Teleporting Group of Bots

[SaitoHikari]

Only way to counteract bots is to make everything in the game untradeable, and having a queue system where you were put into parties at random and couldn't do anything in a premade group. But then you have a terrible game.

They used to be very visible at the start of the game, including spamming the /shout chat so it was basically unusable. Now bots tend to only spam certain gil selling sites around main hubs, and they warp around underground to do MSQ stuff, always as blm lalafell

They used to be able to spam /tells as well. It was so bad that I knew plenty of PC players that actually downloaded a third party program known as Guildwork to completely block tells if they contained certain keywords or phrases set by the player. Shortly before Stormblood release, the SE staff disabled the ability for trial accounts to send /tells, which appears to have completely destroyed that intrusive advertising method. The creator of Guildwork hasn't updated the program since (and it no longer works for FF14 as far as I know), likely because the primary function is no longer needed.

I think that recently, the devs might have disabled their ability to send messages in /say as well, judging from the amount of players in Brayflox and below dungeons who don't type back when others ask them questions/try to give them advice regarding their skill usage, but the players are clearly behaving/gesturing as if they are listening. I haven't actually seen any bots advertising /say messages in Limsa as of late, unless they stopped advertising in Sargatanas entirely. These days, I only ever see adverts from trolls/moles in novice network inviting advert bots in before said bots are swiftly booted out.