its good to know someone supports cheating
You've said more than enough. Take a break from the game.
I don't mind competition, strangely enough. It's a free market and that's always going to happen.
However, I would like my competition to not be a machine that can function 24/7 without break that can always change its price almost instantaneously after I put mine, thereby making me never ever able to even compete.
And even outside of that, consider the following. People are using third party software to mess with the game, which is against the rules, no? That thing we all agreed to when we signed up? Square is basically putting the notion forward that the rules ARE in fact allowed to be broken. That's not a good system to have, or to stand on, because if that's the case why even make that rule if it's just not gonna be enforced to the point where players are ACTIVELY ADMITTING IN GAME CHAT that they bot, with 0 punishment?
I love how people think Bots are what is wrong with the economy.
Now do not get me wrong they are a problem and SE has always failed at handling them both their mmos so far.
But with that said...remove all the bots then what.
Crafters will still make 10xs the armor as needed by the market.
Gathers will mass gather 100xs the materials that crafters need.
And raiders/endgame ppl will continue to not buying stuff a month into raid patches because the gear is complete trash compared to tome/raid drops.
And due to the above this will lead to all those 100s of legit crafters per server to... well constantly undercutting every few minutes to try to off load their 10 armor pieces they just crafted along side a market that has 120 already on there with everyone else trying to mass sell before the prices crash.
I don't think you realize how fine with that we'd be. Just knowing we're competing with other crafters, who are at their keys, not botting their way to mounds of gil to sell to players via RMT.
Also I don't agree with your assertions, but all the same, I'll take that over the botters anyday.
The issues do run deeper then just the bots, but getting rid of them would at least give other people a fair chance to actually push sales outside of the brief post-patch windows where their scripts are broken.
as someone else said, I have no problem competing against other PEOPLE. think of it this was, this is my version of pvp. simple as that. I am not in it to make billions of gil, for me its fun.
just like people who pvp really arent into doing it against bots, neither am I. so our venues are different.
you remove all the bots, the prices still drop because.. people like me who will drop prices just to sell things. will they drop every 5 minutes on cue? maybe not, but at least real people will be selling them and not making real money profit off SE
I mean, I could sit here and explain how all the big listers that have all that over-saturation are generally the botters (at least a good chunk,) but I'll pretend for a moment that somehow nothing actually visibly changes.
I would still prefer that, because I'd rather the market crash by a players choice, than a machine. A player has to eventually eat, sleep, go to work and take care of the kids. A machine? 24/7 activity. The fact some players aren't even afraid to admit to it anymore is concern enough (One example being the player admitting to house botting on these forums, another player admitting to me in whisper he bots his crafts so he can go watch tv, and even one that straight told me in chat how his bot works and how it responds to things, such as turning off with enough whispers in case it's a GM to fake being afk.)
Very much what I've put in bold. It is the same for housing. I fought against a lot of people for housing and I never begrudged the people who put a lot of man hours camping for it getting them, because they're putting the effort in with a system that's broken and aren't taken the unfair exploitative easy answer out. It means I always drew a lot of joy when I saw a bot continuously click on a person's pet and somebody else got the house. And joy when I found out that people relocate and set up a retainer with items to sell so the person botting/using an auto clicker spends all their gil.
Undercutting is annoying as heck and it's just gonna happen, but at least it requires effort to be on the ball. Bots just add that much extra unfair edge that it is taking it too far and makes for a bigger problem.
I feel like maybe there ought to be a restriction on how frequently you can update a market price or limit how many times a day you can adjust it. This would address both bots and people who excessively undercut people.
I'll quote you a friend of someone I raided with once last expansion who unapologetically botted. "I could crash the market down to 500 gil if I really wanted to. It's still profit to me."
Let that sink in and you'll realize why bots are far worse than any regular person crafting ten armor sets. Not only is a person held back by time, they have an incentive to maximize their cost to profit margin. Bots don't because they aren't actively spending time. Someone who bots while at work essentially gets a free eight hours. Anything they make from those materials is pure profit because they wouldn't have had them otherwise. That's what makes competing with bots so difficult. They can and will crash markets simply because it doesn't matter if something sells for 500, 1000 or 5000.
As people not buying stuff. Raiders aren't your main income source, and never have been after the initial first few weeks. It's the midcore and casual players who buy that gear. Back in Stormblood I made millions months into each patch primarily on people I suspect never touched Savage, or maybe were playing an alt job. Either way, selling stuff only became an issue towards the midway point of Stomblood when more people realized SE does absolutely nothing to bots. Come Shadowbringers and it's a running joke on Discord, Reddit and so forth how incompetent they are handling bots.