How long does it take to remove a BOT

[LaylaTsarra]

My experience with gather bots is they're very hard to get banned. They're really easy to spot and I know I've personally reported them many times. I can only remember being successful with one on Gilgamesh but that sure didn't stop the horde of others. I can only suspect it's gotten a lot worse given i haven't been into gather/sell for awhile.

[KageTokage]

If it's openly cheating using hacks, they'll usually get banned within the week.

If it's a more typical bot that's just running 24/7 and constantly following the same path/sequence of actions, they almost never actually get removed.

Whatever "methods" they use to detect bots seriously need some refinement if not even those parties of treasure map bots doing conga lines across Norvrandt are obvious enough to be banned.

[Hyperia]

Unfortunately gather bots are apart of the economy now and if they were to kill every one of them, they would have to go and rebalance all of the crafting. So yea… they’re not going anywhere.

[KageTokage]

Unfortunately gather bots are apart of the economy now and if they were to kill every one of them, they would have to go and rebalance all of the crafting. So yea… they’re not going anywhere.

That is really not the case. If there's enough of a market, people will go out and gather their own materials to sell or use for themselves.

The economy is not going to explode if the bots disappear. Rather, players will see an opportunity to make money and take advantage of it. The main reason they even "rely" on bots is because they basically own all of the mainstream markets by resorting to overstocking and/or aggressive, automated undercutting that makes it difficult for legit players to get anything sell. They also thrive on the fact that they are not actually playing the game, and thus they can comfortably sell things at prices much lower then actual players would be okay with as they don't feel a need to factor in a labor/time cost into their pricing.

[_Koneko_]

even if they ban a bot two more will take their place their like Hydra

[Liam_Harper]

Never.

A normal player doesn't break and stand on the spot mounting and dismounting on loop for half an hour ...twice, but the gatherer who I caught doing exactly that and reported is still there 8 months later doing almost 24/7 on timed nodes.

[KageTokage]

I can only assume that all of the level 80 bots are "legit" and actually paid for Shadowbringers and/or a level/story skip to not have been banned for so long, which would mean they're actually pulling in enough RMT sales to support their sub fees and other expenses.

Which further makes me think SE needs to put more emphasis on punishing the buyers then going after the ones generating the gil, because you can never truly solve that problem as long as those slash and burn ARR gil farmers exist. You can, however, scare people into not wanting buy gil in the first place.