I give up, the bots win AKA: My flight is scheduled for departure

[Ralph2449]

The MB is full of them and it's impossible to compete with a script that can run 24/7 and update prices every 15-30 minutes on the dot..

Sad to see this is an issue that exists here, it is a video game market used to buy and sell stuff, you should never have to deal with people who use bots and scripts when you are just trying to sell something.

A similar issue happens in WoW where people literally buy a 2nd account so they can have a character at the auction house to alt tab and cancels can like crazy every time they alt tabbed because they ve added such script macros to their scroll wheel.

So if you are an average person you have no hope of ever selling stuff unless you seriously undersell or literally spend your entire day in front of it meaning they can’t get to play the rest of the game.

That is a serious issue plaguing many online mmorpg markets

[Kes13a]

as for bots making SE money, I doubt most bots ever buy anything off Mog station, where, lets face it, you actually can generate more per month than $15

happy players also generate income by convincing friends to play and to continue subbing, and by extension, likely buying more off Mog station.

real people generate more cash for SE.

all bots do is generate sub numbers and subsistence income. So unless the bots are run by SE and generating income for SE from RMT... the scale should be balanced more towards the retaining actual people playing side of things.

[KageTokage]

The thing about cheaters is that they are ruining the experience for themselves and eventually, they will loose interest and leave.

That doesn't really apply to the RMTers who are using the game to generate income and aren't even actually playing 99% of the time.

Heck, even a lot of normal players will readily resort to bots whenever they want to do activities they deem too tedious to be worthy of their precious time, like FATE/level grinding, crafting, or gathering. In the eyes of those players it probably enhances the experience by allowing them to reap all of the benefits with none of the effort.

It's honestly those people who tick me off the most as it undermines the value of achievement rewards like the amaro and the pteranodon when a significant number of people with them cheated for it.

[Zfz]

Ever since 2.0 when people complained about the market board, it was already known that eventually botters are going to take over the market.

Yoshida envisioned a market where people who invest the time to watch the board "wins" by being able to make sales. Well guess what, bots are infinitely more capable than humans at watching simple numbers 24/7 and acting on it.

It's unfortuante that not only did the devs not prepare for this eventuality, they actively built a design that benefited bots the most, and then refuse to do anything about it.

[Jijifli]

Sure.

False, sure, they will lose some money, but many and I mean many bots operate via trial accounts thus there is no profit barring that which can be used to overinflate their population numbers. So going to disagree with this one.

Aiight, I need to focus on this one. The bots causing the issues such as OP's situation are NOT trial. Trial cannot go into ShB zones. Trial cannot hit level 80. Trial cannot interact with market. Trial cannot trade.

And yet, when I see a nice chunk of the same bots for years going to get aethersand 24/7, am I led to believe these are just trials that would just reappear?

The simple answer is this. Those bots, the ones where actual investment is made, will not come back if banned. And that's exactly why Square won't do it, because they would stop getting someone's money. The only ways they'll ever care are if...
1) The Loss of profits from playerbase dips due to bots, plus the money needed to invest to stop it is greater in loss than what the bots give in gain. Even if it's 1 to 1, where 1 bot makes 1 person quit, they still wouldn't do anything because it costs money to delete it.
2) Publicity gets terrible. We've already seen proof of this, with the PvP hacking. Square did not care at all about people hacking in PvP until it not only showed up on the JP servers, be began to spread over twitter like wildfire in the JP community. They had to take a quick action (prevent trials from pvp) to put a hard cap on it. Weird how reports did nothing for such a long time, but Twitter, the king's of cancel culture, scared them enough? Almost like they could do that the entire time...

[MariaArvana]

Sure.

False, sure, they will lose some money, but many and I mean many bots operate via trial accounts thus there is no profit barring that which can be used to overinflate their population numbers. So going to disagree with this one.

The RMT bots aren't trial accounts. The trial has far too many restrictions on it for them to actually accomplish anything. They use sophisticated fraudulent credit card schemes along with stolen credit card #'s & chargebacks to make accounts on the game, hence why it's basically impossible to keep them under control. Anytime you ban them, they load up the next credit card number on their endless database and are back in 0.5 nanoseconds generating gil.

Due to the volatility of their accounts since they get banned on the next wave after their chargebacks show up, they can't mess with the MB outside of extremely easy to farm stuff like Shards. The actual accounts that control MBs are 99.9% actual players using automated systems, which is where jijifli's point is extremely true. Any legit player they ban is less $$$ each month since many might not choose to return, and Square might simply value profit since its quantifiable that they'd lose $15/month losing them (especially if they've paid their sub every single month for years), but its un-quantifiable what they'd lose by not banning them.

[Saefinn]

How intelligent are these bots? Could you hypothetically set an item for 2gil (assuming it's something that you don't mind accidentally selling 1 for 1gil) and watch the bot try to sell all their stuff for 1gil? Buy them up and then put yours and their's up for a more reasonable price? Make them lose money and profit from it at the same time.

But that thought obviously weighs on how intelligent the bots can be.

[Zfz]

How intelligent are these bots?

I don't know about the bots in FFXIV, but I remember reading about such bots in PSO2 already implementing a bottom line below which they will not undercut; instead they will buy up items sold at very low prices and add it to their stock. The same kind of 24/7 bots, updating their prices every couple of minutes.

Essentially, bots with a simple flow-control already exist and will maneuver around simple tricks like that. Their strength isn't in how smart they are, but how persistent they can be, watching the board and undercutting or buying out stock 24/7, while operating at a very low profit margin that a human player would otherwise consider unprofitable.

Even worse. There may be bots operated by RMT vendors who use the market board to launder their gil. Use dirty gil to buy up mats, use bots to make items, then use bots to sell those items (sometimes even at a loss), and you get "clean" gil.

[LaylaTsarra]

I've encountered one on a EU Server. 80 Pally and 80 in all Craft/Gather fully penta melded. Spends all their time in their topmast apartment crafting. Has a free company with 7 members for which he is the Master. All apparent alts are all level 23/24 ish in one roll. I'm not crafter selling but noticed their price adjustments didn't seen normal with the frequency of undercuts so I did some checking.

They sell all the high end gear as well as much of the lower end coffer gear for which I've been selling. Been personally out of the market except for materia/tome mats I get from hunts. I feel bad for anyone doing crafting there this guy is persistent in their undercuts.

[KageTokage]

It's a little unfortunate that the ARR gil farmers will likely never go away as there's a fairly good chance they're responsible for some of the data center crashes that happen every now and then due to them completely overloading the servers for certain instances like Amdapor Keep and Wanderer's Palace; particularly with the tomestone event giving those instances additional traffic from actual players.

SE could easily fix this by just removing the raw gil drops from those dungeons to at least force the bots into a place that can better handle their numbers, but considering that they've been doing this since ARR with little to no changes to their methods...

I don't know about the bots in FFXIV, but I remember reading about such bots in PSO2 already implementing a bottom line below which they will not undercut; instead they will buy up items sold at very low prices and add it to their stock. The same kind of 24/7 bots, updating their prices every couple of minutes.

Essentially, bots with a simple flow-control already exist and will maneuver around simple tricks like that. Their strength isn't in how smart they are, but how persistent they can be, watching the board and undercutting or buying out stock 24/7, while operating at a very low profit margin that a human player would otherwise consider unprofitable.

Even worse. There may be bots operated by RMT vendors who use the market board to launder their gil. Use dirty gil to buy up mats, use bots to make items, then use bots to sell those items (sometimes even at a loss), and you get "clean" gil.

Can confirm they basically do all of that. They need to set price floors or else they get into endless undercut wars with each other and tank the prices down the nothingness. The only "winners" in this current scheme of things are the bot farmers who have more resources to dedicate to reducing their crafting costs (IE, having additional bots that farm allegory tomestones and/or gather their materials) which enables them to sell lower then their competition while still making a net profit.

It's also likely part of why people seldom ever get banned for buying gil because they'll go through hoops to mask it as a legitimate transaction even if it means losing gil from market taxes.