Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[NamidaTekika]

I half wonder if after so long if you can report them for harassment of the playerbase and get an actual live GM to look at specific ones lol cause it is kind of ridiculous how long they are allowed to run, fed by the same bots that gather forever. Literally players cannot fairly compete with this and it destroys the markets.

[Muutaras]

And small second part.
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I think without bots real price on items higher on 15-40%
While I was writing this, the bots had already managed to change the prices of the items selling by me and other players 15 times xD.
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SE plz add more GM on servers or open volunteers for this case. I would love to help make the game a little better.

[NamidaTekika]

And small second part.
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I think without bots real price on items higher on 15-40%
While I was writing this, the bots had already managed to change the prices of the items selling by me and other players 15 times xD.
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SE plz add more GM on servers or open volunteers for this case. I would love to help make the game a little better.

Ya prices would likely be higher but crafters/gatherers would have a real economy too, and if people weren't buying they'd drop price. Not just drop price to GET a sale.

The whole bot situation is ridiculous and theres no real excuse for it from Square's side.

[NamidaTekika]

You want to report it through the in game Support Desk under Contact Us - Report Cheating.

Not as if that does anything either given how long some of these bots run.

[KageTokage]

You should probably remove the names mostly because the typical mod response to such is to just delete the entire topic which is largely counter-productive.

[Kes13a]

Yeah, its not fair to those who are flouting the rules to do RMT gil generation. naming and shaming is beneath warrior of light types who always let the bad guys speechify instead of rushing them and letting it end right there.

We have to think of the feelings of those poor bot wielders, sitting behind their computers all lonely... hmm.. except the whole purpose of bots is so they dont HAVE to play the game like the rest of us.

I dont know, after 7 pages its nice to know I am not alone in my frustration at lack of any effort on the part of SE to deal with this issue. Of course, it just crystallizes the fact that SE is not going to do anything about this issue. I had considered the idea mentioned earlier of a coalition of real person crafters/seller working against these bots... but for it to work, every crafter/seller needs to be on board, and that would never happen. new crafters coming in, having spent a lot of gil to get to where they are would want to make gil fast, which would break down the whole idea

No, the only way to deal with this is for SE to step up.And until they put GM's in the game that do ALL aspects of the game, not just combat, then they will never identify this as a problem.

[NamidaTekika]

Yeah, its not fair to those who are flouting the rules to do RMT gil generation. naming and shaming is beneath warrior of light types who always let the bad guys speechify instead of rushing them and letting it end right there.

We have to think of the feelings of those poor bot wielders, sitting behind their computers all lonely... hmm.. except the whole purpose of bots is so they dont HAVE to play the game like the rest of us.

I dont know, after 7 pages its nice to know I am not alone in my frustration at lack of any effort on the part of SE to deal with this issue. Of course, it just crystallizes the fact that SE is not going to do anything about this issue. I had considered the idea mentioned earlier of a coalition of real person crafters/seller working against these bots... but for it to work, every crafter/seller needs to be on board, and that would never happen. new crafters coming in, having spent a lot of gil to get to where they are would want to make gil fast, which would break down the whole idea

No, the only way to deal with this is for SE to step up.And until they put GM's in the game that do ALL aspects of the game, not just combat, then they will never identify this as a problem.

As players maybe we just need to start working with our FCs and people we know and such to start building our own direct markets (ie we have a community we put what things we want to buy and place orders with the gatherers and crafters more directly). Stop using the MB altogether. The more people we manage to gather for such a thing the less gil made by RMT people and less incentive for this. Be a long term/massive undertaking but seems like the only thing we as players can do. Square probably wouldn't like it either since we'd stop using one of their main game functions.

[Jojoya]

As players maybe we just need to start working with our FCs and people we know and such to start building our own direct markets (ie we have a community we put what things we want to buy and place orders with the gatherers and crafters more directly). Stop using the MB altogether. The more people we manage to gather for such a thing the less gil made by RMT people and less incentive for this. Be a long term/massive undertaking but seems like the only thing we as players can do. Square probably wouldn't like it either since we'd stop using one of their main game functions.

You'll never get players to abandon the marketboard because there are too many players. It would be too difficult to find the player selling the item you want to buy, especially for rarer items.

SE would be fine if players chose to switch to person to person trading. If they didn't want us doing that, we wouldn't have the trade option in the first place. The marketboard is actually a mess from SE"s perspective. A some of the things they'd like to accomplish are hindered by current limitations of the marketboard (like mandatory retainer assignments).

If you want to pressure SE into doing something about the bots, you'd have to get a significant number of players to quit the game and state that's the reason they're quitting. The problem is not enough players feel negatively impacted enough by their existence to quit over it. Some players are even happy that the bots are there, not because they're using them but because the bots have driven prices down so they pay less.

[TheLoveJenovan]

I'm replying to a few comments on my suggestions, and adding another suggestion.

"I had considered the idea mentioned earlier of a coalition of real person crafters/seller working against these bots... but for it to work, every crafter/seller needs to be on board, and that would never happen. new crafters coming in, having spent a lot of gil to get to where they are would want to make gil fast, which would break down the whole idea"

I believe this was in reference to my first idea to make a coalition of crafters that undersell items below the bot's floor prices. For this suggestion to work, you wouldn't need to have all crafters/sellers on board--in fact, undercutters that aren't aware of the coalition would help the scheme. The objective is to eliminate item markets to the botters by always selling items at just below the bot's floor value. If the RMT bot can't make money by selling items, then their motivation to cheat in the marketboard would be eliminated. I had been doing a slightly different version of this scheme for a few weeks, and it works with just 1 seller (myself). In my case, I forced the bot to sell its items at floor prices on about 20 items, and they moved out of some of the markets (items to sell). This suggestion could work, but it would require a lot of patience to dry out bots.

"You'll never get players to abandon the marketboard because there are too many players."

I believe this is in reference to my second suggestion. My second suggestion was to create an FC titled "No Marketboard." The objective here is not to replace the marketboard but to protest and raise awareness to other players and GMs. I agree that players will continue to use the marketboard, and they should. If members of the FC can't provide an item, other players should use the marketboard. The objective here is to raise awareness for GMs and other players by posting a recruiting message in all major markets. You don't need everyone involved to make a protest work--just a small, vocal minority. This suggestion, however, assumes that GMs are monitoring the game, which I suspect is not the case.

Another suggestion I had made in another post was to request that SE eliminate player-to-player gil trading or trading altogether. They could even do this for a subset of the servers. Some other MMOs have done this, and it has seriously hampered RMT. The types of RMT that remain have been the sale of player accounts, which would be less of an issue for FFXIV because of paid progression through their Moggle service.

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[TheLoveJenovan]

Finally, I have a new suggestion. I'm not sure SE JPN is aware of the issue on SE USA and SE Europe servers. My suggestion is to have a letter undersigned by as many players as possible and to have this letter translated and submitted to SE JPN support and posted on JPN forums read by the devs. The letter would highlight that botting is a major problem in SE USA and SE Europe servers, and we would ask them to intercede directly. This suggestion would get the developers involved directly if they aren't aware of the prevalence of the problem on SE USA and Europe servers--which I believe is the case. As I said in a previous post, I suspect that botting isn't as serious a concern on SE JPN servers due to cultural differences. It's entirely possible that poor communication is making the problem worse on SE USA/Europe servers.

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