Public Service Announcement - BottingFollow

Plenty. XIV has the most botting I've seen because it's extremely obvious. Even in XI the only time you seen botting was largely by the large NA HNM linkshells.

Gather bots are extremely obvious, especially when they teleport underground to new nodes.
"Farm" bots are obvious as they gather and attack mobs from underground.
Craft Bots are extremely obvious because no matter how well you set up your macros, you will not sit there for 24 hrs doing the same rotation (I've recorded a few crafters since I make some time lapse videos sometimes.)
"Raid" Bots are the most obvious when you come across one:

The Tank variety of Raid bot tend to use sprint and a basic rotation. For example, in Labyrinth of the Ancients tank bots tend to completely ignore you or anything you suggest and do only the basic rotation with flash. Bad players as well, but the way they do it is fairly robotic because they'll systematically run around and flash (even on stationary pulls) if the monster happens to wiggle a bit because bot programming makes a tank want to gather up stray mobs so a boss moving will make it "think" it's additional mobs.

When the comets are set to drop you'll see tank sprint towards a green tear drop (where the comet will be) and run back and forth until it drops because it's set to pathfind behind the comet so it survives the meteor.

The Heal variety of bot is triggered by text commands, e.g Tank running a heal dual box will say "Cure!/Regen!" and the bot will instantly do it the second the text command shows up. This I know is a trigger command because I spam "Cure! Cure!" when I'm queued in as a DPS and the bot will keep casting cure on me, thus pissing off the tank.

DPS bots are similar to tank raid bots but a lot of times it's just bad people.

It is extremely common in this game compared to other non-F2P games because despite how easy, forgiving and hand holding the game, people want things even easier lol.

Best thing I've read all day.

It's not just MMOs, but just about any game that can be monetized in anyway or is competitive enough that someone would want to keep making gains while afk.

The only botting that ever really bothered me was botting claims for HNM mobs in XI that only spawned once every few days to a week. Not that I condone the game being played afk, but for the most part none of these bots affected me(at least not enough to bother me) so I didn't really care to waste the energy reporting them.

Meh, I see no harm at all in people botting FATEs to level. If SE had bothered to make leveling more interesting people wouldn't cheat to get to 60. RMT bots though, are another matter...if the this was a game where the economy mattered in the slightest. Unless you craft for the enjoyment of crafting, there is really no reason to do it, and crafting is the only thing in the game that takes any significant amount of gil. If you could still find any housing plots left, that would be the only other to to need money for, but you can't. That makes botting pretty much harmless to this game.

The problem can be shown by taking a teenage thief for example. They start out stealing junk food and pop, which is really just not a huge deal. But in time it grows more and more into a habit as they don't get caught and eventually hey start stealing larger thIngs or money.

Botting is similar because they start using it as a convenience but then decide it's easier to just use it for all the things they can and reap the rewards. No doubt people bot crafting jobs and make killer cash on the market. Which in turn just forces others to try and keep up by either playing more to make more money or bot themselves. It's a bad cycle.

K