Bots ruining the Marketboard for honest working Crafters

Hi

Normally i don't go to the forums, but i don't know how else to air out my complaint so ill give this a shot and see how it goes.

Since the introduction of Savage and new Crafted Gear added to FF14, i have done the best i can to try and help people get ready for savage, sorting out gear, potions, and the occasional food they need. But because of bots blatantly being used to drive the price of gear down faster than it should its put a lot of stress considering i was hoping to make a decent amount to offset my own costs from pentamelding, and to pay the gatherer’s who have worked on my behalf.

Honestly if this is what is gonna happen everytime new gear comes out then how is an honest crafter meant to be making gil, like this is so unfair especially for console players like myself who have extra steps mostly due to having to write our own macros manually.

Another complaint i have is the Master books should not have been on the same day as savage, it put’s us crafters in a more time crunch situation and costed us both time and resources, despite preparing collectable to trade in advance.

Honestly, i just want to see Square take action and maybe level the playing field, honestly not expecting much, but to be honest im seriously considering quitting ff14 if nothing is done because honestly i feel like my time is being wasted.

From
James Gilroy
Honest Omnicrafter

Yeah, i gave up trying to make gil as a crafter. You put something on the market, almost instantly it is underbidden. Just crafting for myself now. Luckily i have a own guild with 4 subs to keep the cash floating.

The bots have always been an issue on the MB. They're annoying but they're just a part of life now if you want to try and make money via the MB.
One trick I like to employ is - when you find a bot and it's consistently undercutting you, just undercut it and relist, wait for it to react and then repeat down to a level where you can comfortably buy all its stock and make a return. I did this with some of the Gatherer Materia the other week. Pushed it down to about 5k each, relisted for 90k each, sold it overnight.

If people wanna bot, punish them for it where you can. Other than that, just gotta suck it up and accept they're never going to root out the problem after this long.

EDIT: You also might want to try plying your trade via Party Finder. I look in there quite often for people unloading materials from submarine trips - clay, lumber etc - and there's usually people listing crafting services to order. Completely circumvents the MB, and you don't have to pay a tax on the gil. It's definitely something people are turning to because of bots. I also see people advertising gathering services as well, and I've personally made a LOT of gil from gathering over the years as well.

This has been an issue as far back as I can remember, but really started to pick up steam in Stormblood. What's sad is that it would be a relatively simple fix too. Either only allow items to be listed once per 24hr (IRL) period and/or charge the full-price listing fee again for every price change under that 24hr period.

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Originally Posted by SlickPaws

The bots have always been an issue on the MB. They're annoying but they're just a part of life now if you want to try and make money via the MB.
One trick I like to employ is - when you find a bot and it's consistently undercutting you, just undercut it and relist, wait for it to react and then repeat down to a level where you can comfortably buy all its stock and make a return. I did this with some of the Gatherer Materia the other week. Pushed it down to about 5k each, relisted for 90k each, sold it overnight.

If people wanna bot, punish them for it where you can. Other than that, just gotta suck it up and accept they're never going to root out the problem after this long.

EDIT: You also might want to try plying your trade via Party Finder. I look in there quite often for people unloading materials from submarine trips - clay, lumber etc - and there's usually people listing crafting services to order. Completely circumvents the MB, and you don't have to pay a tax on the gil. It's definitely something people are turning to because of bots. I also see people advertising gathering services as well, and I've personally made a LOT of gil from gathering over the years as well.

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Since savage was unlocked i did along with my co crafter for two days, the amount of people complaining our prices too high was ridiculous and not to mention some rude people going along the lines of “Sorry i found it cheaper” right now im tools down until i can figure things out because mostly im mentally drained

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Originally Posted by soul2092

Hi

Normally i don't go to the forums, but i don't know how else to air out my complaint so ill give this a shot and see how it goes.

Since the introduction of Savage and new Crafted Gear added to FF14, i have done the best i can to try and help people get ready for savage, sorting out gear, potions, and the occasional food they need. But because of bots blatantly being used to drive the price of gear down faster than it should its put a lot of stress considering i was hoping to make a decent amount to offset my own costs from pentamelding, and to pay the gatherer’s who have worked on my behalf.

Honestly if this is what is gonna happen everytime new gear comes out then how is an honest crafter meant to be making gil, like this is so unfair especially for console players like myself who have extra steps mostly due to having to write our own macros manually.

Another complaint i have is the Master books should not have been on the same day as savage, it put’s us crafters in a more time crunch situation and costed us both time and resources, despite preparing collectable to trade in advance.

Honestly, i just want to see Square take action and maybe level the playing field, honestly not expecting much, but to be honest im seriously considering quitting ff14 if nothing is done because honestly i feel like my time is being wasted.

From
James Gilroy
Honest Omnicrafter

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How did you recognize it was bots?

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Originally Posted by soul2092

Since savage was unlocked i did along with my co crafter for two days, the amount of people complaining our prices too high was ridiculous and not to mention some rude people going along the lines of “Sorry i found it cheaper” right now im tools down until i can figure things out because mostly im mentally drained

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I've made a profit so far tbh (I'm about to touch 30m just by passively chucking things on the MB when I remember/feel like it), but I also don't use the PF or hire people to do my gathering. I'm also not selling gear because that's always been a trap imo. It's definitely not just bots but a vast majority of crafters all trying to pile into gear selling hoping it'll make them millions. Undercutting is normal there, especially on the PF where people will drop prices if anyone shows up with an ad that's lower than they are.

If you really want to be cost-efficient:
- Gather your bulk mats yourself. I took every day up till savage launching taking a couple hours to gather a 999 stack of each new mat available in DT (can do a stack in 45m tbh if you're efficient). You're not only saving the cost of someone else doing it but you can sell materia as you go which is typically a rather large gil maker.

- Take pre-orders a lot of time in advance if you genuinely want to just go with crafting gear and then stop. It's not worth fighting the crowds when other avenues offer faster gil post-savage launch such as materia & mats for crafting the gear as they tend to rise in price if they're used in new items.

- Master book purchases can all be pre-farmed as well. Just cap your scrips and fill a retainer with more collectibles to use later when you run out. I had all my books within 5 minutes using that method.

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Originally Posted by Volgia

How did you recognize it was bots?

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Good question. With the pile of crafters everywhere I feel like this is more of a ‘people undercut me and I don’t like it so they must be bots!’ problem.

This is just how a free market works or to put it another way. There is not enough demand for what is being crafted.

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Originally Posted by IzailiaRen

Good question. With the pile of crafters everywhere I feel like this is more of a ‘people undercut me and I don’t like it so they must be bots!’ problem.

This is just how a free market works or to put it another way. There is not enough demand for what is being crafted.

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There might be a few bots but generally it's just honest crafters undercutting each other.

There is demand out there but a lot of that demand is from players that don't want to pay the current prices. Once prices drop down to a reasonable range, there will be a healthy volume of sales.

Yeah, undercutters have always been a problem in this game since day one. There could be bots involved, but most players don't have the know-how to do that. I can assure you, most players stand at a bell and market board constantly checking the stuff they have up making sure they're on the top of the list. And, 9 times outta 10, new sellers putting an item on the AH is just gonna undercut the person on the top of the list, like that person who bids $1 over on the price is right.

At the end of the day, that's the sacrifice one makes dealing in high value, slower selling items.

Whereas someone dealing in lower value, fast selling items can just set their prices on the high median and forget it. Being undercut doesn't matter. Sure, it wont sell first, but the item sells so fast and the price is so in flux, if you're patient, it will sell.

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

There might be a few bots but generally it's just honest crafters undercutting each other.

There is demand out there but a lot of that demand is from players that don't want to pay the current prices. Once prices drop down to a reasonable range, there will be a healthy volume of sales.

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this is such... bull.

"honest crafters" do not cycle through their retainers on a regular schedule every 10 minutes, they do not change their price to undercut every 5, they do not flood the market, because "honest crafters" are likely out harvesting or playing the game.

OP this has been ongoing for a while. there are bot crafting rings which have their products across servers, all produced by one of these "honest crafters"

they make gil for RMT, and they make a lot. SE.. doesnt care. you can submit detailed reports to the STF, and nothing ever gets done. you CAN beat the botters, but thats treating it like a job, and burns you out.

these days I craft for my friends since I have come to realize SE just doesnt care and will do nothing about them

Damn, here I was levelling my gatherers/crafters cuz I'm sick of being a brokie all the time.. Can't have shit in Eorzea smh

Gear should be expert recipes that makes it more difficult to produce HQ items, often producing NQ and even a possibility to fail the craft altogether.

The fact that you can press a macro and produce HQ gear ~100% of the time is the reason why crafting has gone downhill and so easy for bots to churn out piece after piece.

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Originally Posted by EdwinChucklenuts

Damn, here I was levelling my gatherers/crafters cuz I'm sick of being a brokie all the time.. Can't have shit in Eorzea smh

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If you wanna make gil, leveling your DoLs and DoHs is not a waist of time, I can assure you. You can make plenty.

Just save the high level gear crafting as something you do for yourself and your buds.

Primarily deal in crafting mats and crafted crafting mats on the AH.

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Originally Posted by MisterNublet

Gear should be expert recipes that makes it more difficult to produce HQ items, often producing NQ and even a possibility to fail the craft altogether.

The fact that you can press a macro and produce HQ gear ~100% of the time is the reason why crafting has gone downhill and so easy for bots to churn out piece after piece.

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Yeah, making it where anybody could HQ anything 100% of the time with proper gear and materia changed the game.

Back in the day it was a bit more of a skilled trade and RNG was even involved.

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Originally Posted by Kes13a

this is such... bull.

"honest crafters" do not cycle through their retainers on a regular schedule every 10 minutes, they do not change their price to undercut every 5, they do not flood the market, because "honest crafters" are likely out harvesting or playing the game.

OP this has been ongoing for a while. there are bot crafting rings which have their products across servers, all produced by one of these "honest crafters"

they make gil for RMT, and they make a lot. SE.. doesnt care. you can submit detailed reports to the STF, and nothing ever gets done. you CAN beat the botters, but thats treating it like a job, and burns you out.

these days I craft for my friends since I have come to realize SE just doesnt care and will do nothing about them

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This isn't bull, you can literally go hang out in either of the DT cities and watch people sit there for hours crafting and running back and forth to the bell. At least is the case in Diabolos.

Some people, surprisingly enough, do treat this game like a job lol. So much so to the point that they log in during actual work hours as well.

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Originally Posted by EdwinChucklenuts

Damn, here I was levelling my gatherers/crafters cuz I'm sick of being a brokie all the time.. Can't have shit in Eorzea smh

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You can still make money with them, just don't go for the trendy thing that everyone is crowding into. The more annoying mats/crafts/gathers. are usually the ones actually worth going for since a lot can't be bothered to do it. Spiritbonding your gear for end game materia while you gather mats is also pretty lucrative.

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Originally Posted by EdwinChucklenuts

Damn, here I was levelling my gatherers/crafters cuz I'm sick of being a brokie all the time.. Can't have shit in Eorzea smh

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If your focus is raiding, leveling DoL/DoH is good, not for making money but saving it since you will be self-sufficient. Even having access to over-melding and gear repair within instance is nice. Given how easy it is to do there is no reason not to.

I craft other things and sell mats and materia (made millions selling mats in the past few days). To me the effort, time and cost (including pentamelding crafting gear) of honestly crafting raid gear isn’t worth it due to how competitive people are on the MB (not just bots, crafting is easier than it was before EW and more people do it). The only endgame things I craft are potions and food as consumables are always needed.

Bots are a problem, yes. But there's actually quite a few other problems, and arguably bigger problems than just bots.

Probably one of the biggest is there is genuinely a fair oversaturation of crafters, and specifically for this patch where people aren't necessarily buying a full set of gear, but using a blend of pieces from Ex, Normal Mode raid, and crafted. I think what we saw on this occasion was an excess in supply and not enough demand to cover that supply. So what you're dealing with isn't necessarily one person undercutting every 5 minutes, but rather 4-5 different people undercutting at 4-5 different time intervals, not to mention a lot of people who will have already crafted everything they intend to sell.

Some of these people are just generally more selective with what they craft as well. Since crafters are not only competing with themselves but with the normal mode gear and the extreme primal gear as well, this means they aren't really just crafting everything, but comparing stats on the gear and then making a judgement call on what would sell well, and then only crafting those pieces and undercutting on those pieces.

If you want to make good gil, you can't just expect to charge steadfast into the crafted battle market. Diversify... Do hunt trains and sell tomes, they were going like hotcakes. Do collectables and sell materia to people melding late, as a few examples. Coming out of my first day of the patch I made around 80M Gil. You just need to think of the wider scope.

Welcome to market board savage

Look at you and your stock two retainers. You are a mistake. The ephemeral crafts you exalt are pale imitations, utterly devoid of quantity.

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Everyone can be an omnicrafter and there are many guides and methods on how to reach the maximum level. But then it turns out you have to sit and craft collectibles for days to get books, to get grip gels 2.0, to then get an absurd amount of materias so your crafts are 34.3sec faster, not to mention a week or two of mass hoarding of resources to then spend days crafting and selling on all 10 retainers on each and every of the 50 accounts... Oh and don't forget the monitoring to constantly keep the prices undercut.

Combat is balanced around savage and crafting is balanced around crafter savage whales. If you don't go whale then your quantity is much lower while time commitment may go way off the charts vs what you are willing to accept. Having crafters leveled is handy and has fun side content recently but it still can be cheaper and quicker to buy some crafts from MB after prices settle down instead of trying to do what isn't your main focus in the game. And even the gil you could get will quickly lose its value as you pass 5, 10, 20 million... Someone made 100 mil and now their counter is higher and higher.

The crafted gear prices plummeted with in hours on Seraph. I've also noticed crafted food isn't really moving either. I think more people are crafters now and crafting things for themselves. I have made about 20 million since Tuesday simply selling the Orange Scrip mats and other materials folks need to craft the gear and food. So I am sticking to gathering mats this week vs. crafting for gil.

The freaking alchemist potions blew my mind. Like they hit rock bottom and started to dig. Granted they're easy to make but whoa.

The competetion is ultra sharp, if you got a poor Supply Line or pay too much for stuff you need to do stuff with or whatever in a hope for a quick coin, then you may lose or have poor margains.

And that is how it is, I don't need to earn 100K+ per item.. am happy as long as getting 10-50K in if that is what I have to deal with.

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Originally Posted by soul2092

Another complaint i have is the Master books should not have been on the same day as savage, it put’s us crafters in a more time crunch situation and costed us both time and resources, despite preparing collectable to trade in advance.

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I got burned on masterbooks in patch 6.05, so I was ready for this one, had 3,000+ purples saved up, close to 4,000 yellow scrips to exchange 1:1 for purples, the level 98 role quests left unfinished.

I didn't even need to dig into custom deliveries to have enough for all 8 books

When everyone and their mother can cap out all their crafters and then makes the exact same items as everyone else in the hopes of making money, its no wonder the market gets saturated in just a few hours. Crafting is more about being able to know what to sell rather than actually making things.

"honest crafters" and it's people overcharging everything by millions of gil so they can try and sucker casuals
It's not bots, it's me, I undercut for sport

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Originally Posted by IzailiaRen

Good question. With the pile of crafters everywhere I feel like this is more of a ‘people undercut me and I don’t like it so they must be bots!’ problem.

This is just how a free market works or to put it another way. There is not enough demand for what is being crafted.

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I suppose if your items get undercut by a fixed amount within seconds every time your adjust the price, it could be a bot. I often undercut just to make the price easier to type. (If the lowest current price is 1959 for example, I'll put mine up for 1900)

"honest crafters" lmao
you mean the dedicated "artisans" looping a 20-step craft 99 times in the middle of the public square while irl they're not even near their pc? or the honest gatherers flying from node to node in perfectly straight lines for hours on end?

the bot issue is waaaaaaay bigger than anyone's ready to discuss, and it goes all the way down, producing insane amounts of goods while the actual demand remains stagnant. devs don't care. if you wanna craft for profit, I hope you logged in at 3 am sharp with your currencies maxed out and ready to go and knew people already willing to buy asap. if you woke up at a regular time or god forbid had work that day, just kiss the real money opportunity goodbye tbh. at the time of this writing, it's not even worth it to bother anymore and it's only been like 2 days since the patch dropped. imagine going out and gathering a ton of crap from scratch and then sitting there manually starting your ingame multiple-part crafting macro just to sell your consumables for like, 4k each (and falling) or to have your gearpieces get undercut the literal second you list it and the profit you were gonna make wasn't even worth getting out of bed for. at one point, the actual supplies to craft the thing were more expensive than the completed product, so i just gave up on crafting and began selling the raw materials instead. get it while you can though, because in a couple of weeks the demand will completely stagnate while the supply will continue to increase, and the marketboard will go back to its normal state of being in a permanent recession where anything you list just sits there for days, maybe even weeks, because people just buy a 99-stack of food in bulk and forget about it and they only buy gear once.

tbh idk how they can even fix it. it's always like this. as long as i can remember it's been like this. people go so so so hard on day 1 of a new gear patch because everyone understands that those first few hours are the best the market's ever gonna be, and it falls off so hard afterwards that it isn't even funny. there were so many people crafting in solution 9 two days ago. now there's like 2 guys. it's been two days dude

Without another type of content similar to the Firmament the only reason to level crafters in this game is to be self sufficient. They're not particularly great for making gil anymore, and when opportunity arrives to make them relevant beyond self-sufficiency the dev team ruins it by making it not compatible with the DoH/L jobs (Island Sanctuary)
Even though leveling them to the cap is the most trivial grinding process in the entire game.

To me this is the problem of being an omni-crafter, right? Cuz like, if people couldn't omnicraft, then we would have some actual kind of trade economy in game. Maybe when the game was less popular and there weren't as many guides and macros on how easy it was to craft this could have been a thing, but now as it stands... I don't know if it's a bot problem, it's like everyone says, it's just a demand issue. You can just make your own stuff without a need to buy anything if you prep correctly.

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Originally Posted by Stormfur

The freaking alchemist potions blew my mind. Like they hit rock bottom and started to dig. Granted they're easy to make but whoa.

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The first tier of an expansion tends to be easier to craft, but if something doesn't require lots of gated mats it will be mass-crafted by every moogle.

I'd rather deal with tons of people undercutting me and crafting being as accessible as it is, versus how difficult it was to get into endgame crafting back in the ARR-HW days. My stuff may not sell for insane prices as long, but it also means a fair price is reached faster, which is largely a boon for the playerbase as a whole.