SE Stepped Up Their Antibot Game?

Content mercs and leveling "service" /yells aside, anyone else seeing a large decrease in bots? I noticed it mid-January; I'm seeing far less botting in the wild, especially in Dynamis. Even people I've reported for easyfarm have gone missing all around the same time. Prices of goods going up seeming to reflect this..

The bot numbers in all the hotspots are lower than usual.

Only 50 in CNS only 50 in Bhaf only 100 in KRT only 100 in BB. But every single bot I track is in their spot.

Prices are up because it was a difficult ambuscade month. The bots in dynamis were addressed a few months ago. Prices are gonna go down after this weekend because of the version update resetting ambucade.

Hmm regarding ambu, that would be somewhat true - but plutons/rbbs/beits are still maintaining their usual prices. I know there are alternative means of getting them but that’s true for dyna currency too.


I thought so! Having returned in May 2024, up until December-ish it was very much out in the open the amount of botting occurring. Many of the botters - both rmt and cheating player- I had been reporting all got the hammer around the same time.

I wonder if those 6 bst bots that run HTBF constantly are next in the block… the ones that run between North Sandy #2 and the KI NPC

I tracked the price of ambu mats at different points in the month, and for the most part, it stayed pretty consistent. Supply for some items going down has caused some materials to spike up (i.e. Riftcinders, HPB, Alex????), but that could just be due to dumb players overpaying. Dynamis mats apparently skyrocketed since bots stopped botting it so often. Ambu-month difficulty may have played a part in the price of mats going up a little, but I have noticed ambu mats always go up towards the end of the month cycle before the reset, because usually people spam it early on after an update and less before the reset; the AH is stocked for the first few weeks, but by month's end, nobody has many mats left to sell off, which creates an indirect increase in cost for these mats. It's not always related to how "hard" the month is, because at the beginning/middle of the month, the prices were still the same as the month prior. I know because I intentionally held my mats to see if prices jumped due to people being "scurred" of ambu. But it didn't budge. Until now.

Now some idiot made the price of Alex go to 700k/99 which is unheard of (over double the normal price, wtf?). So should I unload my stash and cash out over someone's apparent crash out, or is this just a momentary blip in the matrix due to some weirdo on Asura? lol

edit: and just like that, the price of alex back down to 500k. classic asura things

All it takes is one idiot to make a push and finish a weapon.

You all always over react. Characters can only hold 80 / put 7 on the ah. When said idiot pushes there's a lag until someone realizes the push happened and fills back up.

Number go up. Number go down. It's not magic.

If Square Enix suits understood this game and the nature of the people that play it, it would lead to them to follow Blizzard and sell gil themselves. They would make an obscene amount of money doing that off XI.

Luckily they don't understand it.

Blizzard even managed to use psychology to sell it as a positive to players, by saying them selling gil would reduce botting and rmt because they could sell cheaper than it would be worth them doing it.

Yeaaa… silver pieces were selling over 1m today owo

You are missing something here. The bazaars are themselves fully botted. If you buy enough stacks of Alexandrite they will unpack linen coin purses within minutes and refill. A single mythic or even several won’t deplete the supply on Asura on its own

Isn’t Chinese new year from January 28th to mid-February?

Yep.

Congrats for reporting moms and dads botting at night… definitely amazing job, then you all complain about less populations…

RMT bot do not get banned, something fishy going on between them and SE.

And to be honest, no botter/RMT stole my aminon claim. They don’t bother anyone

Merc XI industry is just going down because crafting has gone mostly away, so you buy less AH/currencies (ex: sortie/odyssey), so ppl buy less Gil. That has made them leave. Maletaru (not a RMT dude) will tell you he doesn’t list stuff in AH because folks don’t buy. The whole economy need to be rethought. Few currencies going up so much is because a player is impatient, as stated above. So where do you/they spend the Gil? So F it.

But yeah worry about you and stop fixating on others.

If there's a hole in the AH someone will fill it. If there's no need or want it won't be filled. None of this needs controlling. It just takes a bit of time for someone to notice.

Someone always CAPITALIZES if opportunity presents. "Changing the economy" into something more controlled by SE is....stupid. No more sophisticated word than that is appropriate. It's just stupid.

References : all of human history.

this is the dumbest thing i've read on this forum and that's saying quite a bit

I did not write that…? please report my afk bazaar botting…

At the same time, I’ve lost so many people i enjoy chatting on discord with because they did something someone got upset with, that I would not care (my wife will thank you too). I have never reported anyone, I have 0 GM call recorded, I do not care it’s a video game. Also funny story, there was this LS, they all got “whacked”, well, they went on the the next game and still played together, 14 ppl right there. I have their discord. Someone’s posted somewhere, the last 2 player will be a pure vanilla player upset at it all and a 6boxer. Keep being upset, I’m looking forward to civ, maybe lol

I mean, they got banned for breaking the ToS, multiple times. LPT: if you have had a 3-day suspension for breaking ToS, probably stop breaking ToS. If you can get banned if "someone gets upset with you" then...probably stop doing the things that will get you banned?

I'm just as upset as you are that a bunch of my friends got banned too, don't get me wrong, but every single one of them brought it upon themselves, it's not the fault of some random anonymous person who (possibly) reported them. I'm certainly no happier being without them, and I have only reported like...1 person for anything in my entire history of the game. I'm not really a proponent of reporting/banning people for this stuff.

Snitching is a *** move

It is odd to me that people take pleasure in reporting others that aren't directly harming their game experience, but I am not surprised really. Not how I want to spend my game time, got plenty of stuff to do without worrying about what everyone else is or isn't doing.

Idk most EP farming done by bots is "harming" people's game experience. If the bots went to the less effective zones for EP it probably wouldnt cause as much friction.

but people who are botting want to get the most out of those 8hours of sleep and 8 hours of work so they take the best spots, and there is risk in doing that.

Typical Karen syndrome. Makes them feel better about their existance for some reason. Usually weak minded people who want to project their own misery outward.

Reporting is petty, but hating the reporter rather than the cheater is still some mental gymnastics. You don't need ML50 to do content; if your team loses a friend because they couldn't resist 'free' MLs, that reflects worse on that friend than anyone who may have reported them.

True enough, it's probably still futile for a legit group to try to party in KRT on Asura, but I haven't been back since I left to know for sure. Gavroches got laughed at, but the turnover on the 24/7 exp sellers (the ones fighting, not shouting) was pretty low from what I remember. I don't think there is some kind of conspiracy, but I do think there is a bias from the people who file reports, intended or not.

*Please stop pretending that people botting exp is affecting you.

I guess I should clarify that I do not play on Asura. Perhaps there is so many botters on Asura that it is literally impossible to get a camp in any zone. I wouldn't know. I can go to KRT and walk past all the "parties" until I find an open camp.

I don't think anyone is pretending that people botting exp affects them. Sylvebits obviously takes pleasure in reporting people because they feel it corrects an injustice. I don't typically report people, I'm just calling out the thinly-veiled motivations when folks cry about reporting.

Either way, bots do affect people, there's no need to pretend. You cannot use any of the best camps on Asura without competing against bots, and even having to step past a handful of bots to find a camp on a small server is an 'effect', however small.

The primary reason for anyone to complain about reports is a fear that they may be targeted. If you're worried about getting banned, the solution is pretty simple: Don't bot. You don't need the MLs to do anything, it's some weird personal vanity/progress obsession.

Yeah its more of a personality thing to me. I'm a private person and usually avoid conflict when possible. It simply would not be in my nature to report another person unless there was no other option. I'm not complaining about people who report others, I just don't really understand it. When I was on Asura, I just accepted the fact that KRT was permanently unavailable and found camps elsewhere. There are more than enough apex/locus camps even for that server to support the demand for exp, but other camps aren't as favorable mob types or harder to get to, etc.

I feel like you're making a lot of assumptions here. Having 74k active characters is way too many for this game. A normal number would be around 65k or even less. I played a few years back when most bots were immune to a ban.

PlayerA reports PlayerB for botting.

SE looks at the report > "Yeah look like it" > Select PlayerB > Force disconnect

*PlayerB disconnects*

PlayerA: OMG that *** finally got banned! Thank you SE!!!

That's where I witnessed SE's ability to force disconnect players/rmt.

You see people selling crack, committing murder, large scale fraud, dealing fent, carjackings, arson and you turn a blind eye to all that to snitch on the person buying a baggie of weed ( not even the dealer) or driving after having two beers with friends over an evening.


Thats the same as snitching about EP bots. Widescale RMT operations, people running in game exploits, people POSing all over ruining content, etc, and you go for the low hanging fruit because someone doesnt want to spend 170 hours EPing a job to 50.


Its not something Id gleefully confess to doing if I did it. Doubly so if Ive complained about a dwindling population, but Im not sure if they have or havent voiced an opinion on that topic.


Again, its a *** move. Let them get caught in spot sweeps or for being greedy and running for days on end. Dont be a snitch. We had a snitch on Carbuncle, and he *** up his reputation so bad he had to switch server and change name. This is after he built up a bunch of good rep by being known for helping people through Aeonics, pissed it all away to “keep the EP grind legit”.

I believe OP is relatively new, seen them asking advice in gear threads as a player just starting out, and I'd only offer one piece of advice.

Try a different server than Asura. It really is unlike the rest of retail in many ways. There are tons of very nice and competent players there, but it is also THE capital for RMT and unsavory type activity. So if you're coming from a private server or looking for a different type of experience that what you see on Asura, don't stick around.

The active characters are characters who have used the AH in the last 30days, which is a metric but it is not a perfect metric.

For example I have not used the AH since Sep. 15, 2024 so I am marked inactive.