Has Square Enix given up on countering RMT and botting?

[DigbyCaesar]

Oh cool! A thread I can respond to. I reported the same bots in multiple zones roughly every day for 6 months. Terrible random letter names, obviously identifiable repeated route pathing, same rotation for hours on end, Only one job at 80/90 but every single crafting/gathering job maxed out...

They are still there. FFXIV can say they ban RMT/botters, but I know for a FACT that this is not true. I've reported an unfathomable number of bots and they are all still there, gathering, every single day. Every single one. I've provided photos. I've provided video footage. Nothing is working.

The RMT announcements where they announce the numbers are absolutely inflated and are a lie that a large majority of players are falling for. I'm not saying they don't ban people because I think people that get reported in mass for rmt chat spamming get banned, but gathering botters definitely are not getting banned when I report them every single day for half a year.

This is what gets to me too. They show these large numbers which tbh, are likely true, but people fixate on the "9,000 players banned" part but not realise that those are only RMT advertisers which is what it specifically says on their banwaves.

Their actual ban count for people botting is almost nil. I posted a breakdown of their reported bans and suspensions for botting earlier in this thread, but it doesn't hurt to put it back in (suspended players in parenthesis):

03/03/22 - 4(4)
24/02/22 - 0(0)
17/02/22 - 0(2)
10/02/22 - 0(10)
03/02/22 - 0(4)
27/01/22 - 0(0)
20/01/22 - 0(3)
13/01/22 - 1(2)
06/01/22 - 0(12)
23/12/21- 0(7)

The part that hurts the most about those figures, is that this is for every data centre.

[Saraide]

This is the problematic perspective people have right now.

On the surface, the result to all this botting is "we get things cheaper". But what will you get to sell then if you have bots constantly undercutting you? What happens when new players come into this game wanting to make a few mil but literally can't?

There's more pressure to resort to RMT under the circumstances that exist now, and that pressure is being put on by RMT sellers. When people buy those 5000 wind crystals for 100k that was farmed by bots, that goes directly into the pockets of an RMT seller to redistribute.

Don't get stuck on the simplicity of things, botting has cascading effects.

There are two things that become much harder in a bot infested economy, getting the money to buy a house (lol) and getting the money to buy the gold mounts. It absolutely negatively affects crafters and that's why I think SE should do something about it but unless you mean to tell me that a majority of players are heavy into crafting the unfortunate reality is that more people benefit even in the long run. Making a few million gil isnt even that hard right now with our messed up ingame economy.

[DigbyCaesar]

There are two things that become much harder in a bot infested economy, getting the money to buy a house (lol) and getting the money to buy the gold mounts. It absolutely negatively affects crafters and that's why I think SE should do something about it but unless you mean to tell me that a majority of players are heavy into crafting the unfortunate reality is that more people benefit even in the long run. Making a few million gil isnt even that hard right now with our messed up ingame economy.

I'm glad I've been given an opportunity to provide a window into the predatory nature of RMT.

Yes, to most of us, we don't need to worry about gil because we have everything pretty much maxed out, we know the ins and outs of the game, it still hinders our ability to sell what we used to be able to sell, but let's put that aside for the bigger picture.

To new players (and I've seen this too many times now), they come into this game not knowing what we know, so they look and ask around and the usual answer is "level up your crafters". So they look up guides on how to level this and that, and there's one website that usually stands out, people have sent this to me on countless occasions asking me what certain things mean in the guide.

Putting their questions aside, the first instruction in EACH of their crafter guides is "Get 3-5 million gil". Wanna know what they suggest below? "Use our gil store".

WE know that you don't need that amount of money to level your crafters, but new players do not. And when they go on these sites where it says "Use our gil store" they might question it, and funnily enough there's an FAQ just for those people on that very site that says:

Is your gil really legit? Is it still against ToS?
ALL of our gil is obtained legally by members of the Gillionaire Girls and cannot be traced back to any illicit activity that breaks Square Enix’s Terms of Services.

It is still against Square’s ToS to buy or sell gil; however we maintain a very low-key operation that has never resulted in anyone being banned, reported or even contacted by Square Enix.

You can be confident that you are not buying “dirty” money from us and your account will not be associated with anything that breaks ToS.

We do not accept gil from any sources that we cannot verify as 100% legitimate, as it could damage the integrity of our business and our reputation as the only dedicated seller of legit Final Fantasy XIV gil.

If you're wondering which website I'm referring to, look up FFXIV gillionaire and see how they plaster their operation on 2/3 of every page (including their guides). People come to me thinking they are genuinely reading good advice.

Edit: 99% likely that they get their gil from the bots who sell crystals and farm maps/eureka fates etc.

[Saraide]

I'm glad I've been given an opportunity to provide a window into the predatory nature of RMT.

(snip)

Edit: 99% likely that they get their gil from the bots who sell crystals and farm maps/eureka fates etc.

Thank you for your insight. I absolutely agree that SE should do something about it. But I am far from confident that they will for the reasons that it's not harming enough people for SE to care and that it's not in people's faces enough (like run sellers were) to be bad publicity. For as long as there is an ingame economy there will be RMT, getting completely rid of it is a dream at best. But making it more difficult would improve the prices for honest sellers atleast a bit.

One of those things is something to be done about: publicity. If it gets brought up regularly in interviews and Q&A sessions surely SE has to do something eventually, right?

I'm sorry if I came across saying that RMT/gatherer bots harm no one, that was not my intention. My point was that it's not harming enough people for SE to care.

[KageTokage]

I'm going to assume the primary way those RMTers traffic gil is just by having the buyer post an overpriced item on the market, then the seller buys the item.

I've heard stories about people getting pulled aside by GMs because they saw they were repeatedly being given millions of gil via trading or mails which is probably going look more suspicious then the former.

If they actually started cracking down on the farm bots, it would be extremely easy to trace them back to the sellers and shut down their operations, though. You can already draw lines sometimes just from looking at who crafted a bot's gear...though it often ends up being a long chain of several bots making gear for one another that finally stops at an actual player.

[DigbyCaesar]

Thank you for your insight. I absolutely agree that SE should do something about it. But I am far from confident that they will for the reasons that it's not harming enough people for SE to care and that it's not in people's faces enough (like run sellers were) to be bad publicity. For as long as there is an ingame economy there will be RMT, getting completely rid of it is a dream at best. But making it more difficult would improve the prices for honest sellers atleast a bit.

One of those things is something to be done about: publicity. If it gets brought up regularly in interviews and Q&A sessions surely SE has to do something eventually, right?

I'm sorry if I came across saying that RMT/gatherer bots harm no one, that was not my intention. My point was that it's not harming enough people for SE to care.

Oh I definitely agree with that.

The fact is, the devs care about the state of the game, and the corporate side of SE only cares about the money.

If their revenue goes up because of botting, they'll do everything they can to ignore what's going on. The actual FF team (CBU3) likely don't want this situation but it wouldn't surprise me if they couldn't present a strong enough argument with SE to ban SE accounts due to botting.

There's only one of two ways SE would ever act on this and it would either be because the game garners a reputation as a bot haven (a negative reputation), or much less likely, player count drops significantly enough to the point where even botters wouldn't want to play lol.

But that's why it's just better to be vocal about the situation, yeah people don't want or don't like to hear it, but if isn't being talked about frequently, we aren't putting enough pressure on the devs to try harder.

At the end of the day, we're all paying for a subscription which comes with a service agreement. We all pay and abide by the rules given to us by the service providers. But in most cases, if people pay for a service and watch people freely break rules of that service, it makes you question the integrity of the service you're paying for.