Cosmic Exploration: An Anti-Bot Measure Or Bad Luck?

When I started playing Final Fantasy XIV I was told Square Enix included some "features" designed to discourage players from doing one thing in the game for extended periods of time. Gathering itself wasn't affected but farming mobs for drops? I noticed that after 10 or 15 minutes the drop rate really diminished. Perhaps a good thing for other players who might need to kill a particular type of critter but not if the recipe required a lot of leather.

Last night I may have encountered another measure. I was on Auxesia trying to craft my way to 500,000 tool mastery points and another title as a Carpenter. I was having the worst luck with the tool mastery missions. Almost every time for 15 minutes I couldn't buy a good condition to get max progress on a craft. About halfway through the period I had an item reach 100% spirit bond. I took a quick look and every piece of crafting gear I was wearing was at 100% spirit bond.

Yikes! Then I remembered that the last time I had played I ended the night with most of my gear at 100% spirit bond and I just planned to extract the materia the next time I logged in. Which was last night. Oops!

Once I extracted all the materia and resumed crafting something unusual happened. The RNG gods looked favorably on me once again and I started recording max scores on each item I crafted. Then I considered an explanation. If someone were running a bot or some other automation, they'd probably not bother extracting their materia. Which means their points output would be subpar compared to pressing each macro manually and watching the character's gear to make sure it doesn't break or, in this case, fill up with spirit bond.

I know the sample size of 10 items created in those 15 minutes was small, but I think large enough to make a judgement. Then again, making sure to keep your equipment repaired and with spirit bond less than 100% isn't hard to do. But I am going to keep track of things like that from now on, especially if the consequences for doing so is losing more than a few crafting materia.