The amount of bots teleporting around is absolutely unbelievable

[Sephrinxx]

I'm no noob to online games or MMOs, I've seen my fair share of bots and what not, but this is just unreal. I literally stood at Mother Miounne in New Gridania for 2 minutes recording bots and probably saw at least 100 of them.

I know for 100% certaintly that these movement patterns and exploits are detectable. Why are they not banned?

I've added as many as I can to my friends list to watch them level and not get banned. For some reason you can only add 5 friends per day (lmao?? what??) and have been reporting them, but the difficulty and time it takes to report them is pretty steep.

[Kuroka]

Its a fight agains windmills and everyone has already given up, sadly... yes its stupid, the fact that they can go where no normal player could is a joke...

[Kurando]

Bots do get dealt with just not immediately. Honestly just focus on playing the game and enjoying yourself, it's not worth investing time in reporting every single one that you see as bots will always be present somewhere or another.

[Goji1639]

Bots are only really a problem for crafters trying to make money on the MB. I don't think they influence any other part of the game.

To solve that I feel like crafting should offer monetary incentives that don't rely on the player economy. Like maybe a weekly for maxed out omnicrafters that awards a large sum of gil.

[Puremallace]

See weekly developer notes on just how many accounts they ban in a week. Popular games will attract them.

[ItMe]

I am a bot-spotting baby.
What about their movements is so distinguishable?
How do you know those players were bots?

[Lilseph]

Why are they not banned?

For RMTs, the general gist of it is that if the Devs decided to ban them instantly, the RMTs can almost instantly figure out how the Devs are detecting their bots and immediately look for other methods to bypass that detection. The Devs detect the new way the RMTs are bypassing the cheat detection and patch it, only for the RMTs to do the same and look for another way to bypass it. It's a perpetual cycle of patch and exploit which the Devs can't do much to fix else it could affect the general playerbase negativity (i.e. chat restrictions, teleport restrictions, and etc.).

Banning the bots en masse delays the RMT from finding out what is causing the bots to be detected, even though they inevitably will figure it out. You'll normally see a huge crowd of bots popping up just after a ban wave (which one actually happened recently), so that's probably why you saw a lot of them earlier.

As for actual players that are botting, tough to say. Have seen some survive till this day, so I'm not sure what's going on with that.

[Ilenya]

Bots are only really a problem for crafters trying to make money on the MB. I don't think they influence any other part of the game.

To solve that I feel like crafting should offer monetary incentives that don't rely on the player economy. Like maybe a weekly for maxed out omnicrafters that awards a large sum of gil.

They can be an issue if the story requires you to kill certain enemies. I had a run in on an alt a while back that had issues with this.

[Seddrinth]

Bots are only really a problem for crafters trying to make money on the MB. I don't think they influence any other part of the game.

To solve that I feel like crafting should offer monetary incentives that don't rely on the player economy. Like maybe a weekly for maxed out omnicrafters that awards a large sum of gil.

I don't craft. I buy everything on mb. So you are telling me that bots are actually helpful for players like me?

[Liam_Harper]

Bots are only really a problem for crafters trying to make money on the MB. I don't think they influence any other part of the game.

To solve that I feel like crafting should offer monetary incentives that don't rely on the player economy. Like maybe a weekly for maxed out omnicrafters that awards a large sum of gil.

They affect leaderboards, such as Ishgard and have been known to run dungeons and PvP, affecting the gameplay experience for the rest of the team. They fill the server and cause queues. They also frequently cause some dungeons to become choked up and break the instance queue, Amdapor Keep being the most popular botting dungeon.

They also heavily crash the price of gathering materials, not just crafting. As for your idea to award maxed out omnicrafters with gil, there are maxed out omnicraft bots. Not to mention pushing large sums of raw gil into the economy will cause inflation.