They're not 'allowing' bots to run free. Its just there's so many and not enough staff at the moment to keep up with them. The other night I saw a bunch of characters pos hacking around the zone right outside ul'dah. The last statement I saw was that they had already banned 800+ accounts involved in RMT activity. Imagine what it's like at the moment, they're dealing with the unexpected number of players flooding the servers that werent prepared for it, while working to fix and expand game stability, they have hundreds of reports of hacked accounts with characters running around botting, spamming gil-selling in towns, sending tells to players advertising, while also dealing with the usual glitches in a new game and inevitable GM calls of players harrassing each other.

It's obvious the interest in ARR has been much bigger than SE anticipated, so it's not surprising they didnt have the staff to handle it. I imagine (at least hope) that when subs start up a good portion of the RMT and botting will stop, or at least become more subtle.

Quote Originally Posted by Cienna View Post
RMT & bots get removed faster on the JP servers. RMTs I reported on the JP server were gone in under 48 hours. NA/EU reported ones- 10 days since report, still there spamming away. I have been keeping track because I heard others reporting the same thing- JP servers get the bots & RMTs dealt with faster then NA/EU. I won't speak as to why, only SE knows why, I only know that playing on the JP server is more pleasant as the RMTs & bots are taken care of pretty fast.
Probably because it's a JP game, and as above, there's more JP staff.