Square-Enix, please, do something about the bots

[DeaconMoore]

Also may I ask to people who play other MMOs: How do they get rid of them? Speaking of both RMT and Gatherer Bots from actual active people.

They don't. It's a never ending dance. Bot programmer makes a bot and sells it. Game developers study said bot, determine how to detect it, then ban them. Bot programmers see how they are being detected and make a new bot that won't be and sell it. And so on.

[Shouko]

Multiple posts over the years have shown SE does not react as if this is a threat to the integrity of the game. While allowing it to grow before getting around to removing it. Here is a little experiment I tried way back in 2.X days. Some of the shard sellers were bots they could not humanly possible provide the amount they had on the AH. So I removed all the wind shards I had onto a retainer. Bought from a "Supposed" bot, put those new shards onto a different retainer and watched the ban waves. Eventually they got removed. The shards I had bought from them did not. So how many billions of shards do you think they put into the game before a timely response happened?

P2P models rarely act on bots as they're making them money via subs. I dealt with that in WoW for years, they never did anything back then except for spamming which actually hurt the players more than the bots.

[KageTokage]

It feels like the only bots they regularly take action against are those warp-hacking gil farmers who tend to show up in droves, only to mysteriously vanish some days later and the expendable RMT spammers who are replaced in a matter of minutes.

The more low-key bots that are being used for personal income seem like they're never going to be dealt with, even though they do often impact the game in a negative way on a small scale by giving individual players too much control over the market as well as an excess of income that is often used to horde houses just because.

[Iscah]

The most annoying thing about bots for me is the ones that happen to be "playing" the MSQ at the same area where you are, and interrupt a non-cutscene story piece by popping up on top of the NPC you are trying to having a conversation with. It feels.... intrusive? Like someone pushed in front of you in a line and doesn't care. And just messes with my enjoyment of the scene.

There's the quick-report option for RMT, but not for other kinds of issues, so there's no easy way to report them if you encounter them. Or can I report them under that because they're creating gil for the RMT?

[Kleeya]

There is quite a lot of them on Northen Thanalan right now, teleporting like mad from mob to mob and killing them. I sure hope this doesn't become like what i have seen on some other games, where completing some quests was nearly impossible because the required mobs were all stolen so fast by whole swarms of bots that a human player couldn't hope to compete with them.

Also may I ask to people who play other MMOs: How do they get rid of them? Speaking of both RMT and Gatherer Bots from actual active people.

The only efficient way i have seen to achieve that is by having a game so dead and deserted by players that the people behind RMT and bots wouldn't even bother with it, because there is no money to gain at all from a non-existent playerbase

[tymora]

There was a game...Tera? which made a minor tweak to the UI and exposed a good number of bots (basically making them click on the wrong UI repeatedly).
Ban-hammered them all.

And Balmung in a way is fairly free from bots since once gone, they usually don't come back due to server lock down.