Bot issues

[Hysterior]

As a former CM on another MMO, I feel like most players have no idea how bots work.

In a nutshell:

• Your reports are pretty much useless. If anything, report players you see/know are purchasing from bots. if you see a group of bots in the area, just report one. Don't bother with the rest of the cluster.
• Banning bots manually is a lost cause, having more CM will not help. They should not even bother with it.
• CMs are probably mass banning IPs on a regular to keep the population under control when a group is spotted but they will always be swamped. That's how good bots are. They change IPs on the fly so there is so much you can detect under one IP.
• No, you cannot spot a bot even before they join the game most of the time.
• Some games (and FF14 being pretty old could be one of them) need maintenance to apply hack/bot patches and these are probably bypassed in a day or so...
• The bot population is different per servers. The more people purchase, the more bots you have. If no one purchases, you have less bots (You will probably never have 0 bots, they will always try)
• Bots are organized. The bots shouting in an area are probably alone in their IP as most likely to be banned so other bots actually farming are not impacted. Another one will take its place as soon as banned so I would not bother blacklisting either, just leave the area.
• Bots are not real people in a sweatshop (I know, I know...). Don't even talk to them. They are just scripts running. You might feel like blocking them or taunting them can be fun but you are just wasting your time. They usually have scripts to avoid you anyway.
• SE should continue to have a 0 tolerance policy for people purchasing from bots. No exceptions. They should make it a bit more clear/evident and I HOPE that cash-shoppers are not "immune" or at least less susceptible to bans like I have seen in other games...

[esra01]

As a former CM on another MMO, I feel like most players have no idea how bots work....

Yeah i know that banning the mass produced bots that are below lvl 50 are pretty much a lost cause. But can't they do something about bots that actually have lots of effort put into it? I mean some player use bots just for their personal use whether it is to buy a house, gather high end material, or craft lvl 80 gears. Those bots need some time investment to make, heck I think i found some of them that are using their main account to bot since SE did literally nothing to prevent it. Seriously i found one that has level 80 in everything and I found him because his fishing bot is broken for a long period of time ( 4+ hours until he realized that the bot is glitched out )