Quote Originally Posted by Johners View Post
Banning in waves is often the strategy other MMOs use. It has worked relatively well for Blizzard that used ban waves psychology. Enough players felt like they got away with it, got attached to having their cheated stuff and then banned them while removing it. Worked really well during Warlords of Draenor when there were several major ban waves during that expansion in the run up to the release of Legion.

The bigger issue in this game is the fact a lot of cheating isn't visible to players directly and Square Enix have no anti-cheat to actually detect it with. Unless the player admits it or you suspect and report them, it's more than likely that you'll get away with it. Square Enix should really start taking ownership of this including the implementation of an anti-cheat.
The reason why online games ban in waves is because fighting cheaters is an arms race. You build systems to detect cheaters, and the cheaters build countermeasures to circumvent the detection. Repeat to infinity.

If someone makes a botting program, and they get instantly banned as soon as the bot does something weird, that gives the bot-maker a HUGE clue about what tripped the detection, and therefore what they should change to make the bot harder to detect. By accumulating known bots over time and then banning in waves, it gives bot makers a lot less information about how they're being caught.

Whether or not SE is being aggressive enough with banning bots is another matter. I doubt it's something they're ignoring, but if the scale of the problem is starting to get out of hand and their current strategies are no longer enough to keep it in check then they might eventually need to take some bigger steps like adding real anti-cheat. I think they're reluctant to do that out of privacy or legal concerns though.