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

[Melichoir]

There are plenty of markets to cover for real people to fill, there's not exactly an overwhelming supply problem. The problem is you have single bot crafters keeping the market supplied for the top 80% of items on the mb, while everyone else's items rot. You massively underestimate exactly how prolific the problem is.

Frankly I disagree. I think people massively overestimate what bots do. Or rather, they incorrectly place bot influence in the wrong areas of the MB and extrapolate weird conclusions if bots didnt exist. There are a bunch of things bots do, for better or worse, that matter. For one, they pump more and more gil into the economy causing inflation. Inflation, however, isnt inherently bad if NPC goods remain static in price. So for example, if you had an item worth 100k, but inflation allows you to sell the same item for 1 million gil cause theres so much excess gil in the economy, this works out in your favor if your ultimate goal is to purchase a house because housing prices remain static. In certain situations, your buying power will INCREASE with inflation caused by bots. This, btw, also works in the cases of certain common goods (like crafting materials that are acquired by simple gathering). Bots end up driving down the price by flooding the market with the mats. Inversely, cause inflation is a thing, on high end items that are release specific (think new crafted Armor sets when a savage tier drops) those items will also sell 'higher' than what should be expected because there is so much Gil in the economy. You can game this aspect, even with bots, by doing a relatively massive undercut that still puts you ahead. You just wont have as large a profit margin if you keep competing by that 1 gil undercut. Reason this works, btw, is bots do undercut but they typically wont undercut something that is drastically lower in price. They will do 1 of two things: Keep their price about the same with a possible slight drop, or buy out your item and re-list (which is a risk to them). If they do the second thing, you get your money while they have to continue to compete. They may end up ahead a little bit in gil, but youll still be well off.

Now, this isnt to say botting cant be a problem. It does limit some of where you can generate money. Youre not going to be as successful generating money from crafting low to moderate level items or anything that is accessible to bots without extreme effort or luck. So gathering mats probably wont make you rich, nor will crafting items that have a MB lifespan, like armor sets. But there are other avenues which bots cant effectively tap into that you can and can make money off of. An immediate example: Casual coffer price points are still pretty high (1.7-2.2 mil depending where and when you look). Bots dont effectively flood this market, so its price point is taking quite a while to decay. Certain deep dungeon items are also items that are difficult for bots to grab. Maps are hit and miss with bots, and it takes a little while for current tier glamour materials to drop in price point.

Beyond that, to many bots do degrade server stability (they can cause server wide lag in high enough numbers), as well as degrade subscription counts as people generally dont want to play a game where a majority of the people they encounter are bots. To much inflation to quickly can also cause problems because it makes it harder and harder for entry level players to catch up (though inflation is inevitable, bots or no bots.)

I think, however, that the big take away is that while bots can and generally are overall bad, this idea that bots stop wealth generation completely or that theyre the cause of all the problems on the MB is a misplaced idea. They do cause problems, but there are things that inadvertently prove beneficial to the broader player base. I think most companies that run MMOs know this fact and have just figured out that the game probably runs better with a certain level of botting. Im very skeptical of the idea that for how many years MMOs have been around, and all the research thats been poured into studying all the Big Data that these games produce on a daily basis, that no company has figured out simple counter measures to wipe out most of the bot population in a game.

Seems more reasonable that these found out bots are probably a necessary evil, but dont say anything cause players would refuse to accept it (or would consider it a tacit approval to bot). Not a popular opinion, and I know Nepenthe has choice words about it, but I think again people arent critically looking at the whole picture. Bots are bad, therefore no good can come from bots and etc.