Cheating and RMT exploitation has hit a new level of ridiculous.

[KageTokage]

I've gotten into a mentality where I just try to tune out bots after months/years of fruitless reports, but this latest little incident was way too egregious to ignore



If you're wondering what you're looking at, this is a full party of level 90 FSH bots farming Lunar Deathworms (Presumably for purple scrips) in a cave at Mare Lamentorum; most easily discernable whenever they have to move awkwardly around to prevent the "fish sense something amiss" gimmick from kicking in or when they're flying back after doing scrip turn-ins.

They are mostly in the same FC (Though I hid that and their names for obvious reasons), and they are additionally using some kind of hack that is basically removing the animation from the Hook abilities to speed up their fishing significantly.

There are also some wanderers behaving in the exact same manner that lead me to believe this was an Aether DC wide operation, and sure enough, they were present in varying numbers in this same spot on every single server on the DC. In total I counted around 30 them of; all level 90 FSH who by all appearances were level-skipped and only progressed the MSQ far enough to gain flight in Mare Lamentorum. A lot of them also are using the Zu or gorilla mount, which suggests they leveled FSH using the Diadem then opted to dump their skybuilder scrips on those for reasons unknown.

Their FCs have several additional level 20ish members that are just holed up in the Limsa Lominsa inn doing...something, though judging from them having CUL at level 30, I'm assuming they're desynthing the garbage fish from the bots to squeeze as much gil out of the process as possible.

If you're on Aether DC, I think it would be prudent to check this out and mass report the bots in question because I haven't seen an operation on this scale since the ARR gil farmers were a thing and it would set a rather worrying precedent if they're able to get away with brazenly hacking on top of automating gameplay.