Happy Thanksbanning!

I was considering this, but this was just after they put out the "notice" about "if you think the deal is too good to be true..." or whatever and a little gil isn't worth that risk lol

Overall though, there's a "happy medium" with bots. Bots that spam vagary, delve, etc. are great for the overall economy. Bots that spam sparks are overall terrible for the economy as it effectively devalues gil. And as far as I'm aware, it's a lot easier to have a bunch of sparks bots than it is vagary/delve spamming ones.

Why is that strange? Farming dynamis sucks raw ***. People are willing to waste their time running a bot for it, but not willing to go do that ***for the meager gain of manually farming it.
If they're willing to bot/farm ***like that let them grind that out so you don't have to.
There was no risk, duped medals got bought punishment free.
Pretty much this. Yeah sparks were/are incredibly stupid.

what you consider 'working' others would consider playing the game. the problem is that bots are better at doing remedial tasks ad nauseam than players and require less (if not no) reward than players.

the entire game is grind. if you don't like /working/ than you probably don't enjoy playing. running multiple accounts to get things done would be considered 'work' when you can make friends to progress without the stress of piloting a spaceship with game genie.

some people think making friends is more work and would rather 6box content. if that sounds like you, then i found this test you should probably take: are you so smart you're stupid?

I mean there's a big difference. 6boxing means you get 6x the rewards and there's no lotting against anyone. It's more work upfront, but less time spent repeating the shitty task for dropables.

6boxes are going to make bank on wyrm ashes, for example. 6boxes make bank on vagary, delve. Events/things that award "being there".

That's a whole different thing than grinding dynamis coins or porxie pork for months on end. The same way that it's still "work not fun" to log in 15 mules for ethereal sqama, but it's still significantly less "work" than farming 45 of them.

It's strange how you come back after a few years and RMT has the opposite effect on the community that it did the last time you played.

It's not that RMT has a different effect, it's largely due to sparks. and a little bit to do with availability. By that I mean that there's no competing forces to drive prices up. It's better to just farm sparks.

10 years ago the risk was much higher and the penalty was more of a deterrent. It's only gotten easier and faster to fire up a new account and get it "operational".

"I prefer to do things with others rather than on my own."
Eiryl: "Strongly Agree! I get all the drops to my self and don't have to share."

Just funny to me is all. Goes back to what the guy I mentioned said about how RMT now do good for our community but back then, they were the worst thing for it. I remember when they started coming around. Items that sold for a few hundred thousand gil were going for millions. It was at the point where only gil buyers could afford anything useful.

Now, with them around more, prices drop to where anyone can generally afford stuff.

The real question is how this thread ever got to 13 pages.

Lemme hit you with some knowledge. Real talk, RMT/bots (not including HNM, *** those guys) were good back then too. The only reason they seemed bad was because people were stupid enough to be competitive.

Yeah, *** botting okotes seemed "bad" because you wanted them and couldn't think of a better way to spend your time than camping against them. Nothing changed, except people figured out it was smarter to let them do the stuff that sucks and stop fighting a losing battle.

-ALL- competition has been removed from the game. The only thing people still fight over is cp camps. (and that shits HELP I AM TRAPPED IN 2006 PLEASE SEND A TIME MACHINE, too)

I'm not disagreeing with you at all. What you said makes total sense. From the perspective of someone who lived "the way it was" for many years, it's crazy to think of how it is now. Camping o-kotes? Yeah, you knew what it entailed and if you wanted them, that's just what you did unless you had the gil.

Today, you are correct, spend a couple months farming dynamis currency for a relic or just let RMT do all that monotonous farming and you buy it for cheap.

Since I came back, 99% of the time, if you want a CP camp, there will be one of the many to pick from. The only time I've had a "fight" about one was this one knob who came to Dho Gates where the bat camp is and decided to camp INSIDE my camp. There are 3 camps in that one tiny area where all 3 camp pull from the room of bats, but it was necessary for him to be INSIDE mine. I'm pretty calm and easy going in the game but that's one of the things that tick me off because it's just douchebag behavior.

This was during the recent CP campaign.

EDIT: Come to think of it, I did end up reporting the guy twice for creating unnecessary lag and saying derogatory things in say when I first tried to politely ask him to move 30 yalms to the other camp. Just noticed he's not been on since then...

on the downlow, stf seems to be actually checking (or at least they were) some/most reports lately. If there's a dbag, you should've reported them because for a minute there it was actually working.

I'm pretty sure I spitefucked at least a dozen people. Try to take my spot while I was gone? haha no.

I laughed out loud.

Also, Re: Okotes, nothing changed? Did you somehow forget that they made those R/E and put the non-R/E versions in BCs?

It's easier than ever for an average player to make gil just doing what they do in the game, and the RMTs/bots keep the supply of items going, because the game's population of actual players has shrunk so much. The drawback is the sparks bots' injection of gil into the economy, but ultimately this doesn't have that much of an effect because anyone can do it and easy content still has valuable items to sell thanks to SE making them reforge mats, and of course ambuscade.

Plenty has changed. If you actually played this game you might have a clue.

Did I say Okotes didn't change?

Context. Bots didn't "become" or "weren't" anything. That is what didn't change. Players got smarter. (smarter doesn't mean smart, just slightly less dumb)

This basically covers the rareNM drop to r/e. in so many words.

I for once agree.

Thread started bad and got worse in the last... 12 pages...

I'm not saying this thread is *** stupid...but it has reached the 9 page limits of relevancy

But keep posting why not maybe by page 20 you can defeat all the bots and restore order to FFXI.

Look forward to Merry Bansmas next week!

and, Happy banned for new year!

IMO the drug dealers are bad, but worse are the addicteds

The effect of bots on the game most certainly changed as the game's landscape and population changed. It was absolutely bad back then too, there are a lot of changes made because of how bad it was. The negative effects of botting have been diluted/mitigated by changes made to the game. Competition would be fine if people didn't use robots to compete. So they increased the number of ways you could get that stuff, which made the bots have less of an impact on things people cared about. Just one example. Then ambuscade and sparks. Bots were always bad, SE just made them less relevant, and now with low population servers they're actually having beneficial side effects.

Who cares ?

If they ban the bots they will buy/level up a new account and start over.

Repeat over and over.

I am just shocked there has been a ban / suspension wave almost weekly and has gotten no mention here. I suspect, the majority are atuo-bans, or rather auto-suspensions. Most hit have no idea what they were hit for, just randomly slapped with 72 hours. Assumptions being superwarp, tako, or possibly other addons. Obviously we all know many of these things are not safe to use, but some are claiming to not have used anything outside the normal windower addon's. If this is the case, does anyone have any insight into what may be causing?

Nope

You can count the posts it’s always after the 30th post unless someone deletes theirs. The server counts the deleted post but we don’t see it etc.

Yeah, a person in my shell said he was permed last week. As SE dont say explicity what the offenders did, it wasnt sure. He used to bot and flee hacks. I think unlikely botting being a reason to ban due to known botters are still here and botting for months in obvious places (Moh Gates, Palborough Mines, etc).

Today i found something interesting. I saw 2 alliances of smashed name botters in Kuftal Cave, and none in Ceizak. I wonder if thats the new thing.

Could be for RMT. There was a guy on my server who came back a while after I did and he got 99, a 119 relic and other stuff in a very short while. Never sells anything.

EDIT: And he disappeared too recently with the others in the wave.

Ceizak bot squads of DRG and BST in ilvl 117 gear has been a thing for like 2yrs now. At least on Lakshmi and Shiva.

Prob a gil buyer, then got bored and left

lol