Lack of action against gathering bots, it needs to be changed, and soon

[Lunavi]

I don't hate raiders. More than half of the people on my FL raid. My FC leader raids. I would be raiding too if the drops were BiS for a year. It's pointless to do it unless for glamour now and none of them looked great enough to warrant hours of wiping and watching videos for.


Just stating the double standard here. Raiders tend to turn a blind eye on the Blatant RMT going on the party finder for years now, and yet they're complaining Gathering Bots are driving prices down but they don't want to go outside the city and actually file the report? lol.

If you can't spot the difference between people selling clears, which is not impacting anyone else in any way, and bots flooding the market with gathering and crafting material tanking the market to the rock bottom and constantly undercutting and therefore making it impossible for legit people to play and enjoy DoH/DoL content then I don't know what to say. Sure, people selling clears for real life money IS bad, but there are different levels of bad and to make a massive part of the game unplayable is definitely worse than carrying people through savage in my honest opinion.

[Oxidized]

How are you determining they are bots? Are you just reporting anyone who is gathering or crafting for longer than you would?

Absolutely not, I love the crafting/gathering community on my home server of Zalera, and I frequently see them at nodes at intermittent intervals. Bots, on the other hand, exhibit a number of telltale signs:

--Not responding to tells, or in the case of some bots, responding to them in a nonsensical manner.
--Operating for hours on end along the same route, to the point that it defies being reasonable.
--Doing the same "order of operations" every single time (ephemeral bots tend to gather, pause for 3 seconds, reduce items, pause, mount up) without any variation. When I go for long gathering stints, I often craft a little bit in between, or pause because I am responding to a tell or taking care of IRL stuff.
--Move from node to node in an unnatural way (most gatherers will home in on nodes, whereas bots often fly overhead and "drop" onto them, causing them to exhibit the midair floating glitch quite often)

As for selling clears, I am against that as well, but it is also something that is much harder to police, since all of the transactional steps could happen outside of the game (although people getting away with PF listings is comically-sad). A gathering bot, on the other hand, must conduct its illicit activity in-game, since it involves interacting with the nodes themselves as well as the marketboard. I want to fight the battles that could actually be won with a little bit of awareness.

[KageTokage]

Out of interest, is anyone here who was/is playing on Japanese servers and could share if the situation with gathering bots is as much of a problem there too?

If the problem does not exist there, then wouldn't it basically mean that there's either 1. a lack of communication between NA/EU department and JP one, or 2. an assumption from the developers' part that if something isn't the matter in Japan, where people tend to be much more honourable, then it means it's neither the case on the West?

I can tell just from looking at their FC rankings that it's definitely a problem over there, too.

Or at least I'm assuming these tiny FCs that are loaded with nothing but "Obviously an alt account" crafters/gatherers that are somehow getting as much if not more FC credits then FCs that have several times as many active members as them aren't legit.

[Oxidized]

I can tell just from looking at their FC rankings that it's definitely a problem over there, too.

Although you are probably right, it does not mean illicit activity in a vacuum; there are plenty of ways to gain a TON of GC seals over the course of a single week by storing up other resources to be converted into turn-ins.

[alimdia]

Heh, just trying to explain to the raiders why Selling Clears for RL Money is just as bad as a Gathering bot/aethersand bot, if not worse. But i'm sure they all know what i'm talking about already, they're just playing dumb xD.

Open up Party Finder, and there's 2 easy bans right there on the Top. If they can't even ban those, how can you expect to get the gathering bots/aethersand bots banned lol.

It's not "the raiders" selling content for real money, it's maybe 3-4 groups per data center, but each group has 7 people so you can have 1 group posting 3-4 different ads making it seem like this is a widespread issue.

Would you think it fair if I accuse you of RMT because some non raiders buy gil? Because that's exactly what you're doing with "the raiders".

[RareItems]

Gathering Bots have been out since 2010 on 1.0 and People have been selling clears since 2013. One is supposedly destroying the economy the other is supposedly promoting Elitism and Toxicity. Is the Game's Economy Destroyed? no. Is the Game getting more Unfriendly and Toxic? Yes.

[KageTokage]

I fail to see how content selling has anything to do with the community supposedly getting more toxic.

I don't think the average player even pays attention to how heavily the bots sway the prices on servers either, because they generally just care about getting stuff for cheap. It's already hit a point where the bulk of the sellers of crafted gear/consumables on my server are botters and most of the legitimate players have backed off because they can't be bothered to be adjusting their prices constantly to combat them. I consider the economy to be in a bad state if it's largely dominated by cheaters.

[alimdia]

Content selling has nothing to do with toxicity, toxicity breeds when you get the "don't tell me how to play" people in duties, it creates animosity between the people who want to have fun with a quick dungeon vs those who just want their party to carry their weight for them, and this has nothing to do with raiding. Plenty of people who don't raid carry their own weight.

[RareItems]

Raider thinking: Oh you need help clearing content? Sure! That will be just 500 dollars per Eden Savage drop . Oh you cant pay? Then get out of here your wasting my time.

The ppl selling content are not some tight knit group of individuals selling content, its a collection of regular players in different "Endgame Raiding" FC's in a special Discord Channel.

These players join PUG savage groups/learning parties and purposely make it fail so ppl can't complete content. lol. How else are they going to sell Clears to people.

Maybe if SE stopped making raids/Ex Trials and actually made meaningful fun content that everyone can easily play like an instanced open world PVP with a mix of Eureka and Frontlines, that would probably be better than them creating content for a small percentage of the playerbase.

As for Gathering bots? If you see one, grab your entire FC and have them mass report the botter. SE's banning system works if you actually report instead of complaining about it on the forums.

[KageTokage]

As for Gathering bots? If you see one, grab your entire FC and have them mass report the botter. SE's banning system works if you actually report instead of complaining about it on the forums.

No, it does not.

Me and and others I keep in touch with have collectively reported several different obvious bots on our server since as far as back as HW and they're still here.

If it did actually work, I think we'd be seeing way more people getting banned according to weekly illicit activity reports but instead it consistently maintains an average ban ratio of less then one bot per server.