The bot problem is rising and real.

[Hysterior]

I spent an hour reporting them yesterday.

It is probably useless, unfortunately.

I will share my experience as a CM on another MMORPG (Not FFXIV):
We had a LOT of bots. At first, I would go in-game, invisible in the starting areas. Spot a bot, ban it and check the IP. Ban all account in the IP.
Then I soon realised how useless that process was.

Bots change IP and can change MAC addresses on the fly. They can set a max amount of character creation per IP so they are not suspicious.
So manual CM-work of checking reports from users or even being in-game and baning them is useless.
The bots issue cannot be solved by manual work.

Good luck SE