ff14gilhub:Bots and Cheaters in Final Fantasy XIV

Final Fantasy XIV is one of those MMORPGs that are getting ruined by bots and cheaters.

Sadly, there are plenty possibilities for botters and cheaters in Final Fantasy XIV, who are commonly appearing in various segments of the game. This is, of course, not a new thing and plenty of other MMORPGs are suffering from the same issue, but certain features of third-party cheating programs for FFXIV seem to be giving hilarious advantages to players.

Bots are evidently almost unavoidable in any MMORPG, and some games are just flooded with automated farming characters who leave honest players struggling to find gatherable resources and quest mobs.

But bots are probably less harmful than the actual cheating features that certain sites offer. These programs are usually subscription based and require monthly payments. Without naming companies and programmers, one of the biggest sources of these cheating programs is the site that caused Blizzard plenty of trouble in the past and was eventually sued.

But that particular site is just one of many that provide a huge range of advantages to players, including things like automated skill rotation, teleporting, everlasting sprint buff, automated dungeon runs, skipping dialogues or cutscenes and much more. How are the honest and non-cheating players supposed to match the damage output of those who have all their skills, interrupts, stuns and other vital things used always at the right moment? This obviously creates PvP imbalances especially if the automated rotations are paired with speed hacks.

A major question arises, and that is whether Square Enix will ever have the ability to counter all of these cheating programs, or will we simply have to accept that some cheaters will always be more powerful than us.

Square Enix is just one of many game publishing and developing companies that are heavily suffering from cheaters, and games like Guild Wars 2, WoW, Aion and ArcheAge have the exact same issue that currently cannot be entirely solved. Of course, bans occur from time to time and sometimes companies like Blizzard and NCSoft get fed up and issue ban waves where hundreds of botting and cheating players are banned. But these usually do not prevent them from doing the same all over again.

Will there ever be an anti-cheating defensive program that will efficiently filter cheaters and botters? Probably not, and the MMO industry is bound to suffer from them for many years to come.