Bots, is anything really ever going to be done about them?

[Sorjal]

This is intended to be a serious discussion about them. They still seem to be everywhere, vending bots, market board pricing bots, crafting bots, gathering bots, etc.

Is anything ever going to be done about them or is it some unwritten rule that they will always be there and you either ignore them or perhaps Square actually wants them because they're more paid subs which feeds into their marketing about the millions of subscribers?

They're not hard to locate in the crafting, gathering, and market board related iterations.

Heck you could probably auto suspend any new account that /say 5gold.com + some other key words.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Bots are bad for SE because the big farms use stolen credit cards,which is part of the reason for the payment processor change SE had to do. CC fraud and chargebacks hurts them far more than the subs help from those accounts.




The shoutbots arent the problem and get banned quickly. Its the farms that are the problem. they get banned in waves but theres not much you can really do to stop them. SE really should just start permabanning gil buyers.

[Kes13a]

bot will always be in a game because there is real money to be made. until they do something to cut into that, such as banning the people BUYING the services (gil or leveling etc), and start with a several week ban for the first offense and lifetime for the second...

as long as our fellow players spend real life cash for in game services or items... anything done to the bots is useless, because they will just make more

[Jeeqbit]

Heck you could probably auto suspend any new account that /say

They already seem to do that because when someone gets their account compromised, they will often be used to advertise and then someone reports it. They also tend to round them up and ban in waves so that they can't tell how they were identified as a bot.

[Kaurhz]

Probably not.

There's a massive amount of money that I would argue people make from this, so there are always going to be methods that will be used to bypass or workaround whatever ideas SE comes up with. Whilst there is money to be made, there is always going to be participation in overcoming what SE achieves.

Short of indulging in this themselves, e.g., actually making Platinum Allagan Coins buyable, or just going all out against the people buying then there isn't much you will be able to do

[Sebazy]

If SE worked smart, they could absolutely crack down hard on the gil botting and farming scene as a whole.

The problem is that it would cost them a not insignificant amount of manpower and development time to do it. The nail in the coffin is that SE won't get any actual return on said investment.

It was a *FAR* bigger issue in FFXI and nothing of note was ever done there that I'm aware of. It's a sad reality of modern gaming unfortunately.

[Jeeqbit]

The nail in the coffin is that SE won't get any actual return on said investment.

Depends. If it is causing players enough distress, it could be losing them subscriptions, and solving it could potentially make more people want to play. if the situation is bad enough that people are unsubscribing due to it.

So I think if we are looking at it from a financial return perspective, that it is a balancing act; they only need to invest enough in the issue that it doesn't bother players enough to make them stop playing.

[Turtledeluxe]

No

Thank you for your question.

Please continue to sub.

[Sorjal]

A quick internet search of bots and ffxiv immediately returns results that are purporting to be completely undetectable and do things like do your quests, run dungeons with you including dodging mechanics, etc., running dungeons for you, doing all your crafting and gathering for you, and basically everything else in the game. I'm not going to link them 'cause that's just free advertising. And yeah it likely all boils down to gil farming and rmt and those that buy gil. So yeah I think I agree and that the penalties for being caught buying gil should be extremely harsh.

[Jojoya]

They're constantly doing things about bots, just like other MMORPGs. And the bots are constantly countering those efforts.

As long as players are more concerned about what rewards they get than playing a game for fun, there will be players more interested in paying their way to what they want than earning the rewards through their own effort. As long as the latter exists, there will be bots to cater to them.

If there's a market for a service and a profit to be made, then a service provider will appear. Shut down one provider and another will take their place. At this point, might as well call bot annoyance a staple of MMORPGs.

And yeah it likely all boils down to gil farming and rmt and those that buy gil. So yeah I think I agree and that the penalties for being caught buying gil should be extremely harsh.

A lot of the buyers are relatively young and don't really understand all the ramifications. They're too used to their parents handing them money so they can get what they want. So they want X item, X item costs Y gil, they buy Y gil from a RMT vendor so they can purchase the item thinking it's the normal way to do things.

Most MMORPGs will give a buyer a 3-6 month ban the first time they're caught to see if they've learned from the experience. Losing access to their account for that long will leave an impression on most and they won't buy again in the future.

If they're caught buying (or cheating in other ways) a second time, then they give the account a permanent ban.