Destroying Server Economies

[Krotoan]

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 are selling at 'normal' prices again.

Sounds exciting. It doesn't sound like you can be shut out of crafting/gathering forever though. .. or playing the rest of the game for that matter.

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.

Limiting.. but not crazily restricted like the entire Blue mage experience.. that was a very far stretch. I guess I get what you're trying to say.. but I'm gonna say the comparison is poor.

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.

if all you ever wanted to do was have 10 items and their mats and just profit forever off of those I can see your problem. But right now it just sounds like they make you change up your tactics (some servers quicker than others). Not exactly ideal, but also still pretty open to actually playing something like a game instead of a spreadsheet.

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.

And yet in 6 years of bots the markets still retain player control over much of the crafts and materials.