Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[Nixxe]

There is one solution, SE could implement a bot for everyone to use. That way we all have the same possibilities.

I find it strange that SE makes the Market Board so difficult to use for someone that wants to make GIL. The search engine is total crap since there are no ways to use it to find what products to sell, only what products to buy. You get no notification if someone place something below your price. Etc. etc.

Just make it easier to sell and the bots won't have any advantages, thus eliminating them all together.

I would also have combined all servers on all data centers into one market place, to make the Market Board much, much larger (the time delay can easily be overcome by making the transaction take a second, in stead of a few milliseconds).

And finally, if you post an item it should only stay on the Market Board for a limited amount of time, something like 48 hours, before it is automatically removed into a special container that keeps it for another 48 hours, before it's discarded, so you have some time to get it back and try to resell it.

Giving people notifications when they're undercut would just encourage anyone who cares to sit at their bell and constantly update prices, which would make it easier to shut casual sellers out of a market or force them to drastically undercut and go somewhere else. Likewise, throwing people's items out would benefit more hardcore sellers at the expense of casual sellers.

Bots will always have an advantage because it's free progress. Even the most devoted player will eventually need to eat or sleep or go the bathroom or... get bored... A bot never will. A bot will sit there clicking over and over and over if it needs to until SE removes it from the game. Pretty much anything a bot can gain is better than not running the bot.

[Angelhearth]

Giving people notifications when they're undercut would just encourage anyone who cares to sit at their bell and constantly update prices, which would make it easier to shut casual sellers out of a market or force them to drastically undercut and go somewhere else. Likewise, throwing people's items out would benefit more hardcore sellers at the expense of casual sellers.

Bots will always have an advantage because it's free progress. Even the most devoted player will eventually need to eat or sleep or go the bathroom or... get bored... A bot never will. A bot will sit there clicking over and over and over if it needs to until SE removes it from the game. Pretty much anything a bot can gain is better than not running the bot.

Well, if you aren't a hard core seller, what's your problem with bots? And what is a hard core seller anyway? I follow up my retainers 6-12 times a day, so I guess I'm hard core. I would say that if you have a problem with bots then you are updating them at least that much, otherwise bots aren't your problem, but hard core sellers.

[Nixxe]

Well, if you aren't a hard core seller, what's your problem with bots? And what is a hard core seller anyway? I follow up my retainers 6-12 times a day, so I guess I'm hard core. I would say that if you have a problem with bots then you are updating them at least that much, otherwise bots aren't your problem, but hard core sellers.

I'm not sure why you think bots are a problem for hardcore sellers. They mostly suppress prices in lower end markets that you should be buying from because those items aren't worth the time it takes to produce them. It just makes selling more efficient.

Despite what the forums would like us to believe, I still see little evidence of the market board being directly botted. I was easily able to sell aesthete's gear in the wake of 5.31 when it temporarily became worth selling, for instance. What I saw ruining the market wasn't bots, but the same nonsense that always plagues gear markets: they're an "obvious" choice to make gil, so clueless crafters flock to them, overstock the market, and make stupid pricing decisions because apparently nobody knows or cares what opportunity cost is.

[Auriya]

Despite what the forums would like us to believe, I still see little evidence of the market board being directly botted.

Really Nixxe? Did you read anything of the previous threads? Or do you simply just not want to see it? There's plenty of experiences shared that bots do exist on the marketboard.
And picking out a sale situation where you happened to sell something doesn't prove anything and definately not that there aren't bots.

It's hard to have a valid discussion here if players just want to be white knights defending the game no matter what, closing their eyes to what's happening and keep on claiming that the game itself is healthy and it's all the players' own fault because they themselves encourage RTM activity.

Pardon me - that's just such a twisted statement. It shouldn't really be such an issue IF the game actually had tools and procedures to reduce that activity more efficiently hence preventing players from even buying gold.
We also shouldn't have any criminals in society if people were behaving - but they aren't. So the government shouldn't do anything to prevent crime because it's all people's own fault if they are exposed to crime?! Of course they should!
It can never be the player's fault that the game is suffering from criminal activity. It's SE's responsability to prevent it from happening – to protect the game AND their customers.

When that is said what we try here is actually to find a way to make SE aware of the extended bot issues and are offering our help to find solutions (simply because we love the game) and we're ...sorry to say..long past if it's happening or not, because it is, even if a few claim it isn't. So if you can't find ”evidence” as you say, it's on you, and noone else.
It get's tedious treading water around the same statements from players who just occationally had succes selling some items, and hence feel justified to jump into a forumthread and miscredit all evidence other players have spent months on colleting

I keep on wondering though why the same few on this forum are so eager and persistent in claiming that there is no market board bot problem..gives food for thought