Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[Jojoya]

oh yeah sure. The idea is, as you said, a listing fee. How it is implemented doesn't matter. As long as changing the price cost something, the idea is here.

But I think only one "tax" is suffisent. So I would say, fix listing fee of 5% is a good deal.

More if you put a biiig fee (like 20+%) we'll see some chat market emerging to prevent to pay this big fee. I know this will never append because it goes against the "mainstreaming, less player interaction possible" way that SE is currently following. But this will prevent botting like crazy.

The reason the market tax is variable is to get players to move their retainers around to reduce strain on whatever system stores the market data (evidently one of those 1.0 holdovers). If every city had the same fixed fee, there would be no reason to move a retainer once "hired". 90% of retainers would end up in Ul'dah since that's the closest city when retainers get unlocked in the MSQ.

As a result, SE would still need to use a variable listing fee if the market tax were removed. Or they would need to find a way to create a truly global market system so where retainers are assigned doesn't matter (which would open the door to having all listings for an entire data center available on every world on that data center).

They won't ever increasing any market fee to as high as 20% unless who ever controls the decision has lost their mind. That would become an excessive burden to less wealthy players, especially those new to the game, while already wealthy players could shrug it off.. It would drive players away from the game. It would also make chatting about anything else other than what people are selling nearly impossible as chat channels of all types would get flooded with sale spam.

And no, a 20% fee is not going to prevent botting because it's impacting all sellers equally. All it would eliminate is the frequent undercutting. If you really want to eliminate botting, you need to heavily penalize those who are doing it to the point they're at a disadvantage compared to those who don't.