Botting on the marketboard. Impossible to sell anything.

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Originally Posted by Prrringles

I don't even think SE are banning the big problematic bot/rmt accounts. Talking about the "1 crafter and 8 mule character" free company accounts. I seldom see those disappear. So I have no clue which thousands of accounts they are terminating each week, but not the right ones. Seems like at least 75% of the sellers are bots these days. I think the solution for me is to just quit the market board. Can't be bothered with competing against bots who automatically update their prices every 10 minutes anymore. I will happily invest my time in something else.

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I did months ago. makes life a lot more relaxed to be honest. SE obviously does not care, in any way, about the bots infesting and ruining the game on every level now. too busy "banning" people advertising gil in the cities.. which is about as low hanging fruit as you can get without having to do anything

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Originally Posted by Prrringles

I don't even think SE are banning the big problematic bot/rmt accounts. Talking about the "1 crafter and 8 mule character" free company accounts. I seldom see those disappear. So I have no clue which thousands of accounts they are terminating each week, but not the right ones. Seems like at least 75% of the sellers are bots these days. I think the solution for me is to just quit the market board. Can't be bothered with competing against bots who automatically update their prices every 10 minutes anymore. I will happily invest my time in something else.

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We had one disappear from Coeurl about 2-3 months ago. Of course we found a new one that appeared about a month later.

What's getting banned is still "the right ones", it's just not all of them and there's nothing to stop them from coming back when they are.

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Originally Posted by Prrringles

I don't even think SE are banning the big problematic bot/rmt accounts. Talking about the "1 crafter and 8 mule character" free company accounts. I seldom see those disappear. So I have no clue which thousands of accounts they are terminating each week, but not the right ones. Seems like at least 75% of the sellers are bots these days. I think the solution for me is to just quit the market board. Can't be bothered with competing against bots who automatically update their prices every 10 minutes anymore. I will happily invest my time in something else.

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The ones on Louisoix seem to get banned a few months after they appear, and then another one appears in around a month. Still means they're wrecking havoc for months though. Obviously always the same person/group behind it, the last crafter account seems to have been banned a couple of months ago but the mule characters were left intact, and they've now recently formed another FC with another crafter character.

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

I did months ago. makes life a lot more relaxed to be honest. SE obviously does not care, in any way, about the bots infesting and ruining the game on every level now. too busy "banning" people advertising gil in the cities.. which is about as low hanging fruit as you can get without having to do anything

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I will finish my calf leather supply and then call it quits. Just a shame I will lose my retainers. Leveling them took a long time.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

We had one disappear from Coeurl about 2-3 months ago. Of course we found a new one that appeared about a month later.
What's getting banned is still "the right ones", it's just not all of them and there's nothing to stop them from coming back when they are.

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I just don't understand how they are terminating thousands of accounts weekly (supposedly) and still be infested. How many of these people/groups are there? Seems highly sus.

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Originally Posted by Krizzle

The ones on Louisoix seem to get banned a few months after they appear, and then another one appears in around a month. Still means they're wrecking havoc for months though. Obviously always the same person/group behind it, the last crafter account seems to have been banned a couple of months ago but the mule characters were left intact, and they've now recently formed another FC with another crafter character.

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Same on Moogle. The name of the one on Louisoix starts with an "R" right? Filed a huge report again last week including all the bots on the Chaos data center. They are so easy to find. I am seriously baffled why I/WE can find them and SE can't. lol

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

too busy "banning" people advertising gil in the cities.. which is about as low hanging fruit as you can get without having to do anything

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Considering i often see a spammer active for 5h... i dont even think they are actively banning those either. Its reaching a point where it starts to feel like reporting them is useless. And it only takes a few months to get to that state.

Most of the bot activity should be easily detected through basic algoritms (posting the same message every 5 minutes containing major flags of RMT should be easy to detect, and even with variations in them it can still be detected). Add to that a lot of reports, and acting on this should be easy and fully automatable (not even a direct ban is needed here, just silencing the person would do a lot). Especialy since a lot of the RMT spammers still use the same domainname, blacklisting can happen a lot faster since there is no need for a person to mention the same domain more than 3 times in such city.

The same can even be applied in the NN, since those bots get repeatedly kicked (which essentialy has the same value as a report here). And if by accident it prevents a legit player from typing, if they get kicked that often out of the NN... something was going on anyway (most likely a very offensive person).

The longer they can spam advertisements, the more likely someone will see it, and act on it, funding the RMTs to continue. The more expensive it becomes for the RMTs to make money, the less the problem becomes as there will be a point where it simply becomes too difficult/expensive to take the risk.

But hacks, bots and mods are ok... lol

Yeah the fact that everyone can craft and the markets are overfilled, retainers were trashing literally EVERYTHING of worth AND them giving out so many primal weapons for free in HoH etc... I just take 0 joy from crafting anymore *sigh*

And if youre looking MBs its usually always the same few retainer names or crafters selling stuff...

They really need to make automatized checks for certain behaviors, i see way too many "players" doing "afk" next to their retainers... or use the mods to check prices 24/7...

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Originally Posted by Prrringles

Same on Moogle. The name of the one on Louisoix starts with an "R" right? Filed a huge report again last week including all the bots on the Chaos data center. They are so easy to find. I am seriously baffled why I/WE can find them and SE can't. lol

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Yeah that's the one lol, it is mad why they're allowed to hang around for so long. They're always so obvious and the pattern is exactly the same across most servers, and especially when it's been going on for years. I got tired of reporting it so I just send one off and try move on at this point! Drives you mental otherwise.

A possible solution to the undercutting could be : Change when the fee is applied. Not when it is sold but when it is listed. Let's say fee is 10%. Listing an item for 1000gils cost 100gils, directly taken from your purse. 10 minutes later you want to change the price to 900gils, 90gils go bye bye.

It does not solve the problem, but by doing so you literally loose gils every time you list/change an item on top of earning less money at the end. Contrary to now that you just earn less.

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Originally Posted by Darkmoonrise

A possible solution to the undercutting could be : Change when the fee is applied. Not when it is sold but when it is listed. Let's say fee is 10%. Listing an item for 1000gils cost 100gils, directly taken from your purse. 10 minutes later you want to change the price to 900gils, 90gils go bye bye.

It does not solve the problem, but by doing so you literally loose gils every time you list/change an item on top of earning less money at the end. Contrary to now that you just earn less.

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problem with that solution is.. the bots wont care, so it will only hurt the actual crafters to list items and then undercut the bots

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Originally Posted by Prrringles

I just don't understand how they are terminating thousands of accounts weekly (supposedly) and still be infested. How many of these people/groups are there? Seems highly sus.

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If your account is banned today, there's nothing stopping you from creating a new account tomorrow.

Same with them. There's no way to stop them from creating new accounts as their existing ones get banned. The barrier to entry for marketboard activity is pretty low so they're back in business very quickly, especially when they can buy job boosts and story skips to get past most of the MSQ requirements.

That's why those who buy gil through RMT also need to get banned. If they keep losing the things they're getting with the gil they buy, most will hit a point where they'll give up and stop buying. Those on the fence who are tempted to buy but worried about getting banned won't when stories spread about the bans. Once the number of players willing to risk their accounts to buy gil drops to a minimal level, most if not all the RMT bot rings will disappear from the game because they can't turn a profit.

Right now because there's no apparent penalty to those who buy gil, there are plenty of players buying it to keep the bots happily in business. The bot rings aren't going to mind losing an occasional account to a ban because the money they've made from their sales more than offsets the cost of creating a new account.

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

problem with that solution is.. the bots wont care, so it will only hurt the actual crafters to list items and then undercut the bots

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Depends on what the fee is and how often they're currently undercutting. If they're undercutting a dozen times a day and they're already close to their price floor, the operators would be forced to stop the frequent undercutting.

But of course it would hurt the player crafters, as you say. They're already unhappy about how low prices have dropped.