Botters

[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.