Is it OK to use bots in FFXIV?

[ZeroRaziel]

There are a lot of "players" who bot, and over the years it's become sadly evident that SE isn't doing anything serious in regards to stopping them.
The obvious RMT farms from china are swiftly dealt with, but actual players who opt to use bots seems to get no actual punishment.

Maybe one day SE will crack down on these and they'll get the ban they deserve. It's very sad that legit players are surpassed by others using nonstop bots.

Part of the issue may very well be that the STF and director/producer/god Yoshi-P are both mostly isolated to the experiences of Japanese servers.
You look around you don't see RMT (as much) or cheaters botting their way nonstop (as much). It exists but from what I've gathered it's not by any degree close to other data centres.
So if the people in charge of dealing with it don't see a problem, then there is no problem. This is why things don't really get done unless brought directly to him by say a fan at a Q&A or a technical issue at an important time.
I like how the sound output issue we've had for years was solved within a week of Yoshi-P having experienced it during a Live Letter.

Huh. Guess you are mostly right here... Made a character on JPN Data Centers and wasn't able to find even one Market Board bot not even on a single world. Damn, don't think that I even seen one RMT spammer in Limsa there...
And it seems that whole STF team (the one responsible for keeping an eye on botting, cheating and all that exciting stuff) consists just of 3 japanese employees



(I think it was 4 as of Stormblood)... And this 3-4 members seems more than enough to keep botting and RMT problem under control mostly on 3 japanese Data Centers.
Could we possibly get a something like "Special Task Force West" team or something?

P.S. Another funny fact: approximately at the same time Market Board botting became more severe on NA & EU servers (around 6 weeks ago) those warping around lvl 1-50 Conjurers and Thaumaturges (they prefer Archers since of ShB for some reason) suddenly gone missing.
I mean this bad boys:



Before you could just use a player search limited to levels 1-50, Conjurer & Thaumaturge & Archer and 90% of matches were those:




But since those 6 weeks they all went M.I.A. and now you can't find those pretty much anywhere (which is a good thing in its own).
Just as if people who were using those found a better ways of making gill.