Bot Free Companies and New Housing Sale Rules

I was poking around with the advanced search today and noticed an influx of bot FCs with gibberish names:

https://i.imgur.com/htnG3iv.png

This made me curious.
What is the effect of property sales being limited to FCs?

So, using a few Python tools, I scraped the available FC registrations and came up with this chart. The date range is limited to 20 pages as returned by the search tool.

https://i.imgur.com/4SQ3QDG.png

When looking at this, keep these three major news dates in mind:

• Dec. 15 - Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XL
• Jan. 19 - Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XLI
• Jan. 29 - Lodestone Additional Plots and Purchasing Guide Update

I wish everyone the best of luck on securing a space tomorrow. ;)

GitHub Link
Step by Step Notebook

Sweet Jesus it makes me want to be on the smallest server possible!

Just a bunch of bots revving up to pour all their funds/gathered goods into an fc chest so they can pool it together before shipping it off to some halfwit that feels the need to break ToS because they want something but don't want to take the time to earn it.

Will just have to wait and see how the next few days/weeks pan out, if the new house flipping becomes selling shell FCs for the housing plot they own. Maybe poke around a while after release and see if any empty plots are owned by trash FCs.

These bot FCs are not anything new, nor have they been used to purchase housing. They’re used for RMT purposes, and that’s about it. People shouldn’t start worrying that they’re going to suddenly swoop in and start buying up all the new plots.

going to be 100% honest i have reported well over 100 botting fc's from moogle to omega yea on both servers

Bots are generally not interested in purchasing land, I've never seen a plot owned by a bot and I live in an enormous server. Also, with the timer in place, there's no way they can efficiently sell a house. Bot FCs are generally done for them to dump money into an FC chest that buyers sometimes request.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Sashazor

Also, with the timer in place, there's no way they can efficiently sell a house.

---

They don't have to sell the house. They sell the FC that owns the house (or plot of land).

Yes, we all know in the past bots of all shapes and sizes have used and abused any system they can. I'd call it too early to tell whether they're going to take a stab at FC housing, due to changes in the relinquish timer as well as the FC-only limitation currently in place. Additionally, OP has a point. Though it may be sheer coincidence, the rise in FC creation may possibly correlate with information on housing being revealed. It's easy to say bot FCs have always existed. But that's ignoring the point that there has evidently been a significant* increase in their occurrence.

Bots make FCs for larger gil transfers and easier sharing. If bots buying and selling land was something to worry about it would have been a huge and most likely commonly known issue across servers already. Also it's an incredibly unreliable system for them, as a bot account could be banned at any time, especially if they were doing something as visible as buying land. Much easier, much faster, and far more reliable to make small FCs for sharing gil and just clipping into the earth and farming nodes/spiritbonding/whatever it is they do these days.

If bot FCs are business as usual, what's the counter-explanation for the rise in bot FC generation? Normal for this time of year? An error due to the short time frame in the data set?

I suppose you might argue that it also correlates to 4.2 in general, perhaps the uptick is just a by-product of getting their product ready for the influx of new/returning players with the new content. I could certainly grant that. In fact, now that I'm considering it, may be even more likely than housing related (and may be easily verified if you could look back further at FC generation prior to previous patch releases).

But, lacking the data, I'll reserve judgement until I see if new housing rules/restrictions have changed any approaches of house flippers.