Is it OK to use bots in FFXIV?

[ZeroRaziel]

My apologies if the title is a bit provocative. I under no circumstances encourage anyone to use any sort of 3rd party software in the game. And that's not a troll thread or anything like that either.

What I trully wonder is how Square Enix actually deals with players using this 3rd party software which allows them to have "unfair advantage over other players"?

I do know that you can find tons of lvl 1-50 bots that use warping, wall glitches or whatever with those wierd random nicknames running around ARR zones which also used to clog up Amdapor Keep or other lvl 50 dungeons occasionally when we saw "Reserving Server" message for half an hour.
Also I know that there are gathering bots which are used to farm nodes for materials.
But during my experience with the game I can't say that I had too much troubles with any of those and assumed that was because they were timely banned and SE kept those things under relative "control".

So I recently though about crafting some items for sale and it turned that Market Board is affected by botting as well. And it seems that one single bot is able to monopolize almost half of the market. As it turned out this one exact same bot has been active for almost a month by now. Reported multiple times by several people via In-Game Support, Web-Site support and directly to Special Task Force team. And nothing changed... For a month now
So could other people please share their experience and thoughts on this matter? Has it always been like this and I simply wasn't paying enough attention?

[Seraphor]

SE ban bots and RMTs in waves every few months.
Unfortunately this means for those few months the botters and RMTs have free reign and are only moderately disadvantaged for a short time when those ban waves occur.

The most affected part of the market however is the sale of crystals/shards/clusters, which would likely be prohibitively expensive if it wasn't for those botters to be frank, so it's a double-edged sword.
If SE could be more proactive on the issue, they would also need to address the balance of obtaining crystals and shards in great enough quantities as well.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

SE ban bots and RMTs in waves every few months.
Unfortunately this means for those few months the botters and RMTs have free reign and are only moderately disadvantaged for a short time when those ban waves occur.

The most affected part of the market however is the sale of crystals/shards/clusters, which would likely be prohibitively expensive if it wasn't for those botters to be frank, so it's a double-edged sword.
If SE could be more proactive on the issue, they would also need to address the balance of obtaining crystals and shards in great enough quantities as well.

Every week. They purge every Thursday.

[ZeroRaziel]

SE ban bots and RMTs in waves every few months.
Unfortunately this means for those few months the botters and RMTs have free reign and are only moderately disadvantaged for a short time when those ban waves occur.

The most affected part of the market however is the sale of crystals/shards/clusters, which would likely be prohibitively expensive if it wasn't for those botters to be frank, so it's a double-edged sword.
If SE could be more proactive on the issue, they would also need to address the balance of obtaining crystals and shards in great enough quantities as well.

Wow...
Thanks for your answer btw. But thats just... wow...
Really...? So if those bots were used for RMT that would mean they were able to "realize" those Gills for real money or "launder" them somehow like a thousand times before SE really does something?
And so if few months had passed woudn't that basicly mean that this bots completely surved it's RMT purpose, besides harming other players game experince?

And yeah, while I can partially agree on a notion regarding double-edged-ish-ness of this whole crystals/shards/clusters matter, there is a huge chance that if those crystals weren't so affordable, we woudn't have such heavily crystals demanding crafting recipes. (1 Fire Shard instead of 10 Fire Clusters + 10 Earth Clusters) So that we need so much of them right now is probably a counter-measure on SE side to balance an oversupply. Also it's extremely easy for SE to increase a bonus to crystals we gather right now even more with buffs like The Twelve's Bounty or The Giving Land.

[Nedkel]

That means the person you reported know the way to get a ton of materials for cheaper from other servers and is not a bot.
Unless you have a solid evidence of him wrapping around.

[ZeroRaziel]

Every week. They purge every Thursday.

If they do, how comes this bot is still there for a month now? Despite numerous reports?

I've seen this exact botting pattern mentioned on this forum before, but this thread was moslty ignored:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...Market-botting

If had a bit more ruckus on a reddit though:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...games_economy/

[LaylaTsarra]

Wow...
Thanks for your answer btw. But thats just... wow...
Really...? So if those bots were used for RMT that would mean they were able to "realize" those Gills for real money or "launder" them somehow like a thousand times before SE really does something?
And so if few months had passed woudn't that basicly mean that this bots completely surved it's RMT purpose, besides harming other players game experince?

I think it depends upon the bot. The ones out selling gil in cities are easy to report and they're the ones in my opinion that get banned on a regular basis. On the other hand gather bots and marketboard bots are harder to identify. I don't really gather/sell anymore but I think of all the ones I reported only one got banned.

[TwistedTea]

Given how prevalent botting is in XIV compared to some f2p games, gonna say a lot of players feel it's ok,since SE does so little regarding botters.

There are gathering bots which gather 24/7 and have been reported for months, years even. And they are still there,business as usual.

Housing bots which use custom ACT scripts to scan wards in seconds,automated teleporting and snap up all the mediums and larges.

The Balmung Housing Alerts (Sadu's) community has reported these housing botters to the GMs and the STF for months/years. Welp, the housing botters are still there.

There are people who even bot for Chocobo Racing...yeah SE is pretty lax with dealing with botting.

Also:

The most affected part of the market however is the sale of crystals/shards/clusters, which would likely be prohibitively expensive if it wasn't for those botters to be frank, so it's a double-edged sword.

I have no issue with the price of shards/crystal/clusters going up, if it means my gil goes to legit players and not botters. I think it'll better for the economy in the long run as well.

[ZeroRaziel]

That means the person you reported know the way to get a ton of materials for cheaper from other servers and is not a bot.
Unless you have a solid evidence of him wrapping around.

Who told anything about a cheaper price?
Thats highly unlikely that it's not a bot, buddy.
Let's see:

1). This botting consist of a 1 account with a character usually with 1 lvl 80 Tank or Healer and all other lvl 80 crafters gathers. With some help from others it was observed for almost a month. This char is online mostly 23-24 hours a day. And never leaving an appartment for all this time never being AFK. This char is also a leader of a FC with 8 other members from 2nd account. All this characters are lvl 21-23 (levelled to retainers unlock point). This ones are active 24/7. Literally. Only time they are offline is a 5 seconds period when they switch between this 8 characters. Lvl 80 character from 1st account puts crafted items to a Company Chest, and those 22 lvl characters put them on sell. Also probably a measure to try and save this lvl 80 char. Of course non of those characters never responded to any /tells.
(Of course you can say that all this players just have an insomnia and play non-stop for a whole month without being AFK. Also those lvl 22 chars, some of which have those Ofgisdja Affndsaf names (of couse thats just their favourite nickname they use in all MMOs) just enjoy changing character every 20 minutes and updating prices of items made by theirs awesome FC leader... Who also has an Insomnia :P And of course they don't respond to even a simple hello because of naturall shyness :PPP)

2). Once character from 2nd account logged in, it immediately accesses Summoning Bell and scans prices of it's listed items and changes it to the current lowest -1 Gill. So far we only noticed what 5 out of 16 retainers sell and that's Primal's Glam Weapons, Neo-Ishgardian Gear and Facet Crafing Gear. You can just simply visit Ul'Dah/Limsa and observe those lvl 22 "not bots" performing theirs cyclic patters one after another for this whole month never changing anything.
(definitely they just enjoy theirs routine ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

3). For some reason every time each character attempts to go from first to second retainer it completely exits summoning bell which can be seen cause it untargets Summoning Bell every time and then targets it again.
(most likely they are just new players who happened to sell almost all Sninryu weapons and simply don't know that you can access your 2nd retainer without completely closing retainers window and definitely not because of a poor monkey coding in a bot's script o_o)

4). And due to predictable and systematic patterns of them we were able to pinpoint exact time of a price scanning window of those retainers and just 1 minute before that we set a price for items selling for 2 000 000 Gill a price around 5 000 Gill to see how characters would react. Once they finished scanning, instead of setting price to 4 999 price remained unchanged. Bots got an upgrade since that reddit post and got new & shiny IF > conditional in a bot's script. And you know what? Once they were done scanning prices instead of visitting a Market Board and buying off more than five Shinryu Weapons for 5 000 Gill this character simply logs off and loggins with a next one.
(that's cause those lvl 22 players are of a very noble heart and do not wish to abuse a "miskate" of someone who "accidentally forgot" to add 3 extra zeros to a price... *stoic_nod* )

5). And out of curiosity I checked other worlds on my server. And guess what, it turns out that almost every world has this exact same "not bot person" with just one lvl 80 tank/healer and all 80 crafters and gatherers who also is leading a FC with eight lvl 22 chars, which are occupying same market zones and all these Free Companies were created in the beginning of May and none of those chars never responding either.
(all that is just a one big coincidence and most obviously has nothing to do with RMT, right?... O_O ...right?...)

[Nedkel]

The solution to your problem is to place the same price as the price cutter and sell in bulk so that way you are going to be #1 on the list.
Btw you could take advantage of bots price cutting, just set price at low and buy them out, i dont see a problem here.

SE cant ban these bots as long as they are using their own custom bot to play with prices, as those are impossible to recognize by the system.