Another ban wave, another disappointment.

[KageTokage]

Let me shed a little bit of light on this, just from my little bit of experience. I used to be a GM for Maplestory for a little while. Most of the time, I would be looking place to place specifically for spam bots. Same with Atlantica. The problem is that these bots have made the users a lot of money, especially with players still doing RMT today. It's nothing to them to get banned - they'll just change one letter or number on a new character and go back to doing it. And it's not just one character - one account could have 8 characters under it. All they need to do is buy a 30-day subscription, grind out trials with a macro, and get stuff. It may not just be that the staffing is an issue, but that these accounts just make new ones. It's not hard to just get under a new IP, make a new account, and go again.

This is true in the case of the RMT spammers and gil farmers, but in the case of the gather/craft bots, they aren't so easily replaced, as they need to get into SB content to make any real profit, and even then, it still takes a long while to level their DoH/L classes.

How are they cornering the market? It's not like a aethersand is limited quantity from the nodes. I'm all for banning bots but cornering the market, really?

I suppose cornering might not be the appropriate term for it, but they've driven the prices on the stuff so low by flooding the market with it that it's not even worth the time investment to farm for selling purposes anymore.

Everdeep aethersands are the only ones that are worth anything, presumably due to the scrip bait and random nature of fishing making them difficult to bot.

Sadly, video/picture evidence cannot be used when making a case, because of the fact that it can be edited. GMs have stated multiple times that they cannot accept anything other than evidence from directly inside the game with regards to any sort of report, be it for cheating/botting, harassment, or anything else reportable/bannable..

Well, then I don't know why the heck they have a field for including a link in your report. I assumed it was for providing extra evidence, but now I have no clue.