Never seen such a poor support like in this game!

[Alestorm]

But at what cost!?

"Everything"
-Gul'dan

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

If that's the case, banning them forces them to register new accounts, no?

[KageTokage]

If that's the case, banning them forces them to register new accounts, no?

If they get banned, they'll register and start leveling new accounts within a few hours. The problem is that takes them less then 24 hours to go through the entire 1-50 leveling process, so they get back to farming gil in scarcely any time at all.

They're so efficient that trying to combat them with bans alone will not work unless they do it on a daily basis.

[Noodle_Trinidad]

How many player we have? Multi-millions and they perma ban... 4 Bots in this report u link?
Pure action indeed.... A real Rambo-Ban-group SE has working there *sarcasm off*

Multi-Millions? Hardly, the last active census count has us at around 540k active characters, a loss of 80k since the last census. Anyways in the long run regardless of how many they ban the gil-sellers will stay to the benefit of SE since theyll have to pay to access certain features.

[KageTokage]

As far as I'm concerned, the only bans that actually matter are the temporary bans and the permabans for botting, since those are likely the only ones being directed at actual players ("Actual" in the sense that they're accounts being used by players on occasion, since some are likely just crafting/gathering mules that spend 99% of their time botting).

I'm not of the belief that they couldn't find a method of stopping or at least hindering the RMT-related bots if they actually tried, so those huge figures just seem like fluff to me since they consist almost entirely of bots that aren't even attempting to be subtle because they know they can just come back with little to no time lost from it.

I still think they need to just axe the gil drops from all dungeons, since they don't amount to anything worth mentioning for anyone other then an army of bots. This would at least force them to have to keep making new accounts whenever their income from completing the MSQ dries up.

[Final-Fantasy]

Well if people would stop buying Gil, we wouldn't have this issue.
Today i noticed someone fairly new spent 142,000,000 Gil on the Eureka mount and half that on a hairstyle.

[wizisi2k]

I hate to ask, but how would you suggest that housing is done if all gil is removed? mogstation and it's pay per lot? Sure that might improve the housing servers-maybe but it'll drag on the game long term. What would you replace the currency people are selling stuff on the marketboard with anyway? How would you compensate players for their lost gil?

[KageTokage]

Honestly, I think the only real silver lining to this whole issue that because gil is virtually useless out of buying fancy overpriced glam items or housing, people have little to gain from bot farming or making RMT purchases.

I think I'd quit if they ever decided to give any special privileges to people with extravagant amounts of gil.

[Atlas-04]

No game can solve this, they always find ways to get in and bot, spam ads, or hack. I personally find very few of these on my server and usually just some dude spamming shout chat in limsa with their gold site. I report/block and go about my day.

[KageTokage]

No game can solve this, they always find ways to get in and bot, spam ads, or hack. I personally find very few of these on my server and usually just some dude spamming shout chat in limsa with their gold site. I report/block and go about my day.

It's unrealistic to expect a game to have no cheaters at all, but it is realistic to expect its support team to keep them under control to a degree where people actually feel afraid of trying to do it because of the risk of being banned (Which is clearly not the case when the number of "normal" non-RMT bots on Cactaur and elsewhere has only been increasing as time goes on). The player-owned bots who do things like join PvP matches, control the economy with automated undercutting and/or market flooding using gathered/crafted items are legitimately disruptive to other players but realistically controllable by a competent GM team, whereas the only way they can really axe the RMT bots is to patch the hacks they're using.

There's probably a lot more bots around then you think on Adamantoise. Just do a player search for new adventurers/sprouts, look for the ones with gibberish names, then check how many online players are in their FCs (Assuming they have one). You can also observe how many players are regularly overnighting on crafting classes or moving strangely while gathering (Gather bots always jump in place when taking flight and also do not turn if they aren't in motion, save for what happens automatically when clicking a node).