Okay now the botting is getting a little out of hand...

[Eyske]

Holy.....

I was in all 4 Major Cities today (Was looking for an Empty House) and lord what did I witness..

In Gridania it must have been around 30-40 Bard Bots...
In Limsa 20?
in Uldah 30+ (They were everywhere around the crystal)
and even in Kugane(!) there were a few.

How can this be? I mean, they dont even try to hide anymore at this point. hssjldhs cöhdah for real? Just straight ban him. They all look the same and have gibberish names.
I even saw a few ,,falling from sky" or ,,dropping straight into hell".
Thats just.. weird.

[KageTokage]

It seems as though they've taken to banning the bots more then once a week now as all of the BRD bots (On Cactuar at least) were gone when I logged in this morning and they had already been purged earlier on Sunday. I'm not seeing any obvious RMT activity in player search aside from the usual spammers, either.

It's a start, because it does take them some time to go through the whole account creation/leveling process. If they're doing it often enough that they can't even farm gil they might actually start making some headway.

[Dustytome]

Still about twenty lvl 50 bots on a number of the Aether servers with a bunch of lower level ones making their way up the chain today.

[DynnDiablos]

I rarely see bots on Faerie. However, it seems Siren is completely overrun, especially in Gridania.

[frostmagemari]

I know with popularity, comes bots....

Less popular, less need to actually do bot control. I think it's time for a policy change.
<first post images>

Bots are never going to become less of a thing until SQE goes after the authors of said bots. While it didn't completely solve the bot problem in WoW; A few years back, Blizzard took legal action against the bot authors themselves rather than choose to simply stop at banning the bots they've found.
Banning an account does nothing after all, all it does is make someone go buy another copy of the game (which is more money in SQE's pocket), more subscription time (which is more money in their pocket). It's sad to say, but since people aren't quitting the game because of bots (or at least making it known that is the reason they're leaving), SQE is perfectly fine to use their band-aid fix of banning the account they find to be bots.

[sauc]

The only one blizzard shut down if I recall correctly was peons4hire and the only reason it worked was because it wasn't a chinese company. Most of these botting/gold selling companies originate in china and they generally don't give a crap about anyones copyright laws outsiders their border so nothing ever happens to them... like in any game. Only way they managed to hit them (and hard) is selling their own gold and while these companies probably sell for cheaper people are generally okay with paying a little more when it's not sketchy and theres no risk of getting banned or hacked.

[KageTokage]

The most popular botting program (Which is so popular that it regularly shows up without me even having to use keywords directly related to it) is a small-scale project maintained by a group of English players, so I think if SE wanted to axe them, they'd actually have a grounds to do so.

I'm starting to get seriously annoyed by the ever increasing number of DoL/H bots and I don't doubt it's likely tied to the Ishgard Restoration coming up. These guys would be easily controllable with a half-way competent enforcement team, unlike the RMT bots who simply come back too quickly and in numbers too great to realistically be kept in check by manual bans.

[KageTokage]

I'm curious. Has anyone witnessed the RMT bot hordes within the past few days?

I've been checking Cactuar with player search (With the sprout filter toggled) when I log in and log out, and I haven't seen them for five days now; only the occasional RMT spammer in capital cities. It's honestly almost more unsettling then them actually being here.

I'd like to hope they actually found a lasting method of dealing with them, though I doubt any kind of preventative measure can keep them at bay forever.

[RoyalBeef]

I'm curious. Has anyone witnessed the RMT bot hordes within the past few days?

I've been checking Cactuar with player search (With the sprout filter toggled) when I log in and log out, and I haven't seen them for five days now; only the occasional RMT spammer in capital cities. It's honestly almost more unsettling then them actually being here.

I'd like to hope they actually found a lasting method of dealing with them, though I doubt any kind of preventative measure can keep them at bay forever.

Keepin an eye on GIL prices might be insightful. If there were effective ways of stopping bots now, they should be skyrocketing.

[KageTokage]

Well, as of the latest illicit activity report, they're now clarifying that bans of bots related to RMT activity are lumped into the RMT/illicit activity category.

Would be nice if there was a significant improvement in the numbers for the "normal" bots eventually, because it's been consistently low since the day they started tracking it in its own category despite there being considerably more DoH/L bots as of late.

I'm still not seeing any RMT bot hordes on Cactuar for whatever reason, though a couple of those weird cross-world ARC/BRD bots were visiting the other day.