Square is just in it for the money.
Square have employees wages to pay, investors demand a RoV. If not for the money they make they would not even exist in the first place. If not for the money the artists, musicians and programmers make from doing this they would be growing crops instead.
The moment this game is not making a profit it will be closed, because Square don't care. If that means they have to make money from whatever you say, then so be it.
Keep in mind this is a sub only mmorpg, this is not a game with a massive cash shop selling mounts and slippers. Ff14 could drop the sub tomorrow if they wanted to and still make massive profits from the cash shop, 11 does not that that luxury.
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They let the bots bot because it's consequence free subs.
First of all it's near impossible to stop "bots" because it's very low tech stuff, you can make bots that work from nothing more than pixels on the screen if needbe. It's really really hard to stop this stuff, also if you start questioning players to see if they are bots you make it a hostile world to play in and get lots of false positives.
They and every company let a certain amount of bots (rmt) function because A) it would cause a massive DDOS campaign against them where none of us could login if they tried zero tol(they did in the past during chocoblinkers) and it was chaos B) it's the least worst option* C) their job is making a game, not being a police in the world of that video game. At a point you can spend more resources policing the thing than making it.
*
If you remove all supply of GIL from botting, when the demand is still there the prices will rise. The sellers don't just stop wanting to make money, they will use other methods to get that GIL. That will be things like hacking accounts, infected addons, theft from friends you let login to your account last year that can now buy a car from the gil on your account etc
High GIL prices = dead game, especially if it has a 3rd party community.
Banning all bots would be far worse for players, because the other methods to get gil to sell are far more destructive and they would be used.
The lesson Square learned from FF11 was to basically have no economy, which is what they did on FF14. Personally I prefer having one to not, even if it has issues with RMT and botting.
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Apathy is too high for anyone to respond by quitting.
It's not apathy, nobody cares about the bots that much. It doesn't matter because it doesn't make a worse game experience in most cases, if every bot disappeared tomorrow your game-play would not be better. You could make the argument it would be worse, cause the AH would be emtpy of stuff like alex and dyna currency as well as far higher prices for what was there. To most who do care, it's mostly a visual or ideological annoyance.
People will always complain, if they are complaining about bots it's because the hacks and cheats are controlled to a degree where the needle is pushed to the next annoying thing.
Also the people who complain about bots usually have an ulterior motive for doing so.