Firmament Botting Out Of Control

[Eriane_Elis]

I won't deny I'm really disappointed that they didn't take any measures to make the Firmament/Diadem experience more interesting/fulfilling.

The FATEs in the former could've been a regular thing and also more a involved process; perhaps allowing you to actually craft things to use for the repairs and gain bonus skyward points as a result.

Diadem could've had collectables/aetherial reduction as an alternative to just brainlessly hitting nodes, and perhaps some "boss" monsters that take a collective effort from the players there to reap a large reward.

As far as the botting goes, almost all of the people from my server I see doing it there have an established history of doing it pretty much any time they're on DoL/H jobs though, so it's not like it pushed them over the edge or anything; they just find gathering/crafting fundamentally uninteresting. There isn't any actual risk to doing it, either, as SE's three strike policy means that unless you had prior offenses, you're just going to get a slap on the wrist if you do somehow get caught.

I think the problem with Aehterial reduction is RNG. Statistics takes in consideration say 60% success but for a pool of 1000 people with a 0.2% margin. Meaning, there's a possibility of a few people who might almost always get whatever you're supposed to get with aehterial reduction so it's not 60% success for you, but as an average. But I get your point. My first issue here is that everyone gains a tremendous amount of gathering and crafting XP. This is upsetting because how many of us gained those levels by gathering and crafting things for like 2 months straight? Now you can level everything in a few days tops. It should have been more like PotD where your level goes up as you keep doing it. Adding to this point, and yours, the collectable idea isn't a bad idea per-se. But, to avoid botting there should be some kind of added dynamic to the mix and exactly what is hard to say but it could have been tied somehow to diadem-only gathering levels. It really comes down to how gathering is so dull in this game and how it easily invites bots. Plus, it doesn't help that SE doesn't monitor player bound positions so well. I get people can fall through the floor from time to time (I have) but bots are entirely different. They teleport from node to node and/or move irregularly. This should be an easy thing to monitor but it isn't. Oh well, whatever I guess. It's part of doing something new, lessons will be learned for the future. Kind of like how Eureka was an improvement to diadem.