If that weren't the case, everybody would be doing it. If bots were the cause of these issues, then you'd see everybody flying out of zone boundaries, and it doesn't happen. There isn't a bot around that can influence the operations on server side. Just google search this crap. It's all out there.