Bot's on Market Board...? Really?

[Nixxe]

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...-%28Aug.-27%29

Here is your evidence right here. This is just Aug 20-27! It is a problem and an increasing one. SE is taking steps to counter this and it clearly informs everyone to report the MB botting, farming, cheating, use of third party tools if suspicious. Let SE handle the investigation portion, and everyone should do their part to report.

If you have nothing to hide SE won't find anything. It appears they aren't going out of their way to spear head the issue, like I said before, don't have the man power or resources to handle it on their own volition. They need our help reporting!

Keep this garbage out of this game.

That information is not detailed enough. It shows 41 accounts were suspended or terminated for botting. An unspecified number of RMT accounts were likewise actioned for botting, but were lumped in with all RMT related activity, which presumably includes people who buy gil and such, not just people botting. Finally, it does not address MB botting specifically, which is the only point of contention. As for whether or not it's an increasing problem, if that's the data you want to go with, then...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

The trendlines both have a negative slope. Even if I were to clean up the data so that it didn't hold the few weeks where SE did almost nothing, likely due to COVID-19, it's unlikely it would actually have a positive slope. It would likely be flat at best. In the case of the RMT advertising graph, the slope is likely negative due to a spike last fall, but it would still likely be flat even if you excluded that range. Of course the data still isn't detailed enough to tell us if botting itself is a greater or lesser problem, but this is a year of data that shows there isn't a whole lot of change and that, if anything, it has maybe gotten a tad better.

In any case, I've definitely observed and reported gathering bots, but unlike MB bots, you can easily tell if someone is botting (or at least exploiting) while gathering because their character will do stuff that should be impossible, such as cut through terrain. But MB bots? Like there was a guy on Balmung who used to be regularly accused of botting the MB and maybe he did, but whenever I went and competed in his markets, I could easily take them over and shut him out of sales. What kind of bot is less effective than a human at maintaining their MB listings? A useless one not worth not worth breaking down into hysterics over.

Or you can come to the far likelier and coherent conclusion that it is in fact bots.

Since I'm guessing you haven't even done as much as you told me to do, what exactly is your evidence? A handful of random data samples not systematically collected combined with your frustration from not being as successful of a seller as you wish?

[MilitaryVet123]

Since I'm guessing you haven't even done as much as you told me to do, what exactly is your evidence? A handful of random data samples not systematically collected combined with your frustration from not being as successful of a seller as you wish?

So here is the evidence:

- A public bot capable of automatic undercutting exists
- Tracking Aesthete's gear reveals that 24/7 undercutting exists by random sampling.
- Multiple eyewitness accounts (read the comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...games_economy/, https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ut_of_control/)

Short of actually linking to said bot I'm not sure what more evidence you want. If you're curious you can do it yourself, as many players before you have done. Instead of believing that dozens of crafters have done their homework and rigorously investigated this, you choose to be a contrarian for no good reason.

Finally, if you do track the market board 24/7 every 5 minutes (shared with a few friends), and see regular undercuts, unless you believe that humans do so on a regular basis, the only likely conclusion is that it's market botting. Of course it's possible for a human to do this but it's incredibly unlikely for it to be sustained over a long period of time. If you don't believe so, randomly check for 20 minutes every day at random times. The statistical likelihood that there's no botting vanishes to zero rapidly. I'm not going to waste my time explaining basic statistics and mathematics to you.

To others who need to learn how to justify their argument because people keep repeating the asinine argument that "if you track it 24/7 you just proved it can be done by a human":

What's the key here is that you're taking random samples over time. This is just another statistical technique and there is no need to actually check the market board 24/7 over a long period of time. As we take more random samples at sufficiently random points (that means sometimes you have to check at 3am etc.), you can, via this wonderful thing known as the Central Limit Theorem, eventually reject the null hypothesis that no undercut botting occurs. For most real world purposes, usually a few dozen samples (with almost all TRUE for an observation of rapid undercutting) will be sufficient to reject the null with a confidence of 95%, or 5% type-1 error rate. (or p-value < 0.05) You can collect more data if you want, as long as it is sufficiently random, to reject the null with more confidence.

It may sound weird but this is literally the same mechanism people use to check (for a timely topic) infection rate of a population. No one tests every single person in the population. They take a random sample of the population and test them and form a reasonable confidence interval of the infection rate. You're doing the same thing when you randomly check the market board to see if frequent undercutting occurs in a 5-min window.

You also don't need to actually collect the sample if you accept the very reasonable assumption that others have done it for you already and they were not lying.

[Nixxe]

So here is the evidence:

- A public bot capable of automatic undercutting exists
- Tracking Aesthete's gear reveals that 24/7 undercutting exists by random sampling.
- Multiple eyewitness accounts (read the comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...games_economy/, https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ut_of_control/)

Short of actually linking to said bot I'm not sure what more evidence you want. If you're curious you can do it yourself, as many players before you have done. Instead of believing that dozens of crafters have done their homework and rigorously investigated this, you choose to be a contrarian for no good reason.

Finally, if you do track the market board 24/7 every 5 minutes (shared with a few friends), and see regular undercuts, unless you believe that humans do so on a regular basis, the only likely conclusion is that it's market botting. Of course it's possible for a human to do this but it's incredibly unlikely for it to be sustained over a long period of time. If you don't believe so, randomly check for 20 minutes every day at random times. The statistical likelihood that there's no botting vanishes to zero rapidly. I'm not going to waste my time explaining basic statistics and mathematics to you.

I would agree. That is a MB bot. Congratulations, you found one.

And yes, I don't believe randoms for precisely the reasons demonstrated in this thread: rather than do something sensible and just provide the evidence in the first place, you'd rather appeal to widespread belief that is something is true and demand I agree with you based on your conviction, which is not only an asinine waste of everyone's time, but also fallacious. It shows poor judgment, and is in and of itself grounds for being skeptical of your claims when you just demand I trust your judgment. Blindly trusting randoms on the internet is a great way to be wrong an unnecessary amount of the time.

[Sqwall]

It shows poor judgment, and is in and of itself grounds for being skeptical of your claims when you just demand I trust your judgment. Blindly trusting randoms on the internet is a great way to be wrong an unnecessary amount of the time.

Your kind of new to the internet aren't you?