The red line is crossed now - Bots, cheaters, hackers, gil-seller

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Originally Posted by Fernandosilveirasc

So basically, what SE is saying is, "get yourself a bot"?

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Wasn't this obvious already with how boring, repetitive, mindless, time consuming and at the same time convoluted crafting and gathering are?

It is my belief that when players resort to bots, it's because there's a fundamental problem with content itself: it's not enjoyable.

Considering how SE has been trying to make crafting and gathering relevant banning all these bots would help tremendously.. once prices on the MB jump, people will start crafting and gathering on their own to either save money or to make it while the prices are high. At some point it would reach a happy medium

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Originally Posted by Lastelli

Wasn't this obvious already with how boring, repetitive, mindless, time consuming and at the same time convoluted crafting and gathering are?

It is my belief that when players resort to bots, it's because there's a fundamental problem with content itself: it's not enjoyable.

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Then all content has a fundamental problem. There will never be any content universally loved by all players so there will always be someone looking to bot their way through it if a reliable bot can be programmed for that content.

A more likely explanation is the fundamental problem lies with the player. An intelligent person will find something else to do if they're not enjoying the content, and forego getting the associated rewards. The lazy and/or entitled player will resort to bots because they believe they deserve the reward even if they don't want to put in the effort.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

Then all content has a fundamental problem. There will never be any content universally loved by all players so there will always be someone looking to bot their way through it if a reliable bot can be programmed for that content.

A more likely explanation is the fundamental problem lies with the player. An intelligent person will find something else to do if they're not enjoying the content, and forego getting the associated rewards. The lazy and/or entitled player will resort to bots because they believe they deserve the reward even if they don't want to put in the effort.

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The difference being, you need gil to enjoy other parts of the game. Raiders need gil if they want new gear, food and potions to tackle the new savage tier with and clear it reasonably fast. Casual players need gil for glamour, since the most requested and appreciated glamour options require mats that are sold for several millions of gil. Which is obvious, as gil is the game's currency. The problem is, earning gil is a chore. The actual process is not fun for most players. Hence why we have so many bots: the demand for gil is there because you need it to enjoy other parts of the game, but many players value their time more than the real money needed to buy it.

Because let's be honest, crafting and gathering are just huge times sinks. You're basically exchanging your time for gil. There's nothing hard to understand, nothing challenging or engaging about it.

That's why you don't see bots for things like savage and ultimate content: that's the end goal, raiders enjoy doing it, and if you don't, you can just avoid it and you're losing pretty much nothing, except for the chance to dye some underwhelming gear and a mount that can be easily obtained in the following expansion doing the content unsynced.

You don't need to gather or craft to make decent gil, honestly. Just doing treasure maps brings in a healthy amount of raw gil plus whatever stuff happens to drop.

I find, however, that most people who bot are not trying to make money and rather are just trying avoid having to buy stuff off the MB. That still hurts the economy by taking away potential customers though.

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Originally Posted by Lastelli

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Why not use the built in bot feature? Retainers they bring stuff back every 60 mins. I don't think I have ever had a week where I made less then 1 mill from retainers. I even stopped getting maps. They are also self sustaining, I can't actually venture them enough to make up for the GC turn ins. They also have the extra MB space built into them.


I also think your last point is a little off. You don't see bots for endgame content because the curve is to high for them. But you do see the same type of lazy/entitled players clearing that content. They just pay for it. The game wouldn't have clears for sale if people weren't buying them. If bots get better they would just move to bots instead.

Retainers can't get aethersands or items from the latest unspoiled/legendary nodes (Which incidentally are the main things bots target). Though even if they could, people would still bot regardless because some are just never satisfied.

I'm really just praying that the potential sabotage of the restoration rankings will be enough to make the devs start taking this whole matter more seriously.

I must be dealing with this tool now. He is blocking anyone from being able to sell Wall Planters and Planter Partitions because he auto-undercuts every 2-3 minutes by 5-10 gil. I kept wondering why someone would just sit there doing it, but it is the same four listings split between the same two retainers and like clockwork if I adjust my prices his lower. I also believe this to be a bot because I tanked the price from 20k to 4k on them and he still undercut, when most wouldn't really want to lose that much gil on them.

In the end they cost me nothing to make and I had a surplus left over from my house decorating, but I would love to unload them even for 4k a piece lol.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

Retainers can't get aethersands or items from the latest unspoiled/legendary nodes (Which incidentally are the main things bots target). Though even if they could, people would still bot regardless because some are just never satisfied.

I'm really just praying that the potential sabotage of the restoration rankings will be enough to make the devs start taking this whole matter more seriously.

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You are so right about the never satisfied. What I find amusing is if bots sabotage the game enough SE isn't going to crack down on bots. They will just use the magic fix all, lock it behind some sort of wall that limits it. That doesn't punish the cheaters it punishes everyone.

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Originally Posted by Lastelli

The difference being, you need gil to enjoy other parts of the game. Raiders need gil if they want new gear, food and potions to tackle the new savage tier with and clear it reasonably fast. Casual players need gil for glamour, since the most requested and appreciated glamour options require mats that are sold for several millions of gil. Which is obvious, as gil is the game's currency. The problem is, earning gil is a chore. The actual process is not fun for most players. Hence why we have so many bots: the demand for gil is there because you need it to enjoy other parts of the game, but many players value their time more than the real money needed to buy it.

Because let's be honest, crafting and gathering are just huge times sinks. You're basically exchanging your time for gil. There's nothing hard to understand, nothing challenging or engaging about it.

That's why you don't see bots for things like savage and ultimate content: that's the end goal, raiders enjoy doing it, and if you don't, you can just avoid it and you're losing pretty much nothing, except for the chance to dye some underwhelming gear and a mount that can be easily obtained in the following expansion doing the content unsynced.

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I love gathering. It is MY end game and I find it very relaxing and enjoyable.

As of today, I've now witnessed people running the ShB MSQ using bots. The laziness really knows no bounds.

I also noticed that aside from their usual janky movement patterns, there's another obvious oddity in that they're able to target both enemies and NPCs from further then an actual player can (They can target anything that's within rendering distance, whereas an actual player needs to be close enough to see the target's name) and also ignore LoS while doing so (Meaning they can target things through walls). This just makes the lack of bans all the more frustrating because they are not hard to identify at ALL, but they seem to insist on continuing to use flawed detection tools when they could just be using their eyes instead.

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Originally Posted by DynnDiablos

I must be dealing with this tool now. He is blocking anyone from being able to sell Wall Planters and Planter Partitions because he auto-undercuts every 2-3 minutes by 5-10 gil. I kept wondering why someone would just sit there doing it, but it is the same four listings split between the same two retainers and like clockwork if I adjust my prices his lower. I also believe this to be a bot because I tanked the price from 20k to 4k on them and he still undercut, when most wouldn't really want to lose that much gil on them.

In the end they cost me nothing to make and I had a surplus left over from my house decorating, but I would love to unload them even for 4k a piece lol.

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If it's an item you don't mind potentially losing some gil try undercutting by a large amount and then buy their stock. Try listing it for 10 gil and wait and see if they undercut you again lol

This is an issue for most MMO's, and there are multiple issues at play.

First being that it's difficult to prove. It doesn't matter how many times you report someone suspicious, or how obvious you think it is. The fact of the matter is that SE can't see the bot program running, so ending an account, that someone may have 100's of dollars invest in, based on hearsay will always require insane scrutiny. It would be expensive.

Second is I doubt they want to start doing blanket account terminations. I think this game is doing well, but I doubt it's doing so well that they're anxious to see just how many paying customers they lose if they start flagging and banning everyone who has questionable software detected.

If they want to make crafting worthwhile, I think adding some crafting content that can't be sold or traded, and thus is only available to the crafter, would be the best course. It could be purely cosmetic stuff and mounts. It could be more potent or longer lasting versions of existing food/potions. Maybe extra materia slots for armor. Maybe extra inventory or other quality of life improvements.

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Originally Posted by Nutshell

If it's an item you don't mind potentially losing some gil try undercutting by a large amount and then buy their stock. Try listing it for 10 gil and wait and see if they undercut you again lol

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I am going to try this. They cost me nothing to make because I gathered all the mats so they are pure profit. I just have 40 of them clogging up my inventories and want them GONE.

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Originally Posted by Goji1639

This is an issue for most MMO's, and there are multiple issues at play.

First being that it's difficult to prove. It doesn't matter how many times you report someone suspicious, or how obvious you think it is. The fact of the matter is that SE can't see the bot program running, so ending an account, that someone may have 100's of dollars invest in, based on hearsay will always require insane scrutiny. It would be expensive.

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The account rules fundamentally state that SE can do whatever the heck they want with your account as its their property, so they're not under any obligation to be 100% positive someone is botting instead of just 99.9% positive, especially when they're unwilling to resort to monitoring software like some other MMOs to detect third party programs.

All they'd need to do is observe a reported player for suspicious behavior, then attempt to communicate with them or otherwise get their attention and if they fail to respond for a prolonged period of time then they issue a ban.

This is basically how WoW handled its reports and tellingly, I was able to get bots removed both quickly and frequently (They actually respond to the reports and mention whether or not action was taken) as opposed to literally never over here.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

The account rules fundamentally state that SE can do whatever the heck they want with your account as its their property, so they're not under any obligation to be 100% positive someone is botting instead of just 99.9% positive, especially when they're unwilling to resort to monitoring software like some other MMOs to detect third party programs.

All they'd need to do is observe a reported player for suspicious behavior, then attempt to communicate with them or otherwise get their attention and if they fail to respond for a prolonged period of time then they issue a ban.

This is basically how WoW handled its reports and tellingly, I was able to get bots removed both quickly and frequently (They actually respond to the reports and mention whether or not action was taken) as opposed to literally never over here.

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If I recall correctly, WoW will shadow players who are reported enough for suspicious activity and immediately ban them. They will then be given a grace period to prove otherwise. A big issue FFXIV has is their GM team has no authority to ban players for botting and such. That falls under the STF, which is ridiculously small.

For all of WoW's many faults. They are leagues above FFXIV when it comes to handling bots.

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Originally Posted by Goji1639

This is an issue for most MMO's, and there are multiple issues at play.

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SE is either seriously under manned or just doesn't care to put more effort into fighting botting. They have yet to put anything into the game that would track bots making it easier to investigate. The GM system seems to be completely separate from this type of cheating. In 11 GMs used to come and move and interact with you if they thought you were botting. You will still get a random tell.



Now will this stop cheating, never. No one expects them to eliminate bots. Just putting more effort in would go a long way.



Also at this point this expansion is pretty corrupted by bots. Which is not the end of the world. But building and putting a system in place for the next expansion and warning everyone for a year and starting to ban players before the next expansion would be nice.


Even though they made crafting and gathering easier to level. I think they would face more complaints about crafting only stuff then they do bots. Bots don't stop people from getting stuff, but making people work for stuff upsets them.

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Originally Posted by Moonlite

SE is either seriously under manned or just doesn't care to put more effort into fighting botting. They have yet to put anything into the game that would track bots making it easier to investigate. The GM system seems to be completely separate from this type of cheating. In 11 GMs used to come and move and interact with you if they thought you were botting. You will still get a random tell.

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If you look up the credits, you'll see the Special Task Force, which handles this sort of thing, has only four people. I don't know if they simply couldn't be bothered or are still woefully ignorant to just how bad botting has become, but either way, they're hilariously understaffed in this department. What makes me think the latter is the dev team announcing a leaderboard for Ishgard Restoration. Pretty much everyone knows that will be a bot riddled mess within hours. Maybe it'll become obvious enough they do something out of sheer embarrassment.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

The account rules fundamentally state that SE can do whatever the heck they want with your account as its their property, so they're not under any obligation to be 100% positive someone is botting instead of just 99.9% positive, especially when they're unwilling to resort to monitoring software like some other MMOs to detect third party programs.

All they'd need to do is observe a reported player for suspicious behavior, then attempt to communicate with them or otherwise get their attention and if they fail to respond for a prolonged period of time then they issue a ban.

This is basically how WoW handled its reports and tellingly, I was able to get bots removed both quickly and frequently (They actually respond to the reports and mention whether or not action was taken) as opposed to literally never over here.

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Even 99.9% positive is a lot of work. World of Warcraft did a lot of vetting but they had the resources for it. This game isn't nearly as big as WoW was in it's prime, or even now. And, even with all the work Blizzard put into vetting and removing bots there were always tons of them everywhere. The market was every bit as deflated and cut as it is in this game.

Also, Square can't do "whatever the heck they want" with your account. Even if it's in the EULA that they can, there are laws that protect consumers from agreements that basically result in theft. If someone has spent $1000's on digital property on their SE account SE can't close it unless they have a damn convincing reason. Otherwise they could easily be sued.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

If you look up the credits, you'll see the Special Task Force, which handles this sort of thing, has only four people. I don't know if they simply couldn't be bothered or are still woefully ignorant to just how bad botting has become, but either way, they're hilariously understaffed in this department. What makes me think the latter is the dev team announcing a leaderboard for Ishgard Restoration. Pretty much everyone knows that will be a bot riddled mess within hours. Maybe it'll become obvious enough they do something out of sheer embarrassment.

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That is part of the problem with the whole situation. They used the special task force in 11. GMs were still active in bot hunting. If the bots that are regular players and not rmt are smart they will not get involved with leaderboard. SE can pretend the problem is under control, the forums can defend SE policy they just don't have the staff to handle the situation. The evil person in me hopes its like a lot of content SE implements that is new and not well thought out. Front pages of forums filled with anger at why SE couldn't see this coming. Just like last Ishgard resto patch.

I personally don't care much for most botting, gathering, crafting, even playing. Although its an advantage, its nothing that really hurts the competitive aspect of the game...since mostly, there is none. But, the price undercutting bot is completely unfair, since it locks out the market for anyone who doesn't have a bot. So you spend a lot of time to get to the endgame top tier crafting, just to get a NOPE in your face.

Also, you could make the price undercutting bots basically useless, if you just add a dailly limit to price adjusting and item posting. Its not really hard, they just need to care.

I am find it is hard to believe that people still thinks gil means anything at 5.0 in this game. Even you start fresh at 5.0, you would have over 10 mils by now....

This character is siting on 20 mils that i am only occasionally stuck up 2 retainers
On top that i already own a decorated house plot.

Gils means nothing in this game, i find how gil sellers even survive...

I have to admit i'm also in the camp that is hoping the bots ruin the planned Ishgard leaderboard so there is a massive outcry of anger forcing Squares hand to actually do something.

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Originally Posted by Goji1639

This is an issue for most MMO's, and there are multiple issues at play.

First being that it's difficult to prove. It doesn't matter how many times you report someone suspicious, or how obvious you think it is. The fact of the matter is that SE can't see the bot program running, so ending an account, that someone may have 100's of dollars invest in, based on hearsay will always require insane scrutiny. It would be expensive.

Second is I doubt they want to start doing blanket account terminations. I think this game is doing well, but I doubt it's doing so well that they're anxious to see just how many paying customers they lose if they start flagging and banning everyone who has questionable software detected.

If they want to make crafting worthwhile, I think adding some crafting content that can't be sold or traded, and thus is only available to the crafter, would be the best course. It could be purely cosmetic stuff and mounts. It could be more potent or longer lasting versions of existing food/potions. Maybe extra materia slots for armor. Maybe extra inventory or other quality of life improvements.

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Just hire one person who will go as admin in game and ban all who :

- walk in air
- walk under ground , no collision
- they teleport in ground on same spot - many of them half eaten by floor

ps:
( all those bots are named mostly gdyfhffjgv jghfchhg ) and most of the time they belong to FC with all of them " ghcutgjv bchfchc "

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Originally Posted by Divinemights

I am find it is hard to believe that people still thinks gil means anything at 5.0 in this game. Even you start fresh at 5.0, you would have over 10 mils by now....

This character is siting on 20 mils that i am only occasionally stuck up 2 retainers
On top that i already own a decorated house plot.

Gils means nothing in this game, i find how gil sellers even survive...

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20kk is basically ok money. Try making a full facet gear with full advanced materia with that. Maybe you'd get half the gear.

Gil means something if you need it for something.

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Originally Posted by Goji1639

Even 99.9% positive is a lot of work. World of Warcraft did a lot of vetting but they had the resources for it. This game isn't nearly as big as WoW was in it's prime, or even now. And, even with all the work Blizzard put into vetting and removing bots there were always tons of them everywhere. The market was every bit as deflated and cut as it is in this game.

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I think the only reason the market was abused as much as it was in WoW was because the lack of any significant progression gating via level or questing when it came to leveling gatherers/crafters meant it was several magnitudes easier to max out one's professions and start farming (Particularly for the RMTers who'd just use teleport hacks to avoid ever having to fight enemies and gather nodes from beneath the ground). Bans occur more often, but the bots also come back much quicker so it's a situation similar to what XIV is having to deal with for the gil farmers, except it also extends to gathering/crafting there.

The MSQ gating in XIV puts a damper on how much RMTers can abuse gathering/crafting, but some are evidently willing to level skip new accounts then use bots to run through the ShB MSQ for that purpose...

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Originally Posted by Fernandosilveirasc

I personally don't care much for most botting, gathering, crafting, even playing. Although its an advantage, its nothing that really hurts the competitive aspect of the game...since mostly, there is none. But, the price undercutting bot is completely unfair, since it locks out the market for anyone who doesn't have a bot. So you spend a lot of time to get to the endgame top tier crafting, just to get a NOPE in your face.

Also, you could make the price undercutting bots basically useless, if you just add a dailly limit to price adjusting and item posting. Its not really hard, they just need to care.

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The restoration rankings are attempting to add a competitive aspect to the DoL/H classes, so there's a very high chance it's going to end up being a total wash for legitimate players if SE doesn't aggressively monitor the top spots to ensure that they aren't being occupied by cheaters.

And yeah, I pretty much gave up on trying to sell anything mainstream because there's at least three different bot farmers/undercut spammers on the market right now who are fighting with each other and playing a game of "how low can you go" with the prices on everything. You can only really push sales easily within the first few weeks of a patch while items are being moved quickly and the bots haven't updated scripts yet.

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Originally Posted by Divinemights

I am find it is hard to believe that people still thinks gil means anything at 5.0 in this game. Even you start fresh at 5.0, you would have over 10 mils by now....

This character is siting on 20 mils that i am only occasionally stuck up 2 retainers
On top that i already own a decorated house plot.

Gils means nothing in this game, i find how gil sellers even survive...

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have you found this thing called the market board, when you look at it you notice that it has items you can buy.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

I think the only reason the market was abused as much as it was in WoW was because the lack of any significant progression gating via level or questing when it came to leveling gatherers/crafters meant it was several magnitudes easier to max out one's professions and start farming (Particularly for the RMTers who'd just use teleport hacks to avoid ever having to fight enemies and gather nodes from beneath the ground). Bans occur more often, but the bots also come back much quicker so it's a situation similar to what XIV is having to deal with for the gil farmers, except it also extends to gathering/crafting there.

The MSQ gating in XIV puts a damper on how much RMTers can abuse gathering/crafting, but some are evidently willing to level skip new accounts then use bots to run through the ShB MSQ for that purpose...




The restoration rankings are attempting to add a competitive aspect to the DoL/H classes, so there's a very high chance it's going to end up being a total wash for legitimate players if SE doesn't aggressively monitor the top spots to ensure that they aren't being occupied by cheaters.

And yeah, I pretty much gave up on trying to sell anything mainstream because there's at least three different bot farmers/undercut spammers on the market right now who are fighting with each other and playing a game of "how low can you go" with the prices on everything. You can only really push sales easily within the first few weeks of a patch while items are being moved quickly and the bots haven't updated scripts yet.

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I remember seeing lots o people crafting in ishgard on the days prior to the restoration launch. It's basically deserted now.

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Originally Posted by RyuSaarva

have you found this thing called the market board, when you look at it you notice that it has items you can buy.

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As i already have a decorated house, what else you can buy beside cosmetic staff?
The point i am making is this is a sub character with decorated house that barely using retainers and still have 20 mils.
The making gil is easy in this game and I cant see why people need to buy gils from gil farmer?

The best way to kill off gil sellers is always "not to buy" from them.
If there is no demand and there will be no supply.
It is always fertile to ask any game company to deal with gil sellers

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Originally Posted by Divinemights

I am find it is hard to believe that people still thinks gil means anything at 5.0 in this game. Even you start fresh at 5.0, you would have over 10 mils by now....

This character is siting on 20 mils that i am only occasionally stuck up 2 retainers
On top that i already own a decorated house plot.

Gils means nothing in this game, i find how gil sellers even survive...

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Gil means the same thing as glamour, raids or any thing else in this game. If you care about the content it impacts, it's essentially its own achievement. Getting 100M gill takes a lot of effort and knowledge of market board trends. For a good amount of crafters, that's what they enjoy. SE's downright incompetence when it comes to bots (not simply RMT) renders that aspect of the game pointless. Not much point competing when someone can put up 70+ stacks of 99 Tinctures in a day.

What frustrates people even more is if you mention parse numbers, GMs will pounce because how dare you make little Timmy feel bad. But when it comes to bots destroying the market board? Eh. No big deal, apparently.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

Not much point competing when someone can put up 70+ stacks of 99 Tinctures in a day.

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This problem won't be solved as long as they don't let us craft batches of tinctures by increasing the materials used in a single attempt.

The whole crafting system is based on the idea that you should waste time to make gil. That's unacceptable for most players and that's why there are so many bots.

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Originally Posted by Lastelli

This problem won't be solved as long as they don't let us craft batches of tinctures by increasing the materials used in a single attempt.

The whole crafting system is based on the idea that you should waste time to make gil. That's unacceptable for most players and that's why there are so many bots.

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While I do think this is a good idea, provided there remains some restriction to how many, the bots will remain even if they did make such a change. Instead, you'd have consumables crash even harder since people could easily make stacks of 99 within a couple minutes.

Bots like this exist not for convenience sake but often to sell their gil to RMT. And they've become increasingly rampant because more and more people are realizing how comically lax SE is on banning them.

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Originally Posted by Melichoir

MB bots, while annoying, are just an expedited version of someone sitting at a computer undercutting people. Makes it hard at times for certain items to get that sale so you can get gil, but its not outright preventing it.

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This is one of the worst takes I've seen on botting in my life, and could not be more wrong. If someone is using an undercutting bot and undercutting you every couple of minutes, you will not get sales unless all of their items get bought out first. Most items sell so infrequently that this is likely to not happen. So it does actually prevent you from getting sales.

I can tell you do not craft for gil and have seemingly zero experience with this, and even the very concept of what an undercut bot does.

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Originally Posted by Melichoir

Now Farm bots is where it gets a bit more nuanced and why SE doesnt exactly outright ban every single one. The most pragmatic reason: It would crash the MB. The issue is you dont have enough people doing gathering. Bots in teh game add to that pool and end up driving costs down by creating higher market saturation. Since most MMOs have bots, it can be reasoned to some extent that MB prices has to take into account farm bots adn the game is somewhat tuned in this way. SE most likely has the tools to outright ban this kind of bot pretty easily, but to do so we would see scarcity of a lot of mats just shoot through the roof and make massive fluctuations to the in game gil economy which would end up hurting hte game

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Snipped this post a bit in the quote.

Another really awful take that literally condones botting due to personal laziness.

MBs would not "crash" or "stall", because people will make and gather things that other players will buy. The wells do not dry up. The rivers do not run dry. People will craft and gather the things. The only reason they wouldn't would be specifically due to bots driving the value down so low it isn't worth their time to do. There is no magical shortage of mats or items people aren't crafting either because the vast majority of items I used to make to make gil have had their prices destroyed due to Quick Ventures giving out so many for free that nobody wants the stuff. So they get posted for like 1k or less on MB when they used to sell for 100-400k in the past. There is an oversaturation of most items.

Clearly you have a vested interest in botting continuing since you, again quite clearly, do not craft much yourself (don't post me your lodestone and show me that you leveled them either, it does not mean you craft seriously). You would rather there be bots because you can go buy cheap items without having to put any effort in yourself. for you, that's it.

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Originally Posted by Melichoir

Imagine buying food buffs today for 10k gil for a stack of 10, and tomorrow or this weekend it jumps to 200k for the same stack due to scarcity.

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Imagine spending a couple minutes to craft it yourself if you don't like the price.

What expansion was recent when this thread was first made?

I know people feel like necromancer is likely but still.

Well, I guess one of the biggest threads on the front page of this particular subforum is from 2015 and has 3k pages so maybe that's more normal here...

This thread was made back in SB which is when the marketboard abuse by RMT botters got particularly bad due to them easing the endgame crafting in basically every respect.

It's only gotten worse since then with the bots trying or succeeding in worming their way into even more markets then before, so the topic is plenty relevant.

As far as I'm concerned, trying to craft for profit outside of a window where the bots are broken (The biggest window is at the start of new expansions as they need to script new gathering routes) is largely pointless these days.

On the point of "Tread necromancy".

It seems SE looks at the age and number of post in said thread.
I remember something to that effect from the Japanese side of the forums.
(If I am wrong there , I apologize.)

So , a thread with lots of posts has a better chance of getting attention the a new thread made by every special snowflake that HAS to have its own thread.
That dos not mean any old thread will be listened to , like when it goes against a design condition they made and like.
But it sure can not hurt to try.

Anyway my 5gill on the matter

A bot with one combat job and all crafters levelled on my server sits in an apartment 24/7 making aesthetic HQ gear, updates prices every 5 minutes or so, undercuts by 1 Gil, only goes down to base material costs.. replaces any sold item straight away. Has several retainers.. only disappears at patch when he’s either giving it a rest or broken down.

So basically this whole market is closed off, and this bot makes millions if not billions of Gil. Reported it but they don’t do anything.

Square will never do anything about this, why? Money. The bots pay a subscription fee plus buy the games and expansions = $$$$$ for square. They only step in when the community gets really upset. Lets look at the market as an exmaple:

- I list an item that is currently selling for 599,999 gil (for example) So I list mine for 599,998 - like you are suppose to, sometimes Maybe 599,000 - so that's what 1000 gil I undercut, not that big of a deal. So I come back the next day and see some idiot listing the same item under mine for 599 gil., not thousand, hundred. This sh** needs to stop.
- Diadem - nothing but bots on the weekend.
- DOL - Nothing but bots with few players out and about getting what they need.

The market is run by idiots and bots who undercut each other severely. Ya sure some one comes a long and cleans up that section of the market board, but you are still then re-undercutting others just so your stuff will sell quickly.

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Originally Posted by SavishSalacious

Square will never do anything about this, why? Money. The bots pay a subscription fee plus buy the games and expansions = $$$$$ for square. They only step in when the community gets really upset. Lets look at the market as an exmaple:

- I list an item that is currently selling for 599,999 gil (for example) So I list mine for 599,998 - like you are suppose to, sometimes Maybe 599,000 - so that's what 1000 gil I undercut, not that big of a deal. So I come back the next day and see some idiot listing the same item under mine for 599 gil., not thousand, hundred. This sh** needs to stop.
- Diadem - nothing but bots on the weekend.
- DOL - Nothing but bots with few players out and about getting what they need.

The market is run by idiots and bots who undercut each other severely. Ya sure some one comes a long and cleans up that section of the market board, but you are still then re-undercutting others just so your stuff will sell quickly.

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Bots will undercut but not by the amount or in the way you're describing, and it's honestly hard to say based on your description that this is even a bad decision on the undercutter's part. What item are you selling? How much do they typically sell for? How often do they sell? How often do other players list it? If you're as confident in your listed price, why aren't you buying their item at 1/100th of the price and relisting at your own?

People will put items up at vastly inflated prices in addition to selling things for less than they're worth. If you're just price matching whatever else is listed you might be price matching with someone using their market board slots as storage. The highest price listing of an item is not its baseline value, not when even a lot of serious market board listings are guesses.

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Originally Posted by PaganWitchcraft

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Did you just advertise the bot for everyone? Is this secretly made by the bot creators to get people looking up whatever the heck the bot program is?