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

[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.