Quote Originally Posted by Jojoya View Post
Not everyone who bots is a RMT trader. There are plenty of "real" players out there using some form of 3rd party automation to crank out crafted items while they're afk.

Do you honestly think those players are going to hesitate using that automation to get their leaderboard bragging rights when rankings are based on number of items contributed?

SE made a mistake basing rankings on "greatest contribution" instead of greatest quality. If the rankings were based on the greatest quality from a limited number of turn-ins, players manually crafting have a decent chance to end up at the top of the rankings over players who automate. When the rankings are based on how much you turn in, only those who automate have a chance to win. It's a futile effort to try to compete against those breaking ToS.
Would have to agree that a competition based upon how can do the most farming in the shortest amount of time is kinda stupid, as that just invites botting.

The easiest way to mitigate botting, is to make it so botting is less productive and/or make it so that you don't really gain anything out of botting, as you make it too risky for too little gain. But the moment you slap a competition on it, and make the terms of the competition such that it is advantageous to bot, then yeah, you're basically throwing the doors wide open and inviting them in.

While I said earlier that I do not believe we should be detracting from players' enjoyment in an attempt to kill bots (IE, FFXI fishing, as per my earlier example), I don't believe that we should design new content with a total disregard of bots, either. Some of your suggestions are good ones, like jack the quality of the Lv80 items up so high that it is literally impossible to 100% and then make it so that the top players are the ones who win, because you'd never bot if you were trying for the highest quality. That's actually a rather good suggestion, and I don't know why they didn't do this already.

Other than the fact that getting the best would require absolute BiS and they probably didn't want players feeling pressured to obtain BiS ASAP in time for this event.