Possible market board exploit

Correct me if im wrong but the whole reason behind not allowing players to sell items on other servers is so that players and RMT bots cant destroy markets.

So is it allowed or an unforeseen exploit for a player to have two services accounts, use one account to craft all their items, trade those items to another character of the second service account that lives on another server, and put those items up on the market board? Or does Square not care because they make more money off the player running two accounts and multiple retainers?

I don't think that's exploiting personally. If someone wants to have two service accounts (and people do for various reasons). I will say this though, I have bought something on another server and then decided I didn't want it afterall and sold it on my own server because... that's the only place I can sell it.

No, the reason people can't sell on other servers is simple. Your retainers are tied to your home world.

This isn't an exploit.

I personally don't consider buying an item from a cheaper server and then reselling on your higher-priced server by itself to be a bad thing. It's kind of like buying an item from NPC and reselling high. If someone's willing to put in the time and legwork, kudos on whatever profit they make.

I imagine SE had thought of this possibility when deciding whether or not to allow access to MBs using the world-visit system. So assuming they are OK with the situation above, outside of their normal bot/RMT bans, how would you expect SE to deal with this particular situation? I feel that even if RMT is ruining particular markets, it's still far more beneficial to allow players to the cross-world market boards for purchses.

I'm not trying to say the situation doesn't exist or isn't bad (honestly, I've not noticed it, but I've also not been playing much lately..so who knows!). RMT in general screws with prices, but they also go hand-in-hand with MMOs. They will always be a thing, and it seems they always have the upper hand.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

No, the reason people can't sell on other servers is simple. Your retainers are tied to your home world.

This isn't an exploit.

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Then why even have something in place to "prevent" players to sell on other servers if all you need to do and just have another service account and trade amongst accounts? Also i thought retainers are tied to your character (i.e. i create another character on the same server and hire a retainer, its an entirely new retainer)

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

I personally don't consider buying an item from a cheaper server and then reselling on your higher-priced server by itself to be a bad thing. It's kind of like buying an item from NPC and reselling high. If someone's willing to put in the time and legwork, kudos on whatever profit they make.

I imagine SE had thought of this possibility when deciding whether or not to allow access to MBs using the world-visit system. So assuming they are OK with the situation above, outside of their normal bot/RMT bans, how would you expect SE to deal with this particular situation? I feel that even if RMT is ruining particular markets, it's still far more beneficial to allow players to the cross-world market boards for purchses.

I'm not trying to say the situation doesn't exist or isn't bad (honestly, I've not noticed it, but I've also not been playing much lately..so who knows!). RMT in general screws with prices, but they also go hand-in-hand with MMOs. They will always be a thing, and it seems they always have the upper hand.

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My suggestion would be if the item was crafted by a player on one server it cant be sold on the MB of another server. Kind of like how they do with gear and spiritbonding.

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Originally Posted by Nineball

Then why even have something in place to "prevent" players to sell on other servers if all you need to do and just have another service account and trade amongst accounts? Also i thought retainers are tied to your character (i.e. i create another character on the same server and hire a retainer, its an entirely new retainer)

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SE was (and I think still) planning on letting us buy AND sell across the data center. They just haven't figured out how to do that yet so right now you can only sell on your own server because like stated above, the retainer is made and tied to the server your character is on. The game can't have two retainers named the same thing on one server. So if on all worlds on a data center there is a retainer named "Apple", that would muck it all up right now for selling things across the data center.

Also, no I don't need them restricting me selling something I bought off another world's MB. Why do you want that restricted? Because someone is undercutting you? Or is it some other reason?

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Originally Posted by Nineball

My suggestion would be if the item was crafted by a player on one server it cant be sold on the MB of another server. Kind of like how they do with gear and spiritbonding.

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I still feel that would be far more harmful to legit players. Bit of cutting off your nose to spite your face. As mentioned here already, it would be rather punishing if you do buy some crafted gear abroad, decide you no longer want it for whatever reason, but now you're stuck it simply because you bought it from another server.

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Originally Posted by Nineball

Also i thought retainers are tied to your character (i.e. i create another character on the same server and hire a retainer, its an entirely new retainer)

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You thought wrong.

/end thread

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Originally Posted by Nineball

Then why even have something in place to "prevent" players to sell on other servers if all you need to do and just have another service account and trade amongst accounts? Also i thought retainers are tied to your character (i.e. i create another character on the same server and hire a retainer, its an entirely new retainer)

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Yes, but retainers are not cross world. They are tied to your characters home world.

If anything, you don't even need a second service account, you can simply have an alt on a different server and a friend who is ready to pay few minutes for a trade between your main and alt character. That's it.

Also, the reason why we can't sell things on other servers is much likely the fact that retainers' names have to be unique inside a server so placing something for a sell on another one can seriously mess up things, rather than the wish to prevent some kind of economic harassment because uhm... it's not like bots exist just on one server. If cross-server selling was available, nothing would've changed really just as almost nothing really changed in economics when they released cross-world visits in general: there are still servers whose prices are higher, and there are still people who aren't interested in jumping from server to server in order to buy cheapest version so they just buy it on their home world for whatever price listed.

Can you trade with characters from other servers? If the game allows it and having multiple account is allowed I don't think that would be considered an exploit. I can't imagine it would be unforseen.

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Originally Posted by MsQi

Can you trade with characters from other servers? If the game allows it and having multiple account is allowed I don't think that would be considered an exploit. I can't imagine it would be unforseen.

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You can. You can't send mails trough Moogle Post, but Trade function is perfectly working as long as you both are staying right next to each other.

You can have as many accounts as you like and trade items from one account to another if you like. Or having a group of friends jumping from server to server buying up mats and other stuff to trade with each other to craft cheaper or to just resell. It already exists in big style!
Also when you look at the Market Boards you can see the same crafter name on every server (at least on the Light Datacenter). I guess they do the same – and according to SE it's not against their TOS.

Like or not: according to SE it's not against their TOS but a game feature you can use, so more players should actually group up with their friends to buy and sell crafts and other stuff (bought from different servers within your datacenter), since SE directly encourages it.

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Originally Posted by Halivel

You can. You can't send mails trough Moogle Post, but Trade function is perfectly working as long as you both are staying right next to each other.

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I looked right over this option which is faaaar simpler. lol. I was thinking char #1 would list super low on the MB, char #2 would buy it and relist on their world at a higher price. But even with the direct trading, I don't really see how to avoid that without punishing the players for something that probably (hopefully?) isn't too huge of a thing.

A certain poster has shown me the light to using multiple service accounts. While I do have any plots on my second account demo timer I do craft items on my main and trade them to alts on the second account so I can sell various items on different servers.

I do not see much harm since I am one person and cannot really craft at tye volume required to truly crash a market. I can influence the price to a large degree.

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Then why even have something in place to "prevent" players to sell on other servers

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Because game code is weird and your retainers, the only way to sell stuff, are tied to your home world and cant be accessed, or even indexed (you cant check to see what you have stored on them), while world visiting.

The thing stopping you from selling on another server is that the game physically cant let you.


14's server architecture is weird, I'm honestly amazed we can send tells cross server with what we CANT do when it comes to how instances and x-world are handled, especially since they had to add specific cross-world linkshells, and had to limit the size on them due to the way they store server.character.

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Originally Posted by Nineball

Correct me if im wrong but the whole reason behind not allowing players to sell items on other servers is so that players and RMT bots cant destroy markets.

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That is not correct. SE had intended to create a global marketboard system that would allow all listed items on any world in a data center to be viewed from all marketboards in that data center but ran into technical issues they couldn't solve. They still hope to find a way to solve the technical difficulties.

They want market prices to get stabilized across all worlds. If they didn't, they wouldn't let players buy items while using world visit or allow them to trade with cross world players.

RMT bots destroyed markets since the dawn of time, nothing new and they always find a way.

Also am i the only one who can't see the logic behind this? A bot selling stuff directly without redirecting his stuff to where the price is highest is so much more lucrative since it's easier since such behaivior needs a person behind it which is against the sole reason why botting in t he first place also such a strategy would just waste bots that just farm and then you have a bot that just sell and this one also has only limited selling places so you have 40 places with 2 retainers which are full in no time and the other bots get stuck, wouldn't it be better if every bot just sells on his own world and spams that market there? Can't imagine that botters do all the extra work just to crash markets where they get the most gil.

I don't have any idea how bots work or how easy it would be but i can't imagine that programming a bot that does trading and farming and selling all on his own would be an easy thing to do.

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Originally Posted by Nineball

Correct me if im wrong but the whole reason behind not allowing players to sell items on other servers is so that players and RMT bots cant destroy markets.

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False, it's so real money traders have to have a character on a paid account on the server to transfer gil to players who buy gil. It's to slow them down, make it easier to track both the buyer and seller.

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So is it allowed or an unforeseen exploit for a player to have two services accounts, use one account to craft all their items, trade those items to another character of the second service account that lives on another server, and put those items up on the market board? Or does Square not care because they make more money off the player running two accounts and multiple retainers?

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Most players with multiple accounts are not in the RMT business, they are usually people who spend too much time online, and have enough cash to pay for multiple accounts. I personally had 12 accounts going at once in WOW, so I could basically run some raids solo, using multibox. Also since I friended my alt accounts, I got all the friend rewards. I'm half tempted to do that here. Not for the raids, but for the friend rewards.

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Originally Posted by Gothicshark

False, it's so real money traders have to have a character on a paid account on the server to transfer gil to players who buy gil. It's to slow them down, make it easier to track both the buyer and seller.





Most players with multiple accounts are not in the RMT business, they are usually people who spend too much time online, and have enough cash to pay for multiple accounts. I personally had 12 accounts going at once in WOW, so I could basically run some raids solo, using multibox. Also since I friended my alt accounts, I got all the friend rewards. I'm half tempted to do that here. Not for the raids, but for the friend rewards.

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Tbh I do not think SE really bothers to track gil buyers. Though my reasoning is meh, I do know of a handful of players that buy gil at the start of each raid tier just to buy new items and have been doing so since HW. Though I hsve been playing with these guys for years across other games and in every game we have played they have always bought the currency and I cannot recall them ever getting in trouble for it.

I do not think it is worth it for companies to track down the buyer unless they only do so to find the seller and leave the buyer alone since they fear if they ban or remove the money they will not come back.

Just my personal experience on it.

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Originally Posted by Awha

Tbh I do not think SE really bothers to track gil buyers. Though my reasoning is meh, I do know of a handful of players that buy gil at the start of each raid tier just to buy new items and have been doing so since HW. Though I hsve been playing with these guys for years across other games and in every game we have played they have always bought the currency and I cannot recall them ever getting in trouble for it.

I do not think it is worth it for companies to track down the buyer unless they only do so to find the seller and leave the buyer alone since they fear if they ban or remove the money they will not come back.

Just my personal experience on it.

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It's a justifiably bannable offense, however, it's really hard to prove. Due to this, they only ban those accounts if they can verify that yes they purchased currency. I know that Blizzard banned a bunch of players for buying gold a few years ago, and I'm sure that SE has caught a few and banned them as well. The thing is, they might have a list of players they suspect, but until they catch them in the act, it's hard to tell. As the currency exchanges are usually done through the market with something cheap sold for maximum prices. Easy to make a list of those players, harder to tell if the buyer was actually the gold seller. which is why they limit markets to the server your character is on, and why WOW changed the AH the way they did.

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Originally Posted by Gothicshark

It's a justifiably bannable offense, however, it's really hard to prove. Due to this, they only ban those accounts if they can verify that yes they purchased currency. I know that Blizzard banned a bunch of players for buying gold a few years ago, and I'm sure that SE has caught a few and banned them as well. The thing is, they might have a list of players they suspect, but until they catch them in the act, it's hard to tell. As the currency exchanges are usually done through the market with something cheap sold for maximum prices. Easy to make a list of those players, harder to tell if the buyer was actually the gold seller. which is why they limit markets to the server your character is on, and why WOW changed the AH the way they did.

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Do not get me wrong I am not saying it is not a valid reason to ban someone. I just personally have my doubts since I personally know of many people even an entire static that takes part in RMT on a cycle for every raid tier. I get it is hard to prove and that is also why I think by in large most the people that take part in the buying aspect rarely ever go punished unless it is massive amounts.

Though sure people have gotten banned, and I am trying to pass off my own experience as the standard or encourage the action. I just find it hard to believe that buyers have a high probability of getting punished for their actions.

In the end I am sure they have different methods, I have heard of people complained about the 1 million gil cap in discord. Do not get me wrong I know blizzard is a tad stricter when it comes to RMT and are quick to take action. We had to help a friend level a new account cause his old account was banned for boosting and rmt. I am just kind of leery with FFXIV since they seem to place a much higher standard in burden of proof from the game side, and tend to give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to such actions.

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Originally Posted by Awha

I am just kind of leery with FFXIV since they seem to place a much higher standard in burden of proof from the game side, and tend to give people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to such actions.

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as I said, it's hard to prove. In games like this where they use the Markets to transfer coin, I have more than once snipped that transaction by copying the sale amount. Nothing was more satisfying in WOW than to sell a white quality glove for 10m gold. And then get a tell an hour later saying they purchased the wrong one and please send them back the money. Nope.

This is definitely used by the bot farmers to market their wares on other servers, but as stated, they'd be better off just learning to identify the bots in the first place and getting rid of them.

I've also seen some weird things like level 80 crafts having the nametag of level 1 alt characters who don't even have DoH classes unlocked somehow.

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Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

No, the reason people can't sell on other servers is simple. Your retainers are tied to your home world.

This isn't an exploit.

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Ehh. The OP isn't entirely wrong. If you have access to a second account, you can make several alts on your main who will all have the same number of retainers than trade them stuff through that second account.

That isn't, however, an exploit.

with the ability to cross sever on date center and buy stuff from it, now that thing is meanless, AFAIK most of stuff on MB on aether now almost have same price across all server, you may some time find something cheaper, but that because someone want to undercut their good, not because that item on sever is cheaper than other server

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

This is definitely used by the bot farmers to market their wares on other servers, but as stated, they'd be better off just learning to identify the bots in the first place and getting rid of them.

I've also seen some weird things like level 80 crafts having the nametag of level 1 alt characters who don't even have DoH classes unlocked somehow.

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You can simply make use of a mannequin and sell your alt a piece of armor you crafted for 1g and sell it in the alts world if you have a single account. Anything else is going to require a second account, a friend to pass the crafted items and mats to another world with an alt.

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Originally Posted by MsMisato

You can simply make use of a mannequin and sell your alt a piece of armor you crafted for 1g and sell it in the alts world if you have a single account. Anything else is going to require a second account, a friend to pass the crafted items and mats to another world with an alt.

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Retainers you can put in your yard are still part of the server's marketboard so there's an amount of risk that somebody else will buy your cheap stuff.

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Originally Posted by GeminiReed

Retainers you can put in your yard are still part of the server's marketboard so there's an amount of risk that somebody else will buy your cheap stuff.

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Gear/weapon wise you can mark it sell as set and it doesn't pop on the MB all other loose non gear items you have to sell on MB or trade them to an alt and what not. Easier to sell higher level gear honestly

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Originally Posted by MsMisato

You can simply make use of a mannequin and sell your alt a piece of armor you crafted for 1g and sell it in the alts world if you have a single account. Anything else is going to require a second account, a friend to pass the crafted items and mats to another world with an alt.

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I've seen even consumables bearing the name of a player who can't craft, so I'm not sure what the deal is with that.