Quote Originally Posted by Nixxe View Post
People keep trying to say it's all market board bots though or just generally refuse to distinguish between the claim "I don't see good evidence of market board bots" and the claim "I don't see good evidence of bots," which is just tedious.
I had to reread your posts to try to understand your position.

I agree that as a seller, you might not be interacting directly with market bots. Sometimes players will undercut bots below their floor prices—this had happened on Zalera, for instance, with the majority of lvl 50-70 gear crashing to the 20-30k range, after a bot started selling that gear.

I’m not sure what evidence you’re looking for with market bots. Perhaps a thread like this could be helpful: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...games_economy/

In the end, they’re accounts that are logged on 24/7 for months at a time, and they’ll undercut the lowest bidder within 10-30 minutes. I’m glad you haven’t encountered one directly, but there is evidence of bots on your server—though I can’t verify whether they’re market bots.

For example, you have the following FCs in your top-20 rankings:

1. Bahubali Great Order —ranked 3rd on the server with 3 members (https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...5048202077853/)
2. Arathi Basin — ranked 12th on the server (https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...5048202075319/)
3. aselmet — ranked 20th on the server with 5 members (https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...5048202055297/)

The first FC with 3 people is easily generating more activity than the 5th ranked FC, which has 487 members. I haven’t confirmed in-game whether these are bots and, if they are, their kind. Based on patterns from other servers, the first one could be a market bot, the 2nd looks like it could be a scrip bot for lvl 80-3star mats, and the third looks like a DOL/Ephemeral bot.

If you’re looking for more evidence on Aether, take a trip to Jenova. I left that server over a month ago, but before I left the bot was underselling by 1gil almost all items between lv50-80. If you find an item in which that isn’t the case, wait 10 to 20 minutes and check again.

Finally, I take issue that the bots provide a service by offering low-level items at a cheaper price—at least, that was my interpretation of your comments, but I may have misinterpreted them. I’ve never found anything in the game too tedious to gather or make. If availability of some items becomes a problem without bots—crystals come to mind—the solution is to offer vendors for the items or to improve drop rates. A game economy that relies on bots will mostly reward RMT vendors in the end. I think most of us can agree that the value in an MMORPG (as opposed to an RPG) is the opportunity to play with other players in a fair way. Bots and RMT purchasers seriously undercut the MMO experience for a lot of people.