Discussion: How Can We Handle Botting Better?

[KageTokage]

Don't forget the dumb-as-dirt PvP bots and the fact that gil farmers can ruin someone's first time with the eight player ARR trials/dungeons if they get queued with real players.

A friend of mine said the gil farmers actually managed to break a Cape Westwind instance by killing Rhitatyn while they were still stuck in the entry barrier due to someone watching a cutscene, which resulted in the instance being flagged as complete for the farmers who were able to leave through normal means, but it was still flagged as incomplete for him and the other players after the barrier dropped and the boss didn't come back, forcing them to abandon the instance to escape.

As far as the gathering/crafting goes, I don't think that any amount of actual involvement in the process could prevent people from botting, because I've already seen that they're able account for a multitude of variables like ToT procs, poor/excellent condition, and Discerning Eye procs from Impulsive Appraisal. Heck, I've even seen fishing bots that know what the weather is in a given zone and won't budge until the conditions are right for a fish to spawn. The only semi-reliable means of prevention is constant policing.