Botters

[Radaghast]

The general market is worthless, what is there really to compete over for? NQ items you might as well give out for free, so that leaves HQ's. Getting an item to +1 or +2 is pretty much ezmode. The only true market we are going to see is for that elusive +3. Bot's aren't causing this particular issue, it's the market system itself. So long as nothing is being taken out of the market, the older the server gets the more worthless items get as more and more items enter the system.

Bots you can argue are able to sit on huge amounts of money selling shards/fish (as far as I know there's no bot for botany and mining) and with that particular issue can and will devalue currency. Competition on anything else besides +3's is basically pointless so long as the system remains as it is.

[Eldaena]

The general market is worthless, what is there really to compete over for? NQ items you might as well give out for free, so that leaves HQ's. Getting an item to +1 or +2 is pretty much ezmode. The only true market we are going to see is for that elusive +3. Bot's aren't causing this particular issue, it's the market system itself. So long as nothing is being taken out of the market, the older the server gets the more worthless items get as more and more items enter the system.

Bots you can argue are able to sit on huge amounts of money selling shards/fish (as far as I know there's no bot for botany and mining) and with that particular issue can and will devalue currency. Competition on anything else besides +3's is basically pointless so long as the system remains as it is.

You must be talking about gear? Because people buy NQ items from wards everyday. Mostly for crafting. And there is competition on those items because people need them to rank up their crafts and do not care to farm or gather themselves.

Then as far as gear goes, clothes for crafting - typically no one cares if it is HQ or not because it doesn't appear to make any true difference for crafting.

Then you get into HQ gear for lower and middle ranked classes. Again, not many people care if these are HQ because they will soon rank out of it.

Then for the high-end ranked gear, that depends on the player. Some people do not care about the HQ's slight boost to defense or other stats.

Overall, if the population was larger, we would probably see more of these gears selling more often. I don't think everyone that would play this game, if it were up to par and didn't have a poor reputation, would want to craft and thus would go to buy those items. But as it is now, most people that play the game now, not only fight, but craft and gather.

We have a lot of items in circulation and not many players. And on top of that, bots are bringing in even more and swaying things out of balance for people that work hard and can't make two gil to rub together. The more legitimate players will try to progress, the poorer they will become, whilst botters not only are free of the burn of grinding, but their pockets fill with gil, and once new things come out, they can bot and continue to monopolize.

[Radaghast]

You must be talking about gear? Because people buy NQ items from wards everyday. Mostly for crafting. And there is competition on those items because people need them to rank up their crafts and do not care to farm or gather themselves.

Yea I was referring to gear since the only thing I ever see bots making is shards. Even if the game had more people, the fact that nothing ever leaves the market still makes the items worth less and less as time goes on, with or without bots. A single player if they wanted to be a dick right now could make 50 iron cuirass's and flood the market just because the mats are easy to get. That's why the bots are only bothering with certain items like shards, because the money is with things that sell fast. The only thing that will be worth anything will be the rarer +3 items or if we see something like BCNM's, the rare crafting drops. FFXI was the exact same way, every general item with the exception of consumables became worthless.

I ended up using FFXI's AH as a massive storage facility. Buy full sets of gear for your lower job for basically nothing. Once I was finished I either just dropped the gear or resold it adding to the 50 that were already in stock.

[Airlea]

A single player if they wanted to be a dick right now could make 50 iron cuirass's and flood the market just because the mats are easy to get.

RMT are doing this. Ironically enough, iron plate is exactly one of the gear sets they've targeted on my server.

The mats, well, the mats are easy to get because the market is flooded with mats farmed by bots in addition to those sold by legitimate players.

It's a snowball effect. Say they only farmed crystals. That = cheaper/plentiful shards/crystals = cheap/plentiful shards/crystals for grinding = more crafters hit 50, and faster = more final products flooding the market. That's the ripple effect from crystals/shards alone.

It's basic supply and demand. Something I wish more people understood so they'd stop undercutting by 50% of the next highest price.