How is the botting situation in this game?

[Ashua]

Botting is the single biggest issue the player base has. Balmung enjoyed a period of a botting rarity when it was on lockdown and prices were much less controlled by automation. Yes, the housing incident was bad but even I and my nephew had our chance at camping a house and acquired a few to give to roleplayers over the years until the housing bots really started to become saturated. But all of these statements are meaningless. The point is botting is suppose to be against the terms of playing. Lots of people have gone unpunished and the ease for even non-rmt people to acquire a bot is flimsy easy. There should be no obscure middle argument. Either allow it or crackdown and deal with it aggressively by giving the players the tools to report these people and go after the most public and advertising bots that are spammed on every fan website. There are just a handful and what those bots can do is crazy. People use these bots to do ultimate modes as a team. No, the bot cannot do it all but it has scripts that know the pattern of every fight and optimizes rotation and potion use. The bots are very advanced because it's been ignored. It lets them control the Market place, housing, and high-end content by being able to teleport to safe spots in raids. There is no middle ground. Either let everyone have the same advantage the cheaters do or create tools to let us report these cheaters without taking 10 minutes to go through tedious interfaces that are purposely placed to discourage reports of illegal behavior. And even then they are ignored unless they rmt spam or teleport blatantly.

[KageTokage]

It's not a stretch to say that bots have gotten involved in basically all of the content FFXIV has to offer at this point.

As the previous poster mentioned, while they can't fully automate high-end content like savage/ultimate, they are able to trivialize rotations and resolve certain mechanics; particularly untelegraphed AoEs.

Everything else is free game for them, though, as the few things that are too complicated for them to handle properly either don't punish them for death and/or can be resolved by just having them follow a random DPS player in their party and count on them for safety.

[Vickii]

Do you mean the crafter/gatherer jobs? How would you cheat that?

There’s quite a few. You have some advanced MB bots that undercut items by 1 Gil every few minutes and automatically remake and relist anything that sells. Which gives normal players either a few minutes window or you have to sell at under the price the bot will cut down to, which is usually not worth it.

Another thing they’ll do is set a price which is on the low side to begin with, list at this price and remake and relist once sold. For example all of the Tsuku glamours are sold on my server for 1.6 million. Which is profitable for this bot selling every single one, but I could only sell it for 1.59 million which is the same as the mat to make it.

Gathering bots tend to keep the prices stable. If not for them you’d occasionally make some great sales, but they tend to ensure there is always supply and they’re willing to undercut you.

Generally the bots control the market. But SE doesn’t care. The worst one on our server has been reported multiple times by multiple people and they just ignore it.

[Vickii]

If bots were gone, sure you'd have to pay more for certain materials. But you can also make more money on them at the same time and with a proper profit, be able to afford the price of things that've increased once bot activity is brought under control.

This. I imagine the guy defending bots buys Gil because that’s the literal only ‘benefit’ to having bots on the server.

If there were no bots at all you’d see that players would compete for their spots. If I saw you were selling straw at 9999 Gil I’d sell for 9000, you’d undercut. We may very well arrive back at current prices, as it will then come down to who is willing to buy at what price.

Someone might buy my expensive straw but use it to make a hat that he can sell for a higher price than he can now. Which he wouldn’t do right now because there’s no profit.

While bots are selling ‘straw’ or ‘hat’ for the lowest possible price they can make a profit in bulk quantities, of course real players aren’t going to waste time in that market. But they would once the bots were gone and it would find a new balance, only you’d know you were competing against someone else with the same restrictions on you (free time, sleep etc).

[Vickii]

Im gonna be frank, Im a bit skeptical of your take. It could very well be that way on Brynhildr, but on Sarg here it isnt. I have had no trouble making money on the MB as most of my items tend to sell without issue. To drive that point home, in the last 6 months, Ive made about 40 or so million Gil from selling Whistles from POTD on the MB. And that wasnt even me grinding hard on it. Other items Ive sold are mats from maps, weapons or item materials from EX mode trials, and misc junk brought back from my retainers.

Part of hte issue, when discussing botting, is that there is a lot of hyperbole surrounding it. To say botting causes no issues isnt right, but on the flip side, suggesting that you havent made any money selling anything cause bots is also likely not correct. Even the consideration for things like housing sniping Im a bit iffy on. If the issue is sell by transfer by doing the FC option, yeah that's a problem that need to be rectified. It's a pretty glaring loophole. There are a bunch of ways they can resolve it, like being unable to purchase an FC house for a certain period of time after the FC is formed, being unable to transfer ownership to a player unless theyve been part of the FC for a set period of time, or requiring a minimum number of players above lvl 20 in an FC to remain intact. But I digress. The issue with house sniping is outside of that, I dont know anyone who buys up a house from someone else because of the random buy timer. If anything, for a while on Sarg there was a glut of houses because people werent buying.

Being on the game as long as I have, I dont see botting as 'getting worse'. There are definitely outlier events, like that time where Uldah had like 40 some odd bots bug out and get stuck in a loop, but I generally dont encounter bots that often in teh real world, and I still am able to make money with relative ease on the MB. If anything, Ive seen a decrease in RMT spam. This si anecdotal, I get it, but I dont think Im the only one with this outlook. Frankly, I think the OFs and Reddit tend to blow up the bot issue bigger than it really is simply because it's easy to collect a bunch of disparate small events and paste them all together to give the impression it's destroying everything.

You’re selling items from palace of the dead and retainer junk. Try selling some high end crafted gear and come back to us.

[Nepentha]

Just snipping all of this out because lol

To sum up: Ok, boomer.