Quote Originally Posted by KageTokage View Post
Trust me, it does, and it's a little silly to think it doesn't when it happens in virtually every MMO on the market. They have bots that can run through the entire MSQ without use of hacks, so making one that simply undercuts people at fixed intervals would comparatively be a joke.
While I have no doubt something like this COULD be done (because any action taken by a human in-game can be automated), the research I've done on the subject suggests it isn't anywhere near as widespread as people seem to believe it is.

People (not you specifically) seem to blame botting for every ridiculous market board fluctuation in the game. But the people on botting forums actually talking about bots and scripting aren't really having it. Their position, which makes all the sense in the world by the way, is that widespread use of market board undercutting bots would be SUPER easy to detect and would almost certainly just result in bans. There are definitely bots that will post items on the MB at undercut prices (though not drastic undercuts) and there are bots that will farm and then post their haul on a regular cycle. These absolutely exist. But as far as bots that monitor MB prices and auto-undercut? No. Precisely because two of them on the same server (and it would only take two) would be absurdly easy to spot for even rudimentary detection methods.

Y'know what's the far more likely explanation for the ridiculous undercutting we're seeing? People are stupid.

I've seen items that sell regularly for 200k suddenly be listed for 30k because they didn't sell in eight and a half minutes and the seller's blood sugar was spiking just then. A lot of people simply don't understand that high-value items take longer to sell. And it doesn't take a whole lot of these people to completely tank the market value for an item just because they want theirs to sell nownownow and aren't willing to wait for the natural sales cycle for a high-value item to take care of that.