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.

[Shougun]

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.
.

Oh yeah - I think if you were going to do this you'd combine the market of all the servers on a data center first, that'll really help pump a lot of data (and also add a lot of consistency to pricing cross severs). Not sure if the players NEED to see it but the server should definitely be aware of more than 20 data points on an item.

For stackables you'd sell them for the NPC at any number you wanted and then as a buyer you'd buy any number you wanted. Similar to what you could do with gold in Diablo 3. Of course the NPC would change prices based on how many it had, how many you were giving it, and the demand it's experienced in the past. If you sell one it might be 500 gil, but if you try to sell 500 units at 250 units it might decide the item is worth less and give you only 450 per item past that (as you might be overstocking the npc). So you couldn't wait till an item was selling instantly for 10k and then sell 900000000 and turn the market into a gil printer. The npc being mindful it should be a sink.

As for the rest of it the auctions in the beginning, and minimum price in the beginning, would help protect new sellers, but likely prices would be a bit high in the beginning, but that's true already in our markets lol (stuff always starts over priced).

There would still be some fluctuation but the npc would be designed for minimal rocking, always trying to make a gil sink (but not one so frustrating to avoid, so just like now with our tax on purchase / sell), and also would be fairly smart beyond having many data points of history, being a consolidated stocking point (owns all the stock), understands the rates of sale, and of course if someone was crazy they could still rock the market but it would be a bit more painful to do as the npc would be designed to be resistant to hyper changes (no more 200k one day and 2k the next).

You could still play market games if you were a person who liked to do that, but the ship would be far more auto-piloted, basically zero 1 gil underbidding, and stable.

Not saying it would be perfect or easy, I just don't like having to touch the market that much so for me something that is more set it and forget it is nice lol. I'm sure those who like to own parts of the market would prefer a more manual hand.

[dezzmont]

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.

EvE online works so well as an economy not because of things like buy orders or good pricing history tools, but the fundamental way its economy works. Mainly that it is hyper-tuned to allow resources and tools to leave the economy.

For those not in the know: Imagine if after wiping enough times in a raid you needed an entirely new copy of your sword, materia and all. This would certainly allow the economy to be more stable as the infinite supply can meet an infinite demand (with the price being set by how hard the supply is to obtain), but it doesn't really work in XIV's design.

In fact, the few markets in XIV that actually works 'correctly' also share this property, mainly being the consumables markets. Introducing buy orders to FFXIV would be REALLY BAD for the economy because it would massively accelerate the inevitable: prices bottoming out.

Also it isn't like items leaving the game to force you to buy more is a magic bullet in of itself. Part of why EvE's economy is so complicated to the point you can play the game without ever undocking from a space station is because they have full time economists working to keep things tuned. EvE's entire gameplay is about the economy, either indirectly or indirectly, in a way that XIV can't support. There is also the fact that EvE internally seperates markets, so if a price gets too low or high in one location you can move it to another location. Or you can create value by moving the object, as sometimes transit costs are the lion's share of the price of an item compared to material costs or the cost of facilities or skills to create the item.

As for the idea of a fee to post the item for sale, that is a bit problematic because of how it would actively punish you for going to market 'early.' Because its not really a fee for undercutting someone by 1 gil... it is a fee for getting undercut. The person doing the undercutting pays the fee once to get the advantage, and then the other person has to pay the fee twice (first for the initial sale, and again for posting up again) in a way that is obviously extremely unfair. 1 gil price cuts are frustrating and not ideal, but they are a heck of a lot more fair than price change rate limits and taxes.

Stopping botting on trading networks isn't exactly a new thing SE needs to figure out, its kinda a known science at this point. Its just a question of if they can implement stuff to detect that into XIV considering how spaghettified its code is.