Quote Originally Posted by Risvertasashi View Post
Or.. just don't be one of those people. Might not have been a bot at all.

I know from my own experiences levelling gatherers, righteous bot hunters can definitely be one of the worse scourges on eorzea. Not going to shed any tears if they get actioned for harassment, they deserve it every bit.
It's kind of pointless to even try to disrupt them as they mostly have fail-safes enabled that will ensure their scripts start working properly the moment they're left alone.

Some people really don't have any idea how to properly identify bots and might just use faulty methods such as "Selling too much stuff on the marketboard" as a reason to be suspicious of somebody.



They do have very obvious, almost unmistakable tells that can be noticed once you become aware of them, though, and they're mostly related to their movement patterns. The things I look for are:

-How they behave after gathering from a node. In flight-enabled zones, they always jump in place, then abruptly veer towards their next destination the moment they take flight (Even if it's directly behind them), which both looks unnatural and would be clunky/impractical for an actual player to imitate, let alone constantly due to the camera shenanigans that would be involved.

-Jerky "Point A to point B" style movement reminiscent of how one would move in a point and click game. More noticeable in ARR areas, but also applicable in HW/SB areas if they don't move directly to the node before dismounting.

-Inability to path to unspoiled nodes in an efficient manner. Since they can't "see" nodes until they actually register in the game's memory via proximity, they'll path to a central point between all of the possible spawn points for a node then move to it from there, even if means going around or straight past the node in question.

-Repetition. If you feel any doubts still after noticing any of the previous red flags, just take note of whether you see them doing the same weird things over and over again or not while you're gathering.