Is it OK to use bots in FFXIV?

[RareItems]

Found a bot gathering Garden Beets lol. It's a prominent well known crafter doing it too. Sent a report but probably nothing will happen.

[KageTokage]

It's honestly a rarity for the producer's side of economy on any given server to be sustained by actual players regardless of region at this point.

The JP servers are apparently no exception, so I doubt that language barriers or region bias has anything to do with it.

[Recon1o6]

This game practically prints money for SE, they really should invest more in this game and unfortunately one place they need to invest in is anti botting resources.
At the very least a rightclick/square-report bot option as opposed to merely RMT would significantly speed things up. The tokenforce might actually start making progress given the variety of bots.

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Rmt
Housing auto clicker, housing scanners (One of my proudest moments was when I took over house clicking for my brother and beat out a housing bot spamming the placard, we were there for hours)
Automated Gatherers
Auto Crafter bots
Market scanner bots
Ultimate clearers

[Kes13a]

This game practically prints money for SE, they really should invest more in this game and unfortunately one place they need to invest in is anti botting resources.
At the very least a rightclick/square-report bot option as opposed to merely RMT would significantly speed things up. The tokenforce might actually start making progress given the variety of bots.

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Rmt
Housing auto clicker, housing scanners (One of my proudest moments was when I took over house clicking for my brother and beat out a housing bot spamming the placard, we were there for hours)
Automated Gatherers
Auto Crafter bots
Market scanner bots
Ultimate clearers

I dont see it happening at this point. they have done virtually nothing for so long they are habituated into laziness.

they would have to fire the lot and start fresh with people actually doing something, or at least willing to try...

[Kewitt]

Sadly I wish they would just ban the people that buy gil form people they know are RMTs.
it wouldn't really be all that hard to follow the gil.

oo ya we ban hammered these X number of bots. They traded gil to account X before they got banned.
oo there Player just got 10m gil for something that sells on the market board normally for 1-5k. OK BAN THE PLAYER.

I'm not saying every bone chip that sells for 50m gil is RMT but I am saying a lot of them are.

[Veliaire]

I dont see it happening at this point. they have done virtually nothing for so long they are habituated into laziness.

they would have to fire the lot and start fresh with people actually doing something, or at least willing to try...

The only thing they understand is money. Square Enix reads these forums. They know it is an issue and yet they do nothing. Why? Because people will continue to subscribe anyway. So why should they bother?

The only way they actually do something is when their profits start to take a hit. That's why after my 6 month sub is up, I am cutting back to 3 months/year.. and I'll dedicate more time to other games. I hear Ashes of Creation will be a game changer, so I might switch to that when it comes out, and cut out FFXIV completely unless I feel like they are putting my fees to good use and actually fix housing and/or the bot problems.

[Xoto]

Yeah screw this game. The botting situation is completely out of control and nothing is gonna be done about it.

I do NOT recommend this game to any new players.

[Vickii]

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?

I can only answer that yes, apparently it is okay to bot in FF14.

Exactly the same on my server. You have all these teleport bots around the Aethyryte and MSQ areas with obvious bot names.

A bot sits in gridania apartments 24-7 making all the aesthete gear and undercutting every 2 minutes or so by 1 Gil. Reported to square Enix and they don’t do anything. It’s been months now. Yet apparently if you say a bad word or criticise someone’s dps you get hellfire rained upon you.

[Vickii]

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.

Probably already been said but the newer high end market board bots have a ceiling which is pretty much just above mats cost.

You can drag them down and buy them out but they will just swap another card maybe

[gotaname1]

I would happily challenge any SE programmer, customer rep, even Yoshi-P to make gil without cheating on the market these days. Its almost at the stage where you need a bot to do so. Seen what I suspect is a couple more come online in the last couple days and with more than one "competing" on the market, you do not have the "luxury" of fitting in between their cycles, or having a chance to sell once they have to replenish stock.

Something needs to change. Either SE needs to say they dont give a damn about market botters and cannot do anything or they need to come up with tools so they can do something about an aspect of the game many people do without cheating. Either way, a part of the game they produce is quickly becoming unplayable and they need to fix it... or scrap it.

I tried selling honestly when I discovered how to make macros. So me and my new found scriptkiddy powers started making Dwarven Mythril Nuggets. The market for it was pretty much untouched and I had only like 1 competitor that I think was human. The only difference between me and my competitor is that I purposely had different amounts, fitting the amount nescesary for crafts (you rarely need more than 2 nuggets for recipies so it was easy to figure out). My nuggets sold like hotcakes and I actually had stuff to craft daily while turning an okay profit. And then something weird happened: someone or something bought up EVERYTHING, and started selling the stuff they bought for HALF the price it was offered initially. Like if it sold for 4k previously, it would now be 2k AND in bigger stacks... Weird things like that to manipulate the board. And only after that, did a bot come in, dropping prices by 1 gil, creating an even more extreme pricing envoirnment. I can't compete vs both stupid undercutters and bots together. So I stopped using the marketboard as much as possible all together to sell my stuff.