So many bots

[DumdogsWorld]

How I feel about bots these days:

[KageTokage]

I think the only people who actually care about the bot farmers are the small crowd of people who craft stuff to sell on the MB.

A lot of people don't bother selling anything, and the largest crowd just doesn't craft period.

[Vanitas]

Unfortunately this is something we have to deal with all multiplayer games nowadays and I know it may not SEEM like it but SE is banning literally thousands of bots everyday. If they weren't I promise you what you see now would be infinitely worse.

[Dustytome]

To defeat the problem, you need to attack it at its core.
But this game has many layers of BOT activity, the only way to curb at lest some of it, is have GM's actually police areas by acting on player reports of BOT activity.

I post this a lot, but GMs have no authority over botting/cheating reports. Everything has to be funneled to the Special Task Force (a handful of people in Japan that may or may not be fluent in the various languages reported in). Either local GMs need to be trained to handle these issues or each region needs its own local special task force fluent in the languages being reported in. As a user, the current report flow for these issues seems completely ineffective.

[Angelov-Mercy]

Maybe SE can put a bounty on them, and we can earn in game Gil or something, maybe even a title for turning them in. Once our reports have been investigated and the bad guys dealt with, we can have like a stamp/number next to our names or something on our bot kill count. lol

[xLucia]

It might be because I generally avoid "public areas" unless I need to be there for quests and such, but I never really come across any bots on Moogle (apart from the gil selling ones)

[Nexya]

At this very moment on Zodiark, if you search for level 50 black mages, you litterally get 200/200 bots as a result.
They are all neatly organised in Free Companies, and all bunched up in the same areas.
If you spend any amount of time near a FC chest (or Auriana in Mhor Dona, or a couple of other key spots), you will see them teleporting in and out.

And yet, in the last report of actions taken against illicit activities) :

・Botting activity (Using any number of third party tools that allow for automation)
　・Accounts terminated: 2

Seriously ?

[KageTokage]

The bans for "conventional" bots are the ones being listed under botting. The hacking gil farmers get lumped into the RMT category.

But yeah, those ban numbers are a joke when there's been well over a dozen people botting on a daily basis for months/years on Cactuar alone despite being reported several times by me and others.

[Nexya]

So, it means they banned nearly 11000 gil-farming accounts (up from around 4000 in the previous reports), and still there are so many active bots...

I'm starting to believe this is getting out of hands...

The worst part is, they are super obvious... Many black mages (over 400 of them on Zodiark), some conjurers (about 100) and a few bards (20 or so). They even regroup in Free Companies...

[KageTokage]

So, it means they banned nearly 11000 gil-farming accounts (up from around 4000 in the previous reports), and still there are so many active bots...

I'm starting to believe this is getting out of hands...

The worst part is, they are super obvious... Many black mages (over 400 of them on Zodiark), some conjurers (about 100) and a few bards (20 or so). They even regroup in Free Companies...

It doesn't matter how many of them they ban because they're scripted to instantly create new accounts whenever they do get banned.

They also aren't actually making any meaningful impact on their gil farming because the ban waves only happen weekly and it takes just a day for a bot to hit the level cap and have farmed up a substantial amount of gil to sell.

It reeks of incompetence for them to be taking the same approach to this problem for years when it's proven to be ineffective.