How is the botting situation in this game?

[Fyrefox45]

Look at your servers marketboard. 70% of the lowest items are gonna be made by 1 crafter. That crafter will be in an FC, live in an apartment room 24/7 crafting, and his alt marketboard bots will be undercutting 24/7 selling everything and then restocking from the FC chest in town. They aren't remotely subtle about it.

[Metalwrath]

There is deffintly healers botting for DR relic grind.I dont know about if the bots for detecting s ranks and a ranks are still a thing but i know when i was on odin there was deffintly 1 or 2 fcs that did this the whole time.although afaik one fc moved to ragnarok over a year ago and i moved to zodiark.Even with Crossworld travel hunting doesnt seem to be anywhere near as bad as it used to be with afk bots to scout out spawns.
There was at one point issued with the armies of archer bots coming from grinadia but i dont see them on quite a while.
I only see the occasional blm bot tping at quest markers.They may have done something to stop the running through walls glitch the bots used to use.Im not to sure.
The main bot activity seems to have been still with gatherers and crafters.Its been especially rampant on a lot of servers for the ishgard title.Not sure why though.the titles arent even good.

[KageTokage]

I dont know about if the bots for detecting s ranks and a ranks are still a thing but i know when i was on odin there was deffintly 1 or 2 fcs that did this the whole time.although afaik one fc moved to ragnarok over a year ago and i moved to zodiark.Even with Crossworld travel hunting doesnt seem to be anywhere near as bad as it used to be with afk bots to scout out spawns.

The "hunt radar" functionality is just baked into most of the common bots these days, thus if a S rank happens to spawn in a ShB zone, every single user of that particular bot is immediately privy to its location. This resulted in hunts frequently being picked off without a server's local hunters even being aware that something had spawned.

It got bad enough that a lot of the hunt trackers/discords are now linked to those very bots to ensure that nothing escapes the notice of those who actually try to maintain some semblance of order to the hunting by logging kill times and relaying.

Just another example of how the prevalence of bots has pressured players into changing how they play the game. I personally find it rather vexing that I can seldom spawn a S rank hunt these days without a huge horde of players instantly knowing where it is.

[SavishSalacious]

The markets ARE RUN BY BOTS. And the gathering and crafting is ALSO run by bots.

[Berkilak]

The Exarchic market on my server was tanked over the weekend. Someone came through and undercut every item to 40-60k when, previously, many of these items were regularly selling for well over double that, usually in the 80k ballpark.

All the bots then undercut that, essentially "setting" that as the default price for weeks to come.

Fun times.

[Kyrj]

I'm almost positive SE doesn't care about the bots, and before the "AcTuAlLy" people arrive, sure they may be doing...something but for the life of me I can't figure out what. Whatever it is SE is doing it's clearly not working and they don't seem to be acknowledging that their steps are useless and sad or acknowledge that the bots are a problem.

Hell even the bots in WoW don't openly cheat as bad as the bots in this game.

[Jijifli]

I'm almost positive SE doesn't care about the bots, and before the "AcTuAlLy" people arrive, sure they may be doing...something but for the life of me I can't figure out what. Whatever it is SE is doing it's clearly not working and they don't seem to be acknowledging that their steps are useless and sad or acknowledge that the bots are a problem.

Pretty sure the ones they mention every week or two on the lodestone are just accounts that had a chargeback. It seems if a player is actually paying money for the sub, then nothing seems to get done unless there's enough people screaming about it at the same time (Like, that one who posted on the forums how his bot was ruined by a retainer and they spent 7m on fish, even that took 2 weeks to actually have action taken.)

Hell even the bots in WoW don't openly cheat as bad as the bots in this game.

Though I will say WoW's is really bad, and really public too. Though, I'll note that they haven't shown much advancement in methods, while ffxiv's getting to the point where there's bot map parties, which is horribly bad because even gathering bots still only take other player's money via selling, while map bots actually generate millions into the economy.

Granted that's something they'd done before, but those ones are chargeback'd level 50 ones, vs now where it's 80's generating in a run like 400k per bot, in raw.

[Nepentha]

I'm almost positive SE doesn't care about the bots, and before the "AcTuAlLy" people arrive, sure they may be doing...something but for the life of me I can't figure out what. Whatever it is SE is doing it's clearly not working and they don't seem to be acknowledging that their steps are useless and sad or acknowledge that the bots are a problem.

Hell even the bots in WoW don't openly cheat as bad as the bots in this game.

At this point, the only things that will possibly motivate them are people unsubbing (unlikely) or bad publicity (more likely the longer this goes on and the louder people get).

[KageTokage]

The point about the bots not being sustainable is pretty valid because if they're constantly buying out allegory mats they're going to drive up the prices on those while at the same time they're constantly driving the sell value of the stuff they craft into the floor due to their undercut wars.

The worst thing is that all of the legit crafters are getting caught up in the crossfire and strictly suffer because of it.

[gumas]

i always feel like SE is actually doing something about bots but cant keep up with how fast the bots keep appearing, and it gotten worse now that the game pretty much F2P all the way until HW expansion.

at least its not as bad as wow bots, i have seen this bots in certain area, took screenshot of it, report it and go do my own things, month later i check back and the bots are still there, same name, the very same bots still doing the same thing for a whole month and now there is 4 of them