Bots

[KageTokage]

Japan does have bots, but it's limited to the occasional gathering/leveling bot, not the painfully obvious, mass-produced warp hacking bots you tend to see in droves on the western servers. It wouldn't surprise me if they have stricter laws in place that prevent things like RMT from thriving over there.

They seriously need to step it up for both the gil farming bots and the personal gather/craft/leveling bots, in any case. The former should not be allowed to persist for months on end despite reports with how easily detectable their behavior should be, and the number of the latter type on Cactaur just continues to swell as time goes on.

Sadly, from a business standpoint, the bots are almost strictly beneficial to SE, as people are oft willing to pay for extra accounts to bot with (I can think of at least three people on my server who own one or more alt accounts for botting), plus all of those bots being created allows them to make those claims about the game having 10 million players when in all likely hood only a fourth or so of those accounts belong to actual players.

Separate server for free trial accounts... once you pay you can access the real servers... as of now most bots are free trial so they don't worry about bans... new people can still try it out, bots can't sell gil to free trials... those pay account botters then can become a real focus

This wouldn't actually fix anything as all of the gil-farming bots are paid accounts, due to needing to be able to get level 50 to reach the best spot for gil farming. Whether they're resorting to credit card fraud or simply stealing accounts to produce that many paid bots is what I'm curious about.

They need to prevent them from hacking in the first place or at least implement countermeasures against the methods they use, such as making enemies reset if they're being attacked from locations they're unable to path to (The bots need to float out of bounds to kill anything as their standard party composition is three BLMs and one WHM).