Crafting and Marketboard botting

[Halivel]

I guess what you are meaning is that its more important to make the money than it is to have a reputation. this game is well liked by the bot/cheater community for its ambivalence towards botting/cheating. I dont know about you, but as a business... thats not a reputation I would want, nor money I desire.

as for banning... getting rid of a level 1 RMT barker in a major city is hardly a landmark achievement, or the underground harvesters... they go after the easy to find ones. The ones creating teh money for RMT actions are left alone to operate for years.

It's not what I tried to say really. I'll try to explain. Rather than not caring about reputation, I'm not sure as to what exactly they can do to prevent massive botting to begin with. Other games would go for in-game tools selling in-game money for real ones (something what, iirc, WoW does, for example). I'm not sure now, but if my memory isn't broken completely, people asked about possibilities to have similar system in FF14 and the answer was no. And yet, it would have been the most efficient one - if people can buy Gil legally, there's no need for them go to sellers in general (though even then it likely won't solve the issue completely).

Another step is to prohibit using trading tools on free accounts - something what already is in the game so on this account they did it right (because otherwise it would be even worse than it already is). The thing is, without in-game erm... "gil trader", let's call it this, there's nothing really to stop the further spread, given that they can simply buy another copy of the game. You could of course hard-ban them by IP, but this will only result in hurting usual players, while bot-holders will simply use VPN and continue to do what they do. And this is what i meant by saying that situation is weird - there's no way to prevent botters from buying new copies, because you can't really say if a person is a normal player or not when they register their code on Mog Station, it's something what you can tell only later based on reports.

So the only option I see atm is to actually make their team that works specifically with bots and rmt bigger so there are enough hands to fight in the first place (you said yourself there are like, 4 people doing this, which is... nowhere enough in a game that became this big and popular). There may be better solutions (and there IS one, mentioned in first sentences) but for some reason they can't apply it, which is almost a shame, as I'm quite sure it would've been much more beneficial for them than botters buying base edition.

[Tuska]

if people can buy Gil legally, there's no need for them go to sellers in general (though even then it likely won't solve the issue completely).

That will rarely do anything, I used to play Archeage, they had a sub token called Apex, 1 Apex cost $10. Depending on your server you could sell it for like 2k gold (that's just a random number idr the actual price people sold it for) on the auction house. You need 2 apexes for a sub so a total of 4k right? People would just buy 4k for around $4 which in turn has people getting their sub for cheaper entirely. If you subbed normally it was like $15? Or you can just buy gold for $4...

I believe it's the same in WoW, people just buy the gold to pay for the sub and it all comes out cheaper. This might be why they won't do something like that, it's obvious they can't detect the bots, so this would just help people get cheaper subs.

Also a lot of people bot to sell accounts probably takes like, what a week botting to get to max level? Sell the account and the account is not in actual hands of a player making it even harder to detect. They can't just go off "Oh this person has been mining for 24 hours" some people are hardcore, some people are neets, some people will switch out and have a younger sibling or child do it. It's based off inputs and movement and if the bot is codded nicely, it's hard to detect.

I find it crazy how common bots are here, in a game where ultimately nothing is difficult or "matters". In Archeage is a heavy pvp game, world bosses are pvp, securing your trade packs, pvp, robbing people to make gold, pvp, etc and I could count on one hand the amount of bots I saw in the 5 years I've played it. Hell maybe if that stopped with all the annoying systems (like crafting scripts) that might cut down on the botting people try to by pass.