I have a few associates in crime that use other bots to fulfill their gil farming needs. One used Basabots, the other used MMOminion. It took over a year for them to be banned, but it finally happened. They thought they were safe, only botting when they were awake, and putting their bots on pause occasionally during that time. Over the course of a year they did this without any reprisal, until now. One went as far as paying for gametime through prepaid cards, the other simply used his GF's credit card and name to mark those accounts. Both of them were issued perma bans, the bot accounts and their main account, which all the gil was traced back to. They took precautions like exchanging gil/items through the Market Board and eating the tax in futile attempts to avoid detection. Both of these associates used 4 or more accounts. We know SE tracks the flow of gil, they've demonstrated that with the player census report, detailing on what item was purchased most by chars etc. Be extra careful while botting.
Thanks for the update and interesting to read but maybe my term of casual is off : ". Both of these associates used 4 or more accounts." also there is really no description as to what they were doing with said competitor bots. Were they doing anything that a normal player shouldn't be doing like teleporting in dungeons or the open world? Curious if they are starting to tighten down with the expansion or if these associates were slammed for what they were doing with the bot. Lunch is close so I'll find out real quick if its a wave but there is no other chatter on here about it so likely not. Edit: also as above poster I pretty much let my bot run 24/7 and don't ever log out except for during server downtime so who knows.
I've seen people do much worse. I have to agree there wasn't much said on they were actually doing. I've only read about peopel getting temp bans for the farming, dungeon farming via minion. Where I see bans happen is RMT, and using hacks in the open world.
If they were using Minion with 4 bots, perhaps they were doing dungeons with it, which means teleport hacking. Be careful with that.
Decided to check the emails of all my accounts and none of them were hit(even if they are inactive, if they are flagged they get banned) so my 34 accounts are still intact if I wish to come back. Even using minion teleport hacking those are still good to go, be smart and if you do use minion read their forums and find out what dungeons are "hot", you'll find alot of ban information on there as well.
Its certain dungeons that trigger the bans, LCOA was a huge one and still is, the amount of gil you can farm there is crazy compared to some place like WP, like they say over on their forums, make your own profiles to lessen the risk of a ban, and same goes for this bot as well. But 90% of the community won't or can't so there's not much you can do about that.
