Discussion: How Can We Handle Botting Better?

[JackHatchet]

At this point it feels like all one can really hope for is the bot farmers just getting bored of the game and quitting,

Why would they get bored of the only game guaranteed not to ban them? Beginner's first botting MMO with training wheels! Though I could imagine some FFXIV vets switching to other games like WoW or ESO and getting banned within a week and becoming irate that 'this NEVER happens to me in FFXIV! Why I never, how rude!"

[KisaiTenshi]

Why would they get bored of the only game guaranteed not to ban them? Beginner's first botting MMO with training wheels! Though I could imagine some FFXIV vets switching to other games like WoW or ESO and getting banned within a week and becoming irate that 'this NEVER happens to me in FFXIV! Why I never, how rude!"

I'm sure the only reason players still use unauthorized tools on this game is because SE hasn't shown any willingness to delete accounts.

[KageTokage]

I'm sure the only reason players still use unauthorized tools on this game is because SE hasn't shown any willingness to delete accounts.

I think the gil farmers are pretty much the only exception to that rule.

But yeah, bans are so rare that there's little to no scare factor to discourage people from doing it, which is why the number of botters seems to just keep increasing as time goes on. A lot of them likely reason that by the time they actually get caught for the first time they'll have made so much gil that it won't even matter. There was also a story floating around on the PvP forums of some speed-hacking BLM who managed to get through multiple seasons of PvP at the top ranks before they finally banned him, but even when they did, it was only a temporary ban and he was later seen cheating again both in and out of PvP.

They really should have a zero tolerance policy for players who show evidence of long term cheating, though before that they need to start banning people with some semblance of frequency/reliability because I see about as many bots on my server alone as the total being banned across the entire game each week.

[Fhaerron]

I'm sure the only reason players still use unauthorized tools on this game is because SE hasn't shown any willingness to delete accounts.

They would loose to many players with that.


A large chunk of the RP community uses mods to have different hair styles, get different body textures or to go full naked.
A large chunk of the raider community uses DPS meters and other toolkit that shows boss HP in detail and whatnot.


Funny thing was when ultimate came out when SE was linking the top progression runs and all those people had DPS meters in their streams. And when SE congratulated the world first, those where also 8 people with DPS meters in their screen.


I once asked 'Why does SE even make a ToS when they are not going to enforce the rules?' on a different thread and somebody then actually replied to me with:

Because if they actually had 14 million players like they brag about, they could actually enforce them. But when you tell the media 14m and only have maybe 500k you need to hold onto them as hard as you can to give the illusion your numbers are real.

The more the longer I do kind of agree with that post.