Thanks MilitaryVet123 and Kes13a for your responses.

Quote Originally Posted by MilitaryVet123 View Post
Not true. Vast majority of people don't use bots. The cost doesn't come from slashing the income from bots. The cost comes from dedicating resources and manpower which are often expensive, to solve this problem.
That's true. Both aspects--the cost of losing bot account subscriptions and the cost of staff--contribute to the problem. That's why I made the number of bots banned (100) the same in both examples, as this normalizes the staff/infrastructure cost from botting. At the end of the day, the ROI in investing in the problem is low, as evidenced by the prevalence of the problem. The cost is the loss of bot subscriptions and the staff to police botting, while the return are the retention of otherwise lost accounts from the problem. The point remains the same: SE probably doesn't stand to lose enough accounts by taking a serious approach to the problem.

For example, the recent ban wave terminated 7 bots and suspended 25 bots, which would include the pervasive market bots discussed in this thread. By my count, there are 32 JPN servers, 24 NA servers and 12 Eur servers--68 servers in total. That means they banned 0.1 bots per server-week and suspended 0.36 bots per server-week. On Jenova, there are at least 2-3 market bots, so I can expect them to be banned after 20-30 weeks (4.5-7 months).

The irony is that there is no shortage of cheap staff to help solve the problem. I'm sure you could have at least a few players on each server that would be willing and competent enough to identify bots and write up reports in exchange for their subscription cost. To avoid conflicts of interest, these players could help police servers on different data centers.


Quote Originally Posted by Kes13a View Post
But there is also the hidden business cost long term.

"Yeah, FF 14 was good, great story, but too many bots... I wouldnt recommend playing until they do something about it"

Is that really how they want their word of mouth to go?
I hope this problem damages FF14's reputation, but it looks like it's a problem that has persisted for a long time. See this thread for example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme..._in_this_game/

I wish I would have known that before starting to play the game. I think that continuing to make noise can only help the problem.