Botting on the marketboard. Impossible to sell anything.

i have been playing this game sence the start of arr and botting has been in this game sence then and its not going away anytime soon so good luck with crying to the companty till they change this.

On Twintania are a few Botters, but one of them is really someone I would punch in his Face if I could. He underbids me every day 1000 times so, I sell now my HQ Classic Gear for 20000 Gil and destroy the Market for all those Items. If that is how it should be, then it is fine by me.

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Originally Posted by Aneshda

On Twintania are a few Botters, but one of them is really someone I would punch in his Face if I could. He underbids me every day 1000 times so, I sell now my HQ Classic Gear for 20000 Gil and destroy the Market for all those Items. If that is how it should be, then it is fine by me.

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Which might be fine as long as you continually sell your product for a near-loss. But the moment you give up (since that sounds like a waste of time), prices will jump back and the botter will just relist up to the next higher price... which might be a tidy profit for them. For the next 6 months or so.

Bots don't care. They'll take 20k gil when they're moving thousands of items. Eventually you'll burn out or won't have enough free time to keep up and they'll have the entire market again, but for now they're earning a steady stream of 20k's without even needing to be at the computer while you're burning all your free time for next to no profit.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

Bots don't care. They'll take 20k gil when they're moving thousands of items. Eventually you'll burn out or won't have enough free time to keep up and they'll have the entire market again, but for now they're earning a steady stream of 20k's without even needing to be at the computer while you're burning all your free time for next to no profit.

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This. Don't bother man.

Seems there was a good ban wave yesterday. Most big bots are gone from Chaos it seems. Let's see if they come back after 3 days.

EDIT: Some of the bots are back after exactly 3 days and some are not. So it seems SE is handing out 3 day bans to people caught botting/RMT instead of straight out removing them.. lol

The bots are one of those things that both sides of the playerbase are complaining about, but they haven't done anything meaningful to address it.

It wouldn't surprise me if the STF is so out of touch with the head devs that the latter think the situation is perfectly okay given all the other times Yoshi had to experience/be told something directly before changes happened. It took getting a RMT tell for the quick report function to be added for RMT chat spam, then it took someone directly asking him about the party finder ad spam in an interview to make content selling actionable according to the ToS.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

The bots are one of those things that both sides of the playerbase are complaining about, but they haven't done anything meaningful to address it.

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Its because effectively they cant. The root problem is simply that RMT can only be punished afterward. Which only hurts the buyer and not the seller. And its those sellers that are mostly botting.

You want to take them out at the source, but there is no coverage in laws that makes taking down those sites (and to sue the ones behind the site) easier. EULA's can at most ban a player, but you cant sue such player. Simply because its anonymous dump accounts.
The missing part in the law is that you can consider such site as participant in the game, and therefor require them to accept the EULA. The issue is that they dont have to accept that eula at all to run the site. Automatic acceptance is by that a very dangerous feature to have since its well abusable (someone posts something on a forum, the forum doesnt take it down, and now the forum somehow is considered as being such service). The law however can at least get rules that cover it in similar way to a certain piracy site (that i wont mention). In that case, even though they only rely on user generated data, the site is considered a host for such things, and therefor legaly responsible for their content.

But this can only be done when governments act (and for example in the EU, its not just a single government)... and guess what those governments rarely care about? Instead of purging such services in games, they rather purge games entirely... or instead promote such activities because its capitalism...

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Originally Posted by UkcsAlias

Its because effectively they cant. The root problem is simply that RMT can only be punished afterward. Which only hurts the buyer and not the seller. And its those sellers that are mostly botting.

You want to take them out at the source, but there is no coverage in laws that makes taking down those sites (and to sue the ones behind the site) easier. EULA's can at most ban a player, but you cant sue such player. Simply because its anonymous dump accounts.
The missing part in the law is that you can consider such site as participant in the game, and therefor require them to accept the EULA. The issue is that they dont have to accept that eula at all to run the site. Automatic acceptance is by that a very dangerous feature to have since its well abusable (someone posts something on a forum, the forum doesnt take it down, and now the forum somehow is considered as being such service). The law however can at least get rules that cover it in similar way to a certain piracy site (that i wont mention). In that case, even though they only rely on user generated data, the site is considered a host for such things, and therefor legaly responsible for their content.

But this can only be done when governments act (and for example in the EU, its not just a single government)... and guess what those governments rarely care about? Instead of purging such services in games, they rather purge games entirely... or instead promote such activities because its capitalism...

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Like they can't tell who's botting. Take an obvious limsa bot for instance, online pretty much 24/7 and never moves beyond turning their head to the market board and to the summoning bell every 30s. The trade history of that character alone would be evidence enough, then just follow whos consistently trading items to this character, and the alts related to each account. Boom, you just killed an entire botting branch with minimal effort.

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Originally Posted by Troxbark

Like they can't tell who's botting. Take an obvious limsa bot for instance, online pretty much 24/7 and never moves beyond turning their head to the market board and to the summoning bell every 30s. The trade history of that character alone would be evidence enough, then just follow whos consistently trading items to this character, and the alts related to each account. Boom, you just killed an entire botting branch with minimal effort.

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They need to find a way to do this objectively. It can't be "some guy standing around LL." What if they are instead at the MB in front of the apartment complex? What if they move 10 steps to the left and 10 steps to the right daily? Does that count?

It seems easy for a human to "recognize" a bot, but much more difficult for a human to program a computer to do it.

I think overall the bottom line on the botting issue, specifically market bots, is that the people using the bots are spending more money than the individual player. They need more retainers than one character can use, so they often have alts, and several I have looked at have around a dozen characters in their FC's (used to quickly move items among characters via the company chest). Going to guess that they buy an MSQ skip for each character to unlock retainers etc. on the alts (to save time). $11 to skip ARR, and essentially they're spending $88 per character, plus subscription fees per account every time they come back from being banned. As an individual, I have one account, and might job boost an alt once every couple months, or maybe purchase something from the store.

Plain and simple: Money is king, and the individual player doesn't make their pockets jingle as much as bots.

The individual can't even make a statement by quitting/un-subscribing, and so nothing is done until the number of individuals leaving reaches the point where the total income they provide is greater than that of the bots. If the player base consists of enough players who don't care or don't know about what is going on, then the individuals who are annoyed at it are expendable and are very likely looked on with disdain by the company.

So, I have been following the big bots on Chaos and this is just funny and sad. I have been reporting all of them for quite some time now and it seems SE did suspend their accounts. The funny and sad thing is that they first got a 3 day suspension. They came back after 3 days of absence and weeks later they got a 10 day suspension. Today some of them came back online again after exactly 10 days of absence.

So SE seems to be punishing their accounts (thus acknowledging they are violating the TOS) with TEMP suspensions!! I mean...wow..no words. So far for their "zero tolerance policy" rofl.

Now I probably have to wait a few more weeks for them to get their 20 days suspension and then their final permanent suspension. This is just a joke at this point.

If SE just watched the MB and followed the top selling mat's/gear's or looked in to the most prolific sellers a few times a week. It would be easy to follow the trail back to some type of botting by a MB bot or some gatherer's/crafters botting. Ban the account and anything that goes with it.

The MB is where there mostly making the gil to be able to RMT, knocking that out and there's less of a market for RMT

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Originally Posted by Tyrann-O-saur

If SE just watched the MB and followed the top selling mat's/gear's or looked in to the most prolific sellers a few times a week. It would be easy to follow the trail back to some type of botting by a MB bot or some gatherer's/crafters botting. Ban the account and anything that goes with it.

The MB is where there mostly making the gil to be able to RMT, knocking that out and there's less of a market for RMT

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The thing is... being prolific sellers is NOT against the TOS. However, it is hard to justify how someone can legitimately relist hundreds of items every 5 or 10 minutes, 24 hours/day. In the same way that gathering isn't against the TOS, but hitting up nodes non-stop for 24 hours is clearly a sign of inhuman feats. Where do they draw the line? How do they differentiate between players that simply spend way too much time crafting/gathering/relisting and those that just start some script and walk away.

Tbh, report every single character with unglammed crafter/gatherer bis gear that only have one DoW/DoM at max and all DoH/DoL at max, no mounts, no minions, usually in an FC where the botter's actual character is in so they can get their gil through FC Chest. These days they seem to be avoiding keeping them in the same FC in case they get traced.

I throw up a little when I see someone wearing crafted gear made by a filthy bot.

While I will not deny that the market bots are certainly an issue and make it difficult to sell anything, a couple little experiments I've done recently reveal that one can actually take advantage of the bots, particularly the RMT bots. One thing that I've noticed is that many of these bots that auto-undercut may not have a properly set minimum. This means you can drive them down to the bottom, buy them out, and then resale their wares for profit. I successfully did this against 3 separate bots. However, I will say that in doing this, you do need to do some calculations to understand what your price points are going to be for buying, selling for profit, and breaking even. The basic formula one would follow for this is simply

y = x*(1 + p) *(1 + b)/(1 - s)

where y is the price you list to sell an item, x is the listed price at which you purchased an item (when reselling the bot's item), b is the tax fraction at which you buy (which is always 5%), s is the tax fraction at which you sell (this is determined by the city from which your retainer is selling), and p is the desired profit margin. To determine your break-even price, you would just set p = 0. For example, let's say you buy an item that is listed for 100 gil and you want to resale it for a 35% profit. Further, let's say that you resale the item on a retainer in a city with a 3% tax. So, what price do you need to list the item in order to obtain a 35% profit. In this case, p = 0.35, b = 0.05, s = 0.03, and x = 100. Plugging these numbers into the formula, we obtain

y = 100*(1 + 0.35)*(1 + 0.05)/(1 - 0.03) = 146.134

Since we can only set integral number prices, we set the list price at 147 gil because we want a profit margin at 35% or better. Choosing 146 gil for the list price would make the profit margin slightly less. Of course, you don't have to be that persnickety about it, but that's a personal decision you make. The break-even price for this case would be

y0 = 100*(1 + 0.05)/(1- 0.03) = 108.247

So, you wouldn't want to list for less than 109, else you'll be losing money.

The other thing that I noticed is that the market bots, specifically the RMT market bots, are not able to obtain special mats such as those dropped from bosses are purchased with tomestones. This is because they generally don't engage in dungeons, EX content, or savage content. So, they have no means of obtaining these mats other than market board, and they tend to buy a large amount of these mats. So, this is means that normal players could profit off the RMT bots by selling these mats to them, since normal players do tend engage in these activities and obtain these mats.

With these techniques, I've been able to make roughly 10+ mil gil over the past couple of weeks. I've mostly focused on just selling the special mats; tricking the bots into driving their prices to the bottom and then buying them out can be a risky option, and it's slow. However, if you have the stomach for it and are willing to do some careful calculation with tracking of your sales, you could do reasonably well, piggy-backing on their work.

Bots are also what keeps a lot of things affordable. Can you imagine how expensive shards and crystals would be if not for botters driving the price down into the basement? Once every three minutes you can sometimes haul in enough crystals for like... six or seven crafts of something. If you're lucky. And your gatherer is level 76 or above.

You want to know why Square-Enix doesn't really care about bots that aren't actively engaging in RMT? Because they'd have to wrestle with this game's incompetently laid-out economy if not for the botters providing a constant flow of cheap, available commodities.

I don't have trouble making plenty of money on the marketboards. People whining about botters and undercutting probably don't really understand how to make it work for them. They're probably focused on selling one or two things for a ton of money - those things will move slowly, so being undercut actually matters. But if you're selling someone people tend to buy frequently and they probably buy like three stacks of at a time? It doesn't matter if someone undercuts you by like 3 gil per, you're still going to sell it.

Housing items are often a good investment. Look up what kinds of items are necessary for the latest "modern loft" craze and produce them in bulk. Square imitation windows have always been a very consistent income source for me. Send retainers to get the logs, spend your poetics on the urushi, and just buy the glass lenses and steel ingots from a vendor.

If not that, things like leather or most other "monster goods" are often worth going for. They're needed for multiple crafting professions and unless you're having a retainer do it for you (limited income), it's kind of a pain to farm up 200 monster skins or bits and bobs.

People complain now about bots they all disappeared people would complain about the price increase. Sucks all around.

If you would have 1 Bot that sells Rinascita Gear, Jewelry, Weapons for every single Job on your Server.
Every single piece 2-5 times which makes 75 x 2-5 Items.
And that from his Apartment Room, which he never leaves.
That Bot undercuts all prices every 10 Minutes, 35 seconds.
And now tell me how should someone sell something?

I have 9 Retainers and no matter what niche i choose to sell something ... max. 2 Days later someone will come and flood the Market with 15-20 of those Items, and while that someone does that, he undercuts everyone by 10k-50k in one swoop.

No matter how often you report those Bots, the next day, week, month they are still there and maybe one day after many months that Bot is gone for 3 days, 10 days ... but never perma banned, like it should be. So how should someone earn enough Gil? None likes to sell their Stuff for 5000 Gil.

There is only one way right now ... you don't Play, stand at the Market Board, use a timer and call your Retainer right before the Bot calls his Retainers, to undercut the prices. That Bot will not notice that you sell your Stuff 5k cheaper and so it will keep his price. But by god to do that you need a lot nerves, till something gets sold. It should be not this way.

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Originally Posted by Gserpent

I don't have trouble making plenty of money on the marketboards. People whining about botters and undercutting probably don't really understand how to make it work for them. They're probably focused on selling one or two things for a ton of money - those things will move slowly, so being undercut actually matters. But if you're selling someone people tend to buy frequently and they probably buy like three stacks of at a time? It doesn't matter if someone undercuts you by like 3 gil per, you're still going to sell it.

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I play this game since the start and have multiple gil caps. I still complain about bots. I think you are missing the point. Bots are automated while players have to be physically present and input commands. Do you know how much time poeple need to waste to craft 100's of items in batches and update prices every 10 minutes? Right. It's not even about the gil. It's about fun. And "competing" against bots is all but fun (and fair).

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Originally Posted by Gserpent

Bots are also what keeps a lot of things affordable. Can you imagine how expensive shards and crystals would be if not for botters driving the price down into the basement? Once every three minutes you can sometimes haul in enough crystals for like... six or seven crafts of something. If you're lucky. And your gatherer is level 76 or above.

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They wouldnt become too expensive. Like with every market, if prices are starting to get a bit too high, some people will start investing time into obtaining that item to sell it again. Shards are on that no exception.

Sure, a shard might rise from 8 gil to 80 gil, but on a craft that takes several 2k items and can bring 100k in the end, that rise of 1000 from just shards wouldnt be notible. That extra cost is only a problem when you are trying to compete against bots as they will just push all the profit margins away.

And in the end, you can keep an expensive item that costed 10k each in ingredients on the market for a week at 100k, or sell it 5x at 50k. This competition will also remain there and push prices down. Since in the end, even at 11k, it will make profit (a very low one on that), so undercutting here can be beneficial.

And if without bots something would become problematic to obtain, they can always adjust the balance. But its highly unlikely this would be needed.

What annoys me lately is how even regular players have addons that can search out market niches or automatically undercut all their listed items by 1 gil. I've come across players on discords discussing how it's a thing and not even uncommon either.

It feels a bit annoying to play legitimately, manually repricing every item one by one, then someone comes along 10 minutes later and undercuts the entire lot at a click while sending out their Quick Ventures. It's a punishment for following the ToS.

I'm curious what kind of players are actually controlling the market prices for everything in this game? You can tell there is a fixed range to everything you buy, and very rarely can be not the case.

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Originally Posted by Kaliesto

I'm curious what kind of players are actually controlling the market prices for everything in this game? You can tell there is a fixed range to everything you buy, and very rarely can be not the case.

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No player is going to have that sort of control over everything in the game. A few players may be able to monopolize a certain few item on their home world/data center but most pricing is still going to be mainly influenced by supply and demand. If your seeing items being sold for roughly the same amount on multiple worlds, you're seeing the effects of world visit and data center travel on the marketboard.

If that's not what you're referring to, you should give a specific example of what you're talking about.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

What annoys me lately is how even regular players have addons that can search out market niches or automatically undercut all their listed items by 1 gil. I've come across players on discords discussing how it's a thing and not even uncommon either.

It feels a bit annoying to play legitimately, manually repricing every item one by one, then someone comes along 10 minutes later and undercuts the entire lot at a click while sending out their Quick Ventures. It's a punishment for following the ToS.

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Yeah this is what you get for going mainstream. People in general are scummy so players in this game should be no exception. Like you said - It's a punishment for following the ToS.

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Originally Posted by Prrringles

Yeah this is what you get for going mainstream.

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That isnt just mainstream, such things happen in any game with an economy. Any economy will get players to automate things to optimize their money generating.

The only way to counter this is either by using a tax mechanism (editing prices costs gil), or by having improved detection. As detection is usualy more difficult, tax would be the solution.
But for taxing, there is the issue it also punishes the legit players. But at least there is a way: each retainer can only relist 10 items for free per day. If its sold, a new item is not considered relisted. When exceeding this value, each price change now costs some gil. This value also scales up doubling each time. For gracefulness we can exclude items under a certain value (items/stacks below 10k in total), or even make that cost tiered (<1k is free, <10k 100gil, >10k is scaled values).
Optionaly you could even make these 'relists' a resource that you can stack (for example you get 10 per retainer per day, but they can stack up to 100 - making the occasional trader unaffected).

And ff is still far from mainstream. WoW is mainstream, and ff is still a niche (but probably also the reason why its a lot more fun). Every time an MMO is mentioned in the news (even if its about gaming in general), WoW is usualy mentioned as an example, but FF isnt (at least not in my country).

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Originally Posted by UkcsAlias

That isnt just mainstream, such things happen in any game with an economy. Any economy will get players to automate things to optimize their money generating.

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I don't agree but ok. This whole botting/RMT crap wasn't as big of a problem as it was pre stormblood. The "addon problem" was almost non-existent pre shadowbringers. Shadowbringers and especially Endwalker brought in all the WoW folks (amongst others). I see a correlation there. Just my opinion.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Prrringles

I don't agree but ok. This whole botting/RMT crap wasn't as big of a problem as it was pre stormblood. The "addon problem" was almost non-existent pre shadowbringers. Shadowbringers and especially Endwalker brought in all the WoW folks (amongst others). I see a correlation there. Just my opinion.

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Lowering the barrier to entry probably played a bigger role in the spike. More participants in general not just from population increase but also because it was much easier to level crafting would come with an increase in the number using third party tools to simplify part of the sales process.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

What annoys me lately is how even regular players have addons that can search out market niches or automatically undercut all their listed items by 1 gil. I've come across players on discords discussing how it's a thing and not even uncommon either.

It feels a bit annoying to play legitimately, manually repricing every item one by one, then someone comes along 10 minutes later and undercuts the entire lot at a click while sending out their Quick Ventures. It's a punishment for following the ToS.

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It shouldn't be the players' fault that Square-Enix's designs are like 20 fucking years old at this point. Literally, the unmodified, stock Wrath of the Lich King auction house interface and functionality in WoW Classic is orders of magnitude better than the XIV Market Board, and that game is *fourteen years old* at this point.

There are still a handful of things left in this game that are absurdly dated, even by the time ARR released, and Square-Enix really needs to be catching hell from players for letting it sit like this for so long. There's just no damn reason that market boards and selling items should be so primitive and cumbersome. The only potential positive is that Square-Enix has been seemingly forced by the existence of plugins to adapt and integrate some of the more popular/desired features into the base game. Adding "collected/not collected" to item tooltips and the recent change to more clearly display damage typing were two extremely popular plugins, for example.

Maybe they'll get around to doing something about the deplorable state of the market board in 7.0?

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

No player is going to have that sort of control over everything in the game. A few players may be able to monopolize a certain few item on their home world/data center but most pricing is still going to be mainly influenced by supply and demand. If your seeing items being sold for roughly the same amount on multiple worlds, you're seeing the effects of world visit and data center travel on the marketboard.

If that's not what you're referring to, you should give a specific example of what you're talking about.

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No, You are wrong.
Check every single Light Server for all Frontier, Varsity, Calfskin Rider's, Summer Indigo Items, Spring Dress, Urban Coat + Boots, Rebel Coat + Boots and anything else that sells well.
There is one Player on all Servers who controls the entire Market for all of these Items.
You will easily recognize that one Player by his Prices : 100,001 Gil or 140,001 Gil and so on.
This Player always sells 10-20 of each individual Item.
As an example, I'll take Frontier Pumps and Frontier Dress.
Each Frontier Cloth costs between 89,000 - 100,000 Gil per Cloth on every Light and Chaos Server.
There are also Auction fees.
I know that this Player buys all the Cloth on all Servers at the above Prices.
On Twintania, this Player is selling Frontier Pumps for 100,001 Gil.
That's under 10,000 Gil gain per Item.
And he doesn't allow other Players to sell their Items for a higher sum.
As soon as someone buys something from that Player, he simply restocks his Retainers.
It's been like this for 2 years.
That single Player controls the whole Market for all those above mentioned Items on every single Light Server.
And SE is just doing nothing.

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Originally Posted by Aneshda

No, You are wrong.
Check every single Light Server for all Frontier, Varsity, Calfskin Rider's, Summer Indigo Items, Spring Dress, Urban Coat + Boots, Rebel Coat + Boots and anything else that sells well.
(snip the rest)

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How does that contradict what I said? You've got someone monopolizing a certain few items about of the tens of thousands that can be listed.

What did I say?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

No player is going to have that sort of control over everything in the game. A few players may be able to monopolize a certain few item on their home world/data center

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That's what I said.

Either your market on your world is much brisker than what we have on Coeurl, or we've got very different definitions of what "sells well" is. I look at sales history on those items you mentions and they stretch back anywhere from 2 weeks to 3 months. That means an item might be selling one a day or one every 4-5 days.

Then I look at the profit margins on those items compared to cost to craft. Look at the Urban Coat as an example. It's selling for 1.6 million on Coeurl. Then I look at the price of the Shell Leather. that's 550k each. Since the Urban Coat requires 3 of those to craft (not to mention the other crafting mats, though their cost is trivial in comparison), I'd be selling the coat at a loss. I'm better off selling the Shell Leather (assuming I got it directly from maps in the first place - more fool me if I was buying it off the marketboard).

Not all of those items you list are selling at a loss but in most cases the profit margin is pretty thin for something that is going to take a couple of days to sell.

Why would I bother when I can turn to other items that might have lower market prices but as high or higher profit margins and sell considerably faster? I'm more than happy to let that player have their monopoly if selling at cost makes them happy.

SE does nothing because there is no reason to do anything. It's a player engaging in free market activity.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

SE does nothing because there is no reason to do anything. It's a player engaging in free market activity.

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Botting is disruptive and against the EULA, there is a reason to do something! The free market part is completely irrelevant at that. Especialy since the botting behaviour is disrupting the playing experience of others.

Its more likely that the cost/gain aspect of fighting botting isnt profitable enough.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by UkcsAlias

Botting is disruptive and against the EULA, there is a reason to do something! The free market part is completely irrelevant at that. Especialy since the botting behaviour is disrupting the playing experience of others.

Its more likely that the cost/gain aspect of fighting botting isnt profitable enough.

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Maybe stop taking my comments out of context?

The player I was replying to was talking about player monopolies in general and that's what I was addressing. There is nothing in the ToS saying that player monopolies on the marketboard are against the ToS.

Is that particular player the poster was referring to botting? I don't have a clue. You don't have to bot to get a monopoly. You just need a lot of gil. I suspect 90% of us posting in this thread have enough gil to gain control over a select few items on the marketboard if we had the interest in doing so and we haven't had to resort to botting to get that gil.

Comon guys. I am making this number up but I am pretty sure that over 75% of the "players" selling most items on the market board use bots or are part of a RMT group. And this is all because SE has such a weak and outdated way of dealing with it. "File a report on a website".... rofl. Most people already check out when they read to need to go over to a website to file a report... GM's have absolutely zero power. I reported a player for having obscene retainer names and it took a full 2 months to take action. SE is holding on to this outdated way of doing business like they are to their beloved fax machines in Japan. Stubborn.

I am not a Blizzard fanboy but at least GM's in WoW act fast and have absolutely no mercy (at least when I used to play). Meanwhile many crafters/marketboard enthusiasts are getting rekt without end by bots/rmt since Shadowbringers.

And to the guy saying that LIGHT is controlled by 1 player for glamour items -- it's a bot. Same guy also posts items over on CHAOS. Same old rmt folks. Crafting/gathering gear for all levels is controlled by rmt. Latest battle gear is controlled by rmt. Salable mounts/minions/bardings are controlled by rmt. I can go on.

I have said this a million times before but I will say it one more time. SE is either completely incompetent OR they just benefit too much from said folks and look the other way on purpose. Probably both.

I'll race someone to the bottom every time, usually cutting by 10-20% each time, 2-3 times a day. Just to ditch my inventory at whatever price and get the heck out of that market and into something else with less competition.

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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.

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I disagree, the ones that are the newest are adapting their game to be less detectible even although it's obvious enough, they are rotating their alts and fc masters, buying houses for their fc's, they don't seem to go there unless to reset the timers on its demolition, and I'm betting they already have replacements in place just in case. (probably because they have seen online rants and forums on how they are being detected to avoid constant reporting).

Because the base items are also being farmed over both dc's by a different kind of gil farmer, I try to only buy the items priced around theirs by what looks like legit players to tank the suspected bot on the server I'm currently playing on. (items I was already crafting previously before they showed up) my current prices aren't high but I have them at the price that keeps theirs off the board. I'm probably only hitting a very small % of it, and I'm only selling on 1 server so if my stuff goes elsewhere its not me selling it.

I think someone (credit to their earlier post) suggested here a limit to listing, adjusting, and or removing listings for a set period of time on the marketboard, this could be a step in the right direction to interrupt their progress and would allow real players to have their items in contention for a better period of time, and if u could identify the bots patterns and activity times you could wait till they update theirs then go update yours to lock them out....for a little while at least.

This would probably hinder their operations the most and would make it less attractive as a side hustle...

....unfortunately getting SE's attention is another problem.

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Originally Posted by Rock-Star

I think someone (credit to their earlier post) suggested here a limit to listing, adjusting, and or removing listings for a set period of time on the marketboard, this could be a step in the right direction to interrupt their progress and would allow real players to have their items in contention for a better period of time, and if u could identify the bots patterns and activity times you could wait till they update theirs then go update yours to lock them out....for a little while at least.

This would probably hinder their operations the most and would make it less attractive as a side hustle...

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Yes great idea. This would lock me, you or any other player out as well. What if I post 50 items and someone else just updates their prices 1min after mine? It is not OUR job to contest bots -- we basically pay SE for this. Their bot "rotation" shenanigans do nothing. I still know who they are all day long. They only problem is SE not listening to reports, period.

If SE would ever implement a system like you suggested, remind me to get into the barding/weapon glamour business. Sounds like a fun time.

They still should limit it.... if you craft 50x whatever and sell it, fine, if you craft/gather stuff 20x1-999 and sell it on several retainers AND adept prices every minute for everything... that should hit a limit fast.

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Originally Posted by Prrringles

Yes great idea. This would lock me, you or any other player out as well. What if I post 50 items and someone else just updates their prices 1min after mine

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Thats not really seeing the advantages of it tbh, since the craft bots usually only have a single item listed of each thing they sell at any one time, u could bait it with one item then if they undercut you then just lock it out with another. Tbh almost all my stuff is listed in pairs using 2 different retainers, but this is because if one item sells it gives me time to relist one before they can increase their price to earn more for RMT's.

So if a strategy like this was ever introduced it could work for that also. And it would also allow you to list for higher prices without theirs constantly being the top result. This would be especially beneficial for new crafters working through their recipe logs.

Regardless of the Pros and Cons of the system, getting SE to implement any system will be a bigger miracle. Much like the housing changes.... And maybe not everyone will agree but that was a disaster. SE knows of the problem but will they help.... Probably not but we can hope.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Prrringles

remind me to get into the barding/weapon glamour business. Sounds like a fun time.

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After I transfered from Moogle there probably isn't much competition other than the bots we know of, You should do them, the material prices are reasonable as well from what I see, especially with another update coming up... There might even be some new ones. Or gear, I dunno if any of that has been released yet.

As for Fun, probably the same as anything else, Personally I think the competition is way more rewarding than the gil, If your playing against actual players that is.

I am not a fan of limitations. SE should just get off their behinds and start banning more bots/rmt rings. Every serious crafter/seller knows who the bots/rmt are. There have been enough reports from myself alone to round them all up in one go. This is a SE problem, not a game system problem. I don't think there ever will be a solution as long as SE is pretending everything is peachy. Look at all the topics about bot/rmt in this forum and how old they are. Nothing happened... nothing (oh wait, some of them got TEMPORARY suspensions, what a joke). This is just us shouting into the all consuming void that is SE.