The Market Board makes me sad.

[KageTokage]

Are we talking actual bots or people who actually farm for hours?

Cause if it's the former, isn't that bannable? If bots are crashing the market why isn't SE banning them? Or is SE banning them and more just come? If that's the case why dont they hardware ban them so they cant come back?

There are tons of DoL/H bots around. The former aren't difficult to identify if you pay attention to their movement patterns and note how they're able to follow the exact same path between the gathering nodes consistently with no deviation whatsoever. You'll see them forming conga lines if there are multiple bots in the same zone. They also tend to either only show up in the dead hours of the morning or literally do nothing but gather 24/7.

It is bannable, but SE seldom bans them (Which is evident from their weekly illicit activity reports), and even when they do get banned it's rarely a permaban.

I've been reporting a trio of DoL/H bots that have been active since I started playing in late HW and they're still going strong even as I type this message.

It's impossible to get rid of bots. Like cockroaches, they keep coming back with new accounts after banned. Even hardware banning is not effective as there's ways around that. It's impossible to really ban people from services on the internet unless it's stuff like YouTube and their entire channel revolves around their real self on videos.

The types of bots at work here are not like the gil farmers who can be immediately replaced if they get banned.

These are characters that needed to be leveled all the way to 70 on a DoW/M class, then max out their DoL and/or DoH classes to start their farming.

If the STF actually did their job properly they could be easily kept under control, but...

its an competitive market. COMPETE

not every player going to go down by 1 gil like a mook.

You can't compete with bots who effectively have an infinite amount of time to invest into crafting/gathering and basically only care about how fast their stuff sells.