Let us report retainers who sell items from bots

[elemental10]

You see this guy above me? ^

Yeah, him.

He's right you know.

You know that place near Urth's font? Yeah? The tunnel leading there is chock full of bats. There's this one guy who's been there for two months straight, for real, killing bats and not moving an inch. Guess what he was wearing? That red bloody apron and DoL stuff.

What's more, I see lots of submarine bots, especially in central thanalan. The ants nest? You can see the ants being mysteriously murdered by ghosts. Until you click on them and target it's target and your char looks at an empty patch of land. You bet your buttocks its a submarine.

Even more, especially at Wineport's tele, occasionally you see these BLMs standing around real close together, wearing the same lvl 50 gears. Then after a while, all of them registered for duty at the same time and poof they're gone. Wait a little bit more, and you can see them back again.

Now they're being really brave and starting to appear in Gridania.

[dayspring83]

This post reminds me that a lot of people spend more time looking for (stalking) bots than actually playing the game.

[Ergumenus]

So many bot sympathizers and supporters in this thread and everywhere else. No one even cares. There is literally no reason not to bot in this game.

[Sicno]

In your first scenario, why would a GM launch an extensive investigation if there are no cursory signs of illicit activity? If a player gets reported and after a brief look at their activities, nothing big stands out (no huge amount of gil or items trading hands, no crazy amounts of time logged doing a single thing, etc) I don't think they'd have any reason to delve any deeper.

When I speak of stuff that is clearly obvious I mean things like clearly randomized character/chocobo/FC names, stuff that can be identified within seconds. If that's not the case then yeah, a more detailed investigation is needed. Banning an advertising spammer bot should be super fast and easy because you only need to verify a single message sent to confirm that it's a RMT advertiser, but investigating a character's activity is a totally different story.

For starters we have no idea about the tools they use to investigate stuff like market trading, we don't know how long it takes for them or how much of that kind of stuff they actually log (don't expect a game as populated as this to record every single action made during a character's playtime, that would be a gigantic ammount of data. We can only hope for the best, but don't take it as granted). Besides, how do you draw the line between the behavior of a very dedicated player or the teamwork of a group of players and an actual bot at work? People have mentioned "an insane ammount of shards". I want to know what that "insane" ammount is. Numbers. Is it 1.000? 10.000? With 2 higher lvl retainers you can get 120 shards every 40 minutes. And that's only counting the retainers and not how many shards the actual player can get in that time. And what about different people working together? Like FC members working together to get money for their FC house, piling their shards together and selling them all at once.

So many bot sympathizers and supporters in this thread and everywhere else. No one even cares. There is literally no reason not to bot in this game.

I don't think I have seen any "bot sympathizers" in this thread. Disagreeing with the idea of reporting retainers right away without even knowing the players behind them and what they do to get their goods on the marketboard doesn't make me or anyone else a "bot sympathizer". Especially because like others have pointed out it could easily be abused.

Like I said, I hate RMT and advertisers as much as anyone else. But going on a witch hunt and branding as bots whoever we deem suspicious at first glance makes you no better than a Holy See inquisitor. Think about it.

I'm not saying "don't report". I'm saying "report when you're 100% sure it's a bot and when you have serious evidence".

[Galdous]

If a retainer has 100k shards for sale at near lowest price every night for 3 weeks straight they are retainers belonging to a bot. No one would be that retarded to straight up sale shards for no real profit. 1 million gil for 24 hours of farming? BS I know peole who make 1 million gil for 2-3 hours of crafting. I call BS on anyone who thinks those retainers do not belong to bots.

[Galdous]

I would like to know this as well. Jenova is the Capitol of RMT, and have literally hundreds of bots on the server. Yet, our shard prices have been hovering between 150-200 gil per shard for most of the past 8 months.

Lol. Come on Balmung for 20 gil shards then. Last Saturday they got as low as 9. That is because most Chinese bots deal with spirit bonding and or dungeon teleport farming. Shard sellers are run of the mill casual cheaters who can buy a bot off the internet for 15 dollars. With such an extraordinary amount of software creeps selling bots to people its no wonder such a huge population of ff 14 cheat. And I love how some who obviously do bot come on the forums to try to pretend it is not an issue and sabotauge people who are tired of this bull hockey cheating.

As a sub of ff 14 the basic of that cost should be an atmosphere where I am not being surrounded by a bunch of flipping cheaters. Cheaters have no place on our game and just trying to downplay the issue or accuse me of being jealous is just bot users getting a bit uppity because dere wittle gravy train might get dem banned. Well cry me a river because I will keep contacting SE and will keep pushing for SE to do something about the cheaters surrounding us everywhere.

[Sicno]

If a retainer has 100k shards for sale at near lowest price every night for 3 weeks straight they are retainers belonging to a bot. No one would be that retarded to straight up sale shards for no real profit. 1 million gil for 24 hours of farming? BS I know peole who make 1 million gil for 2-3 hours of crafting. I call BS on anyone who thinks those retainers do not belong to bots.

Ok yeah, that's an insane ammount of shards and something like that does merit a report o_O

Now out of curiosity, how are the listings split there? (trying to picture how to fit 100k shards under a single retainer who has 20 max listings). Do they sell by 10k? 5k? at Jenova and Adamantoise the biggest stack I've seen is 3k, but at average they go between 1k and 2k.

Side note for the laughs: do you think no one would be that retarded to straight up sell something for no real profit? You're welcome to check the Adamantoise markets and see how people can sell their HQ mats (even endgame stuff like darksteel/wolfram ingots) for literally peanuts

[Rath]

When I see a retainer with tons of cheap shards, I always see others undercut them and then usually a known crafter buys up all the cheaper shards. Next day the huge stacks are gone and the price is less than half of what it was the day before. I bought the 9999 stacks once and immediately got a tell from a crafter asking to buy them back. She was using FC chest shards to lower the price. As most people will not pay the price for 9999 shards.

Some of them are botterso, but some are sneaky players. This happens quite often with huge stacks of materia as well. I don't undercut those multi-million gil stacks now. I buy them and chuckle when they are things like 20 SMIV being used to reduce prices.

[Galdous]

When I see a retainer with tons of cheap shards, I always see others undercut them and then usually a known crafter buys up all the cheaper shards. Next day the huge stacks are gone and the price is less than half of what it was the day before. I bought the 9999 stacks once and immediately got a tell from a crafter asking to buy them back. She was using FC chest shards to lower the price. As most people will not pay the price for 9999 shards.

Some of them are botterso, but some are sneaky players. This happens quite often with huge stacks of materia as well. I don't undercut those multi-million gil stacks now. I buy them and chuckle when they are things like 20 SMIV being used to reduce prices.

Not happening on balmung. Too many shard bots for it to work. Average price in 35-40 Gil and who would put up 9999 shards to play an undercut game.

[RylaiBluecrow]

Bots' retainers be like: Bitches please, bots give me much more ventures than yall.