After sitting down for a few hours, once more I have come to the conclusion that bots have effectively killed another MMO for me.

The last few days I have seen not only the usual spammers, but also countless bots in the middle-higher level areas with names that are not just a jumble of random characters. Goldsellers are one thing, but when regular players start botting because it's the only way to compete while not having to worry about any repercussions... It becomes obvious that not enough was done to solve the problem, and likely won't be done. Final Fantasy 14 had very much the same problem, and is still a bot ridden mess with a steadily declining playerbase because of it.

The latest boss change hasn't solved the problem, it has only forced these bots to infest more areas at once while ruining any chance of normal players from getting higher quality equipment from dungeons. And I can only see this being the beginning of further changes along a similar thread which are easy, but which ultimately don't solve anything while also causing regular players to have to spend much more time competing for similar resources.

When dealing with bots, you cannot just sit there and expect a patching team to change some mechanic which might foil bots... Again, and again, and again bots will always stay ahead of ALL of these measures since they are being created by people with nearly infinite resources and a determination to keep them functioning. And with the recent grouping of bots/stolen accounts/gold farmers, ZOE has already lost the war. These bots have already managed to establish themselves over the last 2 weeks, collect a roster of stolen accounts, and developed their bots to where they can move around between multiple points overland being indistinguishable from other players or just harder to track.

Any time that an honest player sees blatant cheating happening, it is a discouragement. It tells them loud and clear that they are spending more effort than other players to get the same result and gives an impression that the company who is running the game doesn't particularly care as long as they keep getting subscribers. It gives the impression that cheating is necessary in order to advance. And when mechanics are changed to penalize players, it makes them consider cheating themselves to get around that penalty or just quit outright since the game is no longer fun. Having to sit at a boss, competing against bots, getting 1-10 chances at a unique item within an hour of sitting there, while getting empty experience which threatens to push you to a level too high for that boss isn't fun. Having to define 15-20 new accounts per hour to ignore to be able to make use of zone chat isn't fun. Having to click through 6-12 spam e-mails a day from goldsellers isn't fun. It's bad enough that 1/4 quests end up breaking at some point, but when you cannot make use of zone chat to even ask if a quest is bugged or what a work-around might be, it only makes you assume that more and more of the game is simply broken and that staff just can't be bothered to fix it.

I know you're trying, I know that some effort has been made and that supposedly dealing with bots is your "top priority", but what we need is doing, not trying. We need actions which result in killing this cancer which is eroding the foundation of your game, not just merely preventative measures. This has been said multiple times by multiple people, but there has been no sign of any of it coming through. Every MMO made within the last two decades has had this problem, and an active GM staff has been the only way of ever solving it.

And this is why you will be losing paying customers who actually play your game and who want to see it succeed. But I guess we have little value compared to the gold sellers who continually buy and maintain hundreds of game keys to keep their operations going.