Never seen such a poor support like in this game!

[ElazulHP]

Every day we have to deal with Gilseller, Farming-Bots, Market Board-Bots (program) and Cheater in every way. SE does NOTHING against it. Ingame Support and GM there are a joke or simply non-existent.
U'll never get more than a pre-defined standard-mail and/or response. Definitely no action is followed....
Sure, it's rather more important to have the monthly fees of these trash-people, rather than support real player and make sure, their game is clean and fair....
Everything for the money, right, SE?

There's the one guy on Sargatanas with the Market Board-bot (program), who undercut by 1 gil every 10 minutes
24/7 until the price reach his set minimum. Crafting and restock automatically via a third-party program and destroy the fun of every legal player. We have report this person over 80 (!!!) times now since Autumn 2017.
Many other player did too. We sent evidence of bot use and cheating in form of print screens (specific Binaries in command-lines, etc...).
There is even another full thread on this Forum about the same person and his cheating / Gil-selling business.
The same person is also active on other Servers (Alexander and Leviathan)....

Then there's another guy on Sargatanas with only ARC lvl. 1 on his char. Sells crafted ilvl 380 weapons with his signature on it. Not even have crafting unlocked.
The GM responded, promised to investigate and take actions against this person, since as he said "it's technically not possible to do without cheating or external Programs"....
What happened...? Nothing!

The list could go on and on and on....

Fact is, SE does nothing against cheaters and Bots at all!!! It's just a big bubble of nothing and false promises....
Never seen such a poor support in an online game! SE should be ashamed of themselves over such a BS we have to deal with every day!

I know exactly who you're referring too and I've reported them as well with no response and nothing done that I can tell as well. It's really annoying.

[Melichoir]

Theres two things to consider:

First its cost effectiveness of banning Botting programs. Consider this: The game has 10 Botters who do the undercutting thing. They (to bot) pay 15 a month like everyone else. So SE nets 150 a month from these botters. Now of the entire playerbase, lets say only 3 people quit over the botter situation. Ultimately, for SE, leaving the botters nets them MORE money than it would to cut their accounts. You may not like that, but that is business 101 here. Sometimes businesses will allow certain activities to continue if it means greater overall profit.

Now, where this becomes flipped is if instead of 3 people quit, 30 people quit. Or 300 people quit. That drastically makes those 10 botters a huge negative in SEs profits.

Then we have to consider pragmatically what botters contribute to the game. We can argue that there are at least 4 different kinds of botters:

Lvling Botters - People who bot just to power lvl alts or other classes merely so they dont have to lvl.
Gathering Botters - Botters who just go about gathering Junk Non stop
Utility Botters - These would be botters who keep undercutting things by 1 gil
RMT/Spam Botters - These are botters who are doing RMT or spamming stuff.

OF those botting, The only one with a huge negative impact on the game at large is the RMT botters because they actively damage the economy of the markets as well as contribute to an indirect pay-to-win model that hurts the game. Utility Botters, while also a negative, dont damage the markets that badly to have extreme profound effects broadly, though theyre annoying at the individual level. And lvling botters dont really impact anyone else to much in open world content. Theyre oddities.

The wierd one is the gathering botters. They do affect market price, but they also create more supply broadly, which brings a really wierd predicament. Lets say that SE could wipe out all botters. No exceptions, and it would be permanent. One of the probably after effects of that would be prices would skyrocket on the MB. I do not believe the current amount of players who do active gathering/crafting would be able to support the demand the game would need. This would end up in shortages nad pricing out a lot of players from things that they were accustomed to getting.

Im not saying that farming bots are a-ok, but I think it would be foolish for any modern MMO company not to make proper assumptions that botting would be occuring and that it would be a factor in the games economy (and might actually be necessary for a stable in game economy frankly.) Thats a concept a lot of people dont consider, and see all botting as 100% wrong. Again, Im not advocating for botting, but rather that I do think the issue isnt a black/white thing.

As for taking care of botters currently, I dont actually encounter to many to often, and the most I see are the RMT ones. The fact that I dont see it to often to me points towards the fact that SE is actually pretty good at watching for botters of all stripes. The reason being that if they didnt, I could easily imagine how this game would look. And its not pretty.

I honestly dont think the 'bot issue' is the biggest problem with ffxiv as it were. A minor nuisance that SE keeps a close eye on is probably more accurate.

[KageTokage]

With the current way they are, they are under control compared to how bad they used to be. Did you play FF14 2.0 is the first couple years? RMT spam and bots used to be a lot worse. Sure things can always be better, but they used to be a lot worse.

I started in 3.3, so I'm wouldn't know.

The only real improvement I've noticed as far as the RMT bots go since then is that they no longer send you tells or try to invite you to parties (Which was obnoxious as all heck) and they've also dropped their habit of trying to sneak into the NN . I'm still counting close to a hundred active RMT bots towards the end of the week and there's now around a dozen crafting/gathering bots active every night as opposed to maybe four or five back in HW.

*snip*

I'm still having doubts about whether or not the RMT bots are actually paying for their accounts or if they're abusing credit card charge-backs or some such to avoid the fees.

Assuming every single bot that was banned last week was paying for a sub, it would've amounted to over $60K in sub fees, and I have a really hard time imagining that the gil selling business is actually making that much money, especially in an environment like XIV's where the currency has very limited uses.

As far as the whole "keeping the market supplied" thing goes, I think infusions are the only item where that might be an issue for legit players and I think they need to remedy that by making infusions craftable in larger quantities to match how quickly raiders burn through them compared to food.

[Alestorm]

But at what cost!?

"Everything"
-Gul'dan