Many I would imagine. It’s such a bad look. My friend showed me a video of dozens and dozens of bots just walking in and out of stockades on repeat. It’s wild how uncontrolled it is.
Pretending there is one.
I wish they would. I half made this post to highlight how bad botting still is. As you have noted, their response is often sluggish. I am concerned this is allowing them to get to 40 and have an impact for much longer. No ones catching them with reports at Hillsbrad anymore. They’re getting to 40 and swarming level 40 zones and they’re making more gold before they catch bans. They are making more money from gold selling because their bots are in action much sooner. This makes the practise more lucrative. I’d love to see these detection methods they talked about for phase 2 because I see more bots now than I did before.
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Great. And three hours later they’re all back with new accounts. Are you going to sit at each new character area all day, every day, interrogating each new person you see to determine if they’re human or not?
That’s 3 alliance areas, and 3 horde zones and 6 servers. Can you be in all the 36 locations without sleeping every day?
What about the bots you don’t see? The ones that are running other dungeons or on other layers? Or when the groups get smarter and instead of streams of bots, they trade to one person inside the instance and they run to the vendor. Add in some random pathing and how do you differentiate that from any other player?
It sounds easy, but the nitty gritty reality is different.
Because you’re making it a single person issue.
Hire 25 people.
Have them work 40 hours a week.
That’s 1,000 hours a week of monitoring.
You’re telling me the bot issue wouldn’t get better?
They keep coming back because Blizzard makes it profitable for them to do so. That’s the problem with sporadic ban waves.
Look, I don’t know why you’re defending Blizz here. They could easily address this problem. It’s not as complicated as you, or they, make it out to be. You some Blizz employee on an alt? 
But there’s no point in arguing. You’ll continue to defend their incompetence…or indifference.
We finally agree on something
I doubt the XP bonus is contributing to open world botting.
It’d be much easier to powerlevel in dungeons with a 40 AoEing than botting to 40. If you’re willing to bot I think you’d be willing to just pay for a dungeon AoE carry.
A way to specifically boost up alt leveling (and maybe phase 3+ leveling) on top of the XP buff would be to make fodder drop from level 40 content and be BoA.
How is them levelling twice as fast not contributing? I see like 10~15 bots in each area. All troll hunters with 3 runes equipped and nothing but BoEs they got off AH. Missing trinkets without fail. Let’s start there.
That would cover 1/2 of one server.
Multiply it by 12.
Multiply it by 20 who cares hire them…
You’re defending a billion dollar company
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You’re going to ban over 15 bots a minute? One every 4 seconds? Not going to accidentally hit any innocent players who lose their account forever because you’re banning characters solely on visual analysis and have no data that can be double checked on appeal? You’re going to be able to continue at this rate as the bot devs modify them to make them less easily detectable by visual analysis?
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The problem with people touting simple answers, is that rarely are problems so easily solved.
At minimum you’d need 40 employees generating no profit just to ban the bots. Maybe another 4 or so to review complaints and possibly overturn bans. Realistically it’ll be closer 10x that number to have any lasting impact.
What was the zero to 40 time before the adjustment?
What is the average time people spend playing a game before they stop?
If you ever get bored look into what McDonald’s put into developing the “drive thru”
This type of analysis dictates your life. Unfortunately you don’t get the big bucks making the type of product you want. Movies are all PG-13 now days for a reason.
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I’m not. I do think Blizzard should do something.
I am pointing out why Blizzard doesn’t do what is ‘simple’ - because it’s labour intensive, expensive and still wouldn’t accomplish what you think.
This reminds me of the anti piracy software in videogames and how it just gives the legit buyer a worse experience (denuvo) and doesn’t prevent piracy at all. Don’t punish actual players to try to inconvenience bad actors. It does more harm than good.
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I mean it’s better than their current solution.
FF14 is never in the spotlight of being a bot fest.
I never see videos of them standing outside a dungeon watching waves and waves of bots zoning in and out.
Only on WOW do I see this.
What is FF14 doing that wow isn’t?
I’m guessing actually having GMs.
The moment you have employees going around banning them by visual analysis, you don’t think they’re going to adapt? They’re going to make the bots look more and more like real players until your visual analysis takes minutes to be relatively certain. It would take them two weeks to make your strategy redundant.
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That just had their customer support and GM staff butchered…yet again. How many layoffs this time? 1900? Well done, Microsoft! 
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Posts like these make all the shillies come out.
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The GMs are so proactive on FFXIV that the community has managed to gaslight themselves into thinking they’re the most friendly community on earth. The truth is that they just save their trash talk for out of game on discords because they know they’re getting banned within an hour if they act out.