Time to reply to the bot sympathizers….again.

1. “Just try selling something else—the bots aren’t selling every item”

This is a specious (dumb) argument. You should be able to play all parts of the game. Some people like playing the marketboard, some people like farming Allegory Tombstones for gear. If you had to drop out of 1/2 of the Expert Roulettes because crappy bots were ruining the runs, would you feel the same way? Work around the bots!

Also, on some servers, bots have moved into almost every item.

2. “Square is doing everything they can to fight bots”

This is patently false. Look at the FC rankings for every server. You’ll find 3-5 bot FCs. Some of these FCs have 1 account that generates more FC activity than FCs with over 300 accounts. There are bots that have existed for years.

SE sucks at addressing bots. Doing something about bots as a community is already doing more than SE is doing about bots, which is basically nothing.

Finally, why wouldn’t they want our help? They clearly need it.

3. “What other MMOs are bots dealt with better?”

Warframe, Nioh. Honestly, I’m willing to bet that FFXIV is the absolute worst at it.

4. “The STF is large enough, and it’s ok that they are all in Japan”

The STF should have team members that can read and understand reports from all languages. According to the Forum, that would be Japanese, English, French, German. I’m fluent in 2 of those, and I wouldn’t want to read reports in the other two. The STF can stay in Japan, but they need members that are fluent in all languages of the game.

The STF is not large enough. How large does it need to be? At least large enough that bot ring FCs don’t show up in the top 100 rankings of every server. SE has more than 60 people in QA to find bugs in their game. Having dozens of people to find bots in their game wouldn’t hurt. They have the money.

Again as a PSA, if you’d like to block the comments of users that don’t add to a conversation:

1. Click “Settings” at the top of the page
2. Click “Edit Ignore List” on the left-hand menu bar
3. Type the username you’d like to add and click “Okay"