Farm is a verb in this context. Mats is short for “materials”. The poster believes they were banned for running around in overland picking up material nodes. There are robots who collect material nodes, so the original poster thinks they might have looked like a robot and that’s the cause of why they got banned.

I assume you were being sarcastic, but I can think of two possible reasons they might have gotten banned for farming mats.

(1) If ZOS uses AI to look for botting behavior (and I don't know whether they do), then presumably at least one thing it would look for are movement sequences which are highly precise and highly repetitive, the way a bot would move when following a programmed route. If a human player were following the same exact closed-loop route over and over without any movement variances, and taking the same harvesting actions over and over without any timing variances, then they would undoubtedly look like a bot to AI, and the AI might report the suspected bot to human moderators to be reviewed and acted upon.

(2) If one player watched another player character farming mats in that manner, especially if it were going on for a long time, then they might report that player character as a possible bot. Judging from some of the threads I've seen in these forums over the years, some players can get extremely testy (to put it lightly) and accusatory toward ofher players when it comes to harvesting material resources, and there have been repeated demands that ZOS look for mat-farming bots and ban them.

Both of those possible scenarios could have been avoided by not moving in a repetitive and unvarying closed-loop pattern and taking actions that were repeated with little or no timing variances.

Unfortunately, players who are farming mats often do exactly that-- they choose an area where there are plenty of resource nodes, then run around from node to node in a closed loop. If the loop is big enough, and if the zone is a "starter island" or other small zone, most or all of the nodes will respawn by the time the player comes back around to them, so such a farming style is considered to be highly efficient.

Also, if an account were reported for possible botting, a human moderator might conceivably look at what happened to the mats after they were farmed using such highly-repetitive patterns and timing, and if the mats were put up for sale on guild traders then it might look like someone "farming gold" so to speak.

The account might also look more suspicious if it were a fairly new account and if "farming mats" was a large part of what was being done on the account from day 1.

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

I assume you were being sarcastic, but I can think of two possible reasons they might have gotten banned for farming mats.

(1) If ZOS uses AI to look for botting behavior (and I don't know whether they do), then presumably at least one thing it would look for are movement sequences which are highly precise and highly repetitive, the way a bot would move when following a programmed route. If a human player were following the same exact closed-loop route over and over without any movement variances, and taking the same harvesting actions over and over without any timing variances, then they would undoubtedly look like a bot to AI, and the AI might report the suspected bot to human moderators to be reviewed and acted upon.

(2) If one player watched another player character farming mats in that manner, especially if it were going on for a long time, then they might report that player character as a possible bot. Judging from some of the threads I've seen in these forums over the years, some players can get extremely testy (to put it lightly) and accusatory toward ofher players when it comes to harvesting material resources, and there have been repeated demands that ZOS look for mat-farming bots and ban them.

Both of those possible scenarios could have been avoided by not moving in a repetitive and unvarying closed-loop pattern and taking actions that were repeated with little or no timing variances.

Unfortunately, players who are farming mats often do exactly that-- they choose an area where there are plenty of resource nodes, then run around from node to node in a closed loop. If the loop is big enough, and if the zone is a "starter island" or other small zone, most or all of the nodes will respawn by the time the player comes back around to them, so such a farming style is considered to be highly efficient.

Also, if an account were reported for possible botting, a human moderator might conceivably look at what happened to the mats after they were farmed using such highly-repetitive patterns and timing, and if the mats were put up for sale on guild traders then it might look like someone "farming gold" so to speak.

The account might also look more suspicious if it were a fairly new account and if "farming mats" was a large part of what was being done on the account from day 1.

I've run into two situations on XB-NA where I've been suspicious. In both cases, a player character ran up to specific spot, stood there for the time it takes to spam the "harvest" button, and then made a beeline for another spot. First time, there was nothing at that spot (so presumably another player had been there very recently); second time, *I* was in the middle of harvesting the node, and the other player character was close enough to clip into mine. Oh, and these weren't in zones where there are different instances based on story progression. That's *generally* pretty rare in my experience; I imagine it's much more common on PC, but it's definitely invading console too.