Request: Anti-cheat system for rampant botting.

[Enkidoh]

The trouble with bots are that no matter what SE tries to implement to defeat them, the bot makers and their users will always find a way around it, it's a zero sum game. Worse, countermeasures SE may implement often just end up negatively impacting legitimate players and the bots still continue unabated.

A FFXIV example was version 1.0 - part of the reason 1.0's client was so notoriously laggy was the client had a function that inspected each packet between the client and the server, checking to see if any third-party program - read: bots - were in use, and would send alerts to SE and the GMs accordingly if any were found. However, this did not work nearly as good in practice, and just made the game chug badly, adding to the lag and issues. And the bots still managed to find workarounds and infested the game anyway, making the whole thing moot.

That's not to say they should just give up fighting botting - I too would love to see the game rid of them and RMT in general - and there have been times where countermeasures they added against botting have been effective (such as the Steps of Faith trial at the end of ARR having mechanics that bots simply could not cheese through, thus it ensured bots were essentially blocked from HW areas for over a year, only when SE nerfed the trial considerably were bots able to get passed it (and not helped by the bot AI learning how to fight in it); and then there were the infamous anti-fishing-bot 'Goblin Bounty Hunters' (or 'GBHs') in FFXI against bots crowding fishing spots), so measures against bots do work, it's just not a simple matter of "do something about botting." It's a complex issue that requires a lot of time, planning and effort to properly combat.