how to fix market board botting

[tdb]

Personally would find a market board ran by an NPC interesting thing to test. When things are new it can start with delayed payment and an auction on sale side to determine starting price (with minmuns players can set). Once the bot has found the point people are on average willing to sell and buy for, over a decent set of data, then payment would be instant and no such thing as undercutting.

In theory the law of supply and demand should take care of finding the correct price point. However there's a few problems which prevent it from working properly in most MMOs:

• Too small economy. Someone deciding to do a big crafting project can gobble up a significant portion of the supply, increasing prices.
• No buy orders. Players are unable to indicate in advance how much they are willing to pay for an item, so prices will decrease until the above happens.
• No historical data. When you can't see how an item has sold in the past, it's hard to guess what the going price is. (FFXIV kinda has this but 20 last sales is just too few.)
• No commodities market. A lot of crafting materials are sold in huge stacks, so someone wanting to craft just one or two items will have to either buy ten times what they need or gather the materials themself.

The only MMO with an actual working economy I've seen is EVE Online. But it has hundreds of thousands of players on the same server, implements buy orders and commodities, and has good tools for viewing market data.

One way of stopping constant price changes would be to change the sales tax into a posting fee.
I.e. instead of a portion of the sale price being deducted before you get it, you have to pay that amount to post the item in the first place - with a new fee being deducted each time you change the price.
This would of course have some drawbacks of its own, but it certainly would prevent people and bots from updating their prices all the time.

I'm not convinced that would prevent people from driving prices to the ground. Already some items are being sold at under their vendoring price, i.e. at a loss. And while that might deter those who constantly undercut by 1 gil, I doubt it would do much to the the general decrease of prices. At best the process might slow down a bit; at worst it could accelerate if the bots start undercutting more. I think I got my first sale over a million gil back when Neo-Ishgardian gear was new (and I was late to put it up by a couple of days because I wanted to do the story and raids first). Now they're priced around 50-100k which is low enough that it's not worth spending my limited gaming time crafting them.