Quote Originally Posted by Krotoan View Post
I have my doubts about most of the people who set prices actually enjoying crafting, but that's gonna be a pretty subjective argument.
There is a player run economy, it runs on things that are not easily bottable. Things that aren't a pure time to dollar ratio. That's all bots can do. You find complicated crafts that require skill and adjustment as they develop and those will be the markets to "run".
In essence, we're playing whack-a-mole with crafting/gathering/flipping against bots. Eg, we find things which are not 'easily botable' but eventually the botters move in on those maket segments as well, so we have to keep moving into different markets. This would be normal market board flow, if there were no bots, but on hyper-competitive market boards, these shifts occur in a matter of hours. And it's not like you can wait out the botters either and hope that the market recovers. Often, it takes months before, certain items are selling at 'normal' prices again.

Sounds like you're still running markets. Same bots as always. In fact now you can take advantage of bot deflated markets on other servers to profit back on your home server. There aren't MORE bots just because the servers are accessible now.
I think the Blue Mage analogy is apt, having to decide your Market board practice around bots is limiting for people who actually enjoy crafting/gathering/playing the MB.


I thought the problem was the bots made it difficult to profit? Are the items cheap or are they expensive? The nodes don't run out of stuff, you can get the mats you can make the items and sell them for profit. Bots have been around since 1.0, not a new problem and they definitely haven't killed the economy.
I'll make it simpler for you. Bots initially drive down prices to the point where legitimate crafters/gatherers can no longer compete. We could buy gathered mats/flip from the bots and craft/flip items for a profit. But the same bots who gather often craft/flip as well. Then they drive down the price of crafted items as well. So that pushes out the legitimate crafters as well.

When all the legit crafters/gatherers are gone, the bots have monopolies. This can be observed in some of the food/potions/crafted gear markets of several servers.