Botting on the marketboard. Impossible to sell anything.

[Kes13a]

I don't even think SE are banning the big problematic bot/rmt accounts. Talking about the "1 crafter and 8 mule character" free company accounts. I seldom see those disappear. So I have no clue which thousands of accounts they are terminating each week, but not the right ones. Seems like at least 75% of the sellers are bots these days. I think the solution for me is to just quit the market board. Can't be bothered with competing against bots who automatically update their prices every 10 minutes anymore. I will happily invest my time in something else.

I did months ago. makes life a lot more relaxed to be honest. SE obviously does not care, in any way, about the bots infesting and ruining the game on every level now. too busy "banning" people advertising gil in the cities.. which is about as low hanging fruit as you can get without having to do anything

[Prrringles]

I did months ago. makes life a lot more relaxed to be honest. SE obviously does not care, in any way, about the bots infesting and ruining the game on every level now. too busy "banning" people advertising gil in the cities.. which is about as low hanging fruit as you can get without having to do anything

I will finish my calf leather supply and then call it quits. Just a shame I will lose my retainers. Leveling them took a long time.

We had one disappear from Coeurl about 2-3 months ago. Of course we found a new one that appeared about a month later.
What's getting banned is still "the right ones", it's just not all of them and there's nothing to stop them from coming back when they are.

I just don't understand how they are terminating thousands of accounts weekly (supposedly) and still be infested. How many of these people/groups are there? Seems highly sus.

The ones on Louisoix seem to get banned a few months after they appear, and then another one appears in around a month. Still means they're wrecking havoc for months though. Obviously always the same person/group behind it, the last crafter account seems to have been banned a couple of months ago but the mule characters were left intact, and they've now recently formed another FC with another crafter character.

Same on Moogle. The name of the one on Louisoix starts with an "R" right? Filed a huge report again last week including all the bots on the Chaos data center. They are so easy to find. I am seriously baffled why I/WE can find them and SE can't. lol

[Krizzle]

Same on Moogle. The name of the one on Louisoix starts with an "R" right? Filed a huge report again last week including all the bots on the Chaos data center. They are so easy to find. I am seriously baffled why I/WE can find them and SE can't. lol

Yeah that's the one lol, it is mad why they're allowed to hang around for so long. They're always so obvious and the pattern is exactly the same across most servers, and especially when it's been going on for years. I got tired of reporting it so I just send one off and try move on at this point! Drives you mental otherwise.

[Jojoya]

I just don't understand how they are terminating thousands of accounts weekly (supposedly) and still be infested. How many of these people/groups are there? Seems highly sus.

If your account is banned today, there's nothing stopping you from creating a new account tomorrow.

Same with them. There's no way to stop them from creating new accounts as their existing ones get banned. The barrier to entry for marketboard activity is pretty low so they're back in business very quickly, especially when they can buy job boosts and story skips to get past most of the MSQ requirements.

That's why those who buy gil through RMT also need to get banned. If they keep losing the things they're getting with the gil they buy, most will hit a point where they'll give up and stop buying. Those on the fence who are tempted to buy but worried about getting banned won't when stories spread about the bans. Once the number of players willing to risk their accounts to buy gil drops to a minimal level, most if not all the RMT bot rings will disappear from the game because they can't turn a profit.

Right now because there's no apparent penalty to those who buy gil, there are plenty of players buying it to keep the bots happily in business. The bot rings aren't going to mind losing an occasional account to a ban because the money they've made from their sales more than offsets the cost of creating a new account.

problem with that solution is.. the bots wont care, so it will only hurt the actual crafters to list items and then undercut the bots

Depends on what the fee is and how often they're currently undercutting. If they're undercutting a dozen times a day and they're already close to their price floor, the operators would be forced to stop the frequent undercutting.

But of course it would hurt the player crafters, as you say. They're already unhappy about how low prices have dropped.

[Rock-Star]

Same on Moogle. The name of the one on Louisoix starts with an "R" right? Filed a huge report again last week including all the bots on the Chaos data center. They are so easy to find.

I disagree, the ones that are the newest are adapting their game to be less detectible even although it's obvious enough, they are rotating their alts and fc masters, buying houses for their fc's, they don't seem to go there unless to reset the timers on its demolition, and I'm betting they already have replacements in place just in case. (probably because they have seen online rants and forums on how they are being detected to avoid constant reporting).

Because the base items are also being farmed over both dc's by a different kind of gil farmer, I try to only buy the items priced around theirs by what looks like legit players to tank the suspected bot on the server I'm currently playing on. (items I was already crafting previously before they showed up) my current prices aren't high but I have them at the price that keeps theirs off the board. I'm probably only hitting a very small % of it, and I'm only selling on 1 server so if my stuff goes elsewhere its not me selling it.

I think someone (credit to their earlier post) suggested here a limit to listing, adjusting, and or removing listings for a set period of time on the marketboard, this could be a step in the right direction to interrupt their progress and would allow real players to have their items in contention for a better period of time, and if u could identify the bots patterns and activity times you could wait till they update theirs then go update yours to lock them out....for a little while at least.

This would probably hinder their operations the most and would make it less attractive as a side hustle...

....unfortunately getting SE's attention is another problem.

[Prrringles]

I think someone (credit to their earlier post) suggested here a limit to listing, adjusting, and or removing listings for a set period of time on the marketboard, this could be a step in the right direction to interrupt their progress and would allow real players to have their items in contention for a better period of time, and if u could identify the bots patterns and activity times you could wait till they update theirs then go update yours to lock them out....for a little while at least.

This would probably hinder their operations the most and would make it less attractive as a side hustle...

Yes great idea. This would lock me, you or any other player out as well. What if I post 50 items and someone else just updates their prices 1min after mine? It is not OUR job to contest bots -- we basically pay SE for this. Their bot "rotation" shenanigans do nothing. I still know who they are all day long. They only problem is SE not listening to reports, period.

If SE would ever implement a system like you suggested, remind me to get into the barding/weapon glamour business. Sounds like a fun time.

[UkcsAlias]

What if I post 50 items and someone else just updates their prices 1min after mine?

With a fixed limit, they do that once, next day you only adjust 1 item, they undercut, and now your remaining 49 items can undercut as he already reached a limit. Alternatively, he might have undercut with just 1 item. But you can again do the same.

For botters its not beneficial, since instead of just 50 items, it often goes about a lot more items for them. Especialy since they dont place the same item 50x, they place it once or twice and refresh that one upon a sell. No need for 10x the same item, when 2 is going to do fine, and enables you to do maintain the supply for 5 items.

And on highly competetive markets, its unsustainable to keep undercutting.

Sure, you will face a limitation, especialy if you are only having 1 of each item on the market. And bots will be anoying for sure. But this limitation will hinder bots more than you. As without this limit, bots will keep undercutting you anyway. And then adjusting even 500 times wont help you.

[UkcsAlias]

too busy "banning" people advertising gil in the cities.. which is about as low hanging fruit as you can get without having to do anything

Considering i often see a spammer active for 5h... i dont even think they are actively banning those either. Its reaching a point where it starts to feel like reporting them is useless. And it only takes a few months to get to that state.

Most of the bot activity should be easily detected through basic algoritms (posting the same message every 5 minutes containing major flags of RMT should be easy to detect, and even with variations in them it can still be detected). Add to that a lot of reports, and acting on this should be easy and fully automatable (not even a direct ban is needed here, just silencing the person would do a lot). Especialy since a lot of the RMT spammers still use the same domainname, blacklisting can happen a lot faster since there is no need for a person to mention the same domain more than 3 times in such city.

The same can even be applied in the NN, since those bots get repeatedly kicked (which essentialy has the same value as a report here). And if by accident it prevents a legit player from typing, if they get kicked that often out of the NN... something was going on anyway (most likely a very offensive person).

The longer they can spam advertisements, the more likely someone will see it, and act on it, funding the RMTs to continue. The more expensive it becomes for the RMTs to make money, the less the problem becomes as there will be a point where it simply becomes too difficult/expensive to take the risk.