Bot problem getting worse on Dynamis

[Avoidy]

I have never seen such bots and I doubt they exist.

Probably bait but idc, this post unlocked a memory and I'm bored. I remember when I first began playing this game and thought this was true, that there were no bots. I hadn't seen any, after all. I was super impressed by how there was no anticheat running in the background but there were also somehow no bots running around. I thought maybe since SE was running the show, they'd used their riches and resources to somehow do the impossible. Then, about a week into playing the game, I was standing in Limsa by that tree near the aetheryte. A midlander male approached the edge of the invisible wall... and stepped off. Then he flew away, walking on air, and disappeared after a while, sort of like Mary Poppins vanishing over the horizon only without an umbrella. The doubts began to form in my mind. Later, shortly after Shadowbringers came out and the game was extremely popular, I tried to leave Ul'dah. The game told me the zone outside was congested, and to try again later. Parked on top of me were other players who had been similarly booted. Except their names were all gibberish. And they were all little lalafell boys who looked the exact same. My doubts deepened.

And then, one day, somebody in Limsa told me to type /icam and look around for a bit. I did. icam opened the "idle camera" mode, which is just a mode where you can use a cool camera that randomly jumps to different players in a town. It's like a fun way to people watch without moving your character around, because the camera does it for you. The camera swapped over to a Roegadyn relaxing by a tree. To a lalafell running to the market. To a catboy seducing another catboy. And then... the camera leapt to another player who was underneath the city. And sure enough, he was a lalaboy who looked like the lalafell boys I mentioned earlier. Basic preset lalaboy, under the city. And he was standing in a tightly packed cluster of lalaboys that all looked just like him, huddled together like spider eggs, under the city. Just standing there. All with gibberish names. Waiting.


Later still, I learned that actually, this game is extremely insecure. I have seen people using certain naughty tools to simply tell the game "hey, I can run really really fast" and the game just says "seems legit to me" and that's how you get those guys who zoom through Ul'dah at Sonic speeds for memes. They don't even get banned because, I guess, even if the game detects some stuff server side, nothing comes of it?? I don't know. There was a bald dude in Balmung who would literally speed through uldah whenever I saw him, and afaik homie's still chillin'. Used to see him all the time. Dude seemed like a chill memer so I'm not trying to put him on blast, just saying like ... nobody on staff seems to give a shit about enforcing anything unless you hurt someone's feelings in a dungeon with mean words. Do I personally care? Hell no. I think this shit's funny af. But it's just another example of how this game's full of holes and god I hope we never have to deal with gameguard or xigncode or some other garbage rootkit trash that makes games run like crap, but I wouldn't be surprised if one day the devs just threw their hands up and installed something, because every year people get bolder and stupider. Best part is, those anticheats don't even work half the time; the genuine cheaters bypass it with ease and regular users get banned for false positives. God I hope we don't see that crap in this game ever.