Bots are like Nuclear Warheads

Since I’m the guy that has all those opinions, I guess I should probably say something about the recent downing of the most infamous of bots, FFXIApp.

There has always been a tense drama between those who bot and those who don’t. As someone who camped kings for a brief while, I can honestly say that, at least on Hades, it feels like everybody does it. I kind of know why. There’s a lot of people, at least on Hades, who feel very Entitled to Shit. Moreover, nobody’s really gotten along, and competition has always been bat-shit insane.

I used to be very adamantly against botting, yelling and screaming my head off at those who did. You only have to read my posts between 2007 to early 2008 and find what I thought. My attitude now has drastically changed. If pressed, I’d say I’m very, “meh”.

For one thing, not camping kings anymore really relieves the stress of it. I was in a linkshell that very clearly did not bot, and it was reflected in the record of two claims over a year and a half period, one of which had to be surrendered since morale for king camping was insanely low from every claim we didn’t get.

The more disturbing trend seems to be, though, how the devteam expects players to have bots, or, at least, some kind of game-altering function. A big key to Absolute Virtue was discovered recently, namely that to lock a two-hour, you have to use a corresponding two-hour ability. Yeah, if you looked at the video, this seemed to be what the devteam was saying, but the window to which to do so is insanely small, not to mention you need to be on AV’s enmity list. To counter this, one of FFXIApp’s feature was an “OnEvent” command, which would allow you to react accordingly; in other words, being able to successfully lock an AV two-hour.

Thirty thousand Alexandrite for a mythic, on a Salvage run where you’re lucky to get 1-100 at best? These numbers are derived from people duping Alexandrite, but they remain unaltered even now. It’s some shameful shit that it was changed from the original fifty thousand, as if though anything exceeding ten thousand has some kind of variable difficulty.

Not to mention how in Pandemonium Warden’s last form, he clearly sets off Astral Flow at very specific HP percentages, only detectable by those using the windower plugin that allows for that.

Back in January, when the players were banned for duping Salvage gear, Square-Enix sent a strong message that cheaters would not be tolerated. When, however, you’ve built a game that makes it difficult for cheaters and insanely difficult for regular players overall because you expect players to cheat, what message are you sending, exactly?

It’s like the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

So, now, my attitude about all of it is “meh”. Devteam intention isn’t clear as it should be, and it’s kind of infuriating that the game is built upon a stand of expecting people to do so. Why now, after five years, has Square-Enix decided to go after the creator of FFXIApp, if you believe that he was seriously served a cease-and-desist letter? And can we expect changes because of it?

“Lawyers are like nuclear warheads. They have theirs, so I have mine. When you use them, they fuck up everything.” – Danny DeVito as Lawrence Garfield, Other People’s Money.

You could say the same thing about bots.

Not that I bot. I don’t. But I’m not going to lie, since I do use windower plugins and macros, which is altering the game to make it more beneficial to me. I know others take out the darters in Dragon’s Aery, and make Chalupa the Antlion easily findable in Sheep in Antlion’s Clothing. The line used to be drawn at botting, since that was at the point where it started affecting other people’s game. But, really, if I’ve learned anything, it’s that making the game easier for yourself comes at some cost, be it short term or long term.