Why are people rewarded for cheating?

[Aerowaffle]

There seem to be two groups of people in this thread:

1. Those who have figured out how the XIV economy works, have made their millions, and are puzzled that others complain that the RMT bots are ruining the economy when the way to make REAL gil in this game involves no botting whatsoever.

2. Those who haven't figured out how the XIV economy works, and assume everyone in the first group is buying gil, botting, or some combination of the two.

Shards are the lowest common denominator in the economy. They've been stable at around 100-150 gil each on Lamia server for the last year. A friend of mine, who fits into group #1, figured out how to manipulate the lightning shard market and made six million gil by level 35. People will blindly buy the lowest priced crystals they can, and then other people will blindly trip over themselves to undercut, and if you go into the market with a little bit of up front capital and that knowledge, you can make millions, Wall Street style.

Any shard sold on the market board, regardless of where it was sourced, is being sold to a crafter, whose money likely came from other players. The only botters (or regularly players) that are artificially inflating the economy are the ones who are creating gil out of nothing- farming things to sell directly to NPCs.

It's pretty insulting to be generalized into a group that makes assumptions about other aspects of the player. I have bought my own house, funded one of my friends (so that we could both have a house in close proximity before other plots were bought up), and plan on funding my fc's house (that's only composed of me and a few friends).

I understand that crafters can make millions and millions of gil at high levels, I don't deny that. Yes, you can also manipulate the market so that you can earn money that way. But in all areas that the bots farming, you cannot make a suitable profit doing the same thing.

If you were to go out and try and sell shards that you have farmed, while bots are currently selling the same shards, your farming time would have been much better used to do something else, because bots can farm at such a quantity at such a low time cost, that it renders your efforts to farm shards for gil negligible. All aspects of the market are not destroyed, but the presence of bot farmers does make it hard to make money for certain items. Just because other aspects of the market take advantage of the abundance of items that the bots flood the market with doesn't make it right.

Those items shouldn't be in the market in the first place if they are gathered illegitimately through automated process.

[Catwho]

If you were to go out and try and sell shards that you have farmed, while bots are currently selling the same shards, your farming time would have been much better used to do something else, because bots can farm at such a quantity at such a low time cost, that it renders your efforts to farm shards for gil negligible. All aspects of the market are not destroyed, but the presence of bot farmers does make it hard to make money for certain items. Just because other aspects of the market take advantage of the abundance of items that the bots flood the market with doesn't make it right.

I provided a counter example to that with the friend who farmed his own shards and made millions manipulating the market. I believe he only farmed about 400 lightning shards at a time.

I'm also not saying I agree with the botters - I too think SE should be more proactive about banning them. But you'll never compete with the RMT miners, even if SE does break their bots, because they have no other aspect of the game to play but the mining and they can run the same character 24/7 in shifts at the gold farms. I figured that out within a month of launch. It's not even worth trying. So I just farm shards for my own use or trade for them, and focus my attention on the aspects of the economy where I can make the most profits.