The bot problem is rising and real.

[KageTokage]

I find it a touch baffling that even some bots that are doing things that are blatantly impossible for normal players like maintaining AFK status while actively crafting/gathering (It normally goes away if you make any kind of mouse/keyboard/controller input whatsoever) or keeping things targeted from several hundred yards away(Generally aetherytes) still don't get banned if I report them.

It seems like only the most blatant of impossibilities like the teleporting hacks used by the gil farmers actually get caught.

Even monitoring something simple as how much active time a player has on a daily basis would readily give away whether not they're botting as the game makes a distinction from simply being marked AFK and being "inactive" for the purposes of staying online and/or in the Novice Network. People routinely spend 24+ hours active without logging off are almost assuredly using a botting program as I've noticed that known botters will never be kicked from the game/novice network even if they're observably just idling in a city or elsewhere for several hours straight, presumably because their game client is permanently flagged as "active" as long as they have a bot client running in the background.

Why would they even care? As long as bots are not big on JP server then its all fine, nothing to watch here citizens.

I know private servers that do better job than SE ever did with bots.

There's still gil farm bots on the JP servers, just not as many.

If you FC search their data centers you'll see several gibberish named FCs in the listing.

I've also seen some very blatant bot-farming FCs filled with nothing but DoH/L players and also had disproportionately high rankings for how small their FC was compared to the ones packing 200+ active members.