Crystal farming and gatherers

[Thorauku]

The vast majority of which are from bots.

Exactly, giving them a skill like what the OP suggested will just result in rampant bots.

[Lyrinn]

Exactly, giving them a skill like what the OP suggested will just result in rampant bots.

It's not quite as simple as that. The problem with shards/crystals is that farming them is beyond tedious. That, coupled with the fact that crafters require disgusting amounts of them, resulted in not many people wanting to farm them, which in turn resulted in high prices. This is a perfect environment for a bot. They farm what is arguably the most annoying thing to farm in the game, be guaranteed to sell them because of the high demand, and get nice chunks of gil out of it, all with minimal effort invested. The low prices we're currently seeing are due to overbotting, but the fundamental problems are there. This is also why you saw things like bot farming diremite webs and not flax when both were in high demand. Flax is easy to farm, diremite web wasn't - which, by the way, no one seems to bot anymore because of how trivial diremite web has become.

If you make shard farming easier, more players will go out to farm them themselves, which both reduces demand and value. Depending on the botters' motives, the heavy botting may die down.