Too many bots, too few bans: The Shadowbringers edition.

[KageTokage]

I want to preface by saying that the RMT bots are extremely inconsequential when you have things like DoL/H bots controlling the markets, PvP bots throwing games by being dumb as dirt, and duty finder bots slowing your groups down with their lack of a functional brain.

It's been a good three weeks since early access started, and as I might've expected, the Shadowbringers zones are now positively loaded with people using bots in the late hours of the day, mainly either to grind FATEs to level or to farm crafting materials. (Aethersands as per usual are a prime target).

The Stormblood zones are also predictably experiencing high numbers of GNB/DNC bots, who annoyingly force me into a situation where I have knowingly and indirectly benefit from their cheating should I decide to do FATEs while they're around.

I've already noticed several dozen people different doing this on Cactuar alone, many of them new faces to me who've either transferred in or returned from an absence (And yes, I do make a mental note of everyone who bots around these parts, mostly so I can purge them from my hunting linkshells/parties if they try to weasel their way in).

Glancing around forums and discords pertaining to the subject also reveals that there's a disturbingly large amount of players involved, with them regularly having hundreds of active users discussing how they can game the system more then they already do. The piddly amount of weekly bans being issued are ultimately just a drop in the bucket and do little to actually discourage people from it.

The whole situation has grown extremely frustrating to me and is likely become even worse come 5.1 where the developers decided that including a ranking system in the Ishgard Restoration project would be a brilliant idea when gathering/craftng are one of the most abused aspects of the game, with the market for crafted gear and consumables regularly being kept in a chokehold by bot farmers.

Something desperately needs to change, and I feel it's mostly rooted in an extremely flawed screening process because contrary to what some might claim, people do get banned for botting and I occasionally see them whining about it on relevant forums. There's no "conspiracy" to ignore cheaters for the sake of profit (If they were following this line of reasoning they wouldn't be so trigger-happy about banning people for social offenses); they're simply not detecting most of them in the first place for whatever reason.

There is a very simple solution to this whole matter (Give GMs the authority to directly investigate suspected bots rather then make the puny STF team resort to their faulty detection "tools"), but the biggest issue is convincing SE that what they're doing now is not sufficient.

The last time they actually addressed it during a live letter, they seem to have misinterpreted that people were complaining about bots strictly in PvP when they're active in basically all aspects of the game. Their only response was to "keep reporting them", which has done squat even when it comes to the ones in PvP.


TLDR: Someone needs to give the dev team a kick in the pants and make them realize how big of an issue bots are right now and that their current methods are inadequate.