Item Duping???

[LordSaviour]

Bots. RMT have several groups of spiritbond bots around. Smart ones tend to leave them in obscure locations just killing mobs 24/7.



Or this. I do this frequently, to be honest. Though it's usually for use, rather than resale. It's fairly rare to come across very cheap t3/4 materia though.

They were selling them for 6 or 7 k a pop, which was like 5-6k less than the next item for sale, doubtful it is market manipulation. Besides, they were not selling them in groups of 5 or less, it was complete stacks.

It would take far too much time to get 198 of One type of Materia, even if they were Spiritbond all day everyday.

[Welsper59]

They were selling them for 6 or 7 k a pop, which was like 5-6k less than the next item for sale, doubtful it is market manipulation. Besides, they were not selling them in groups of 5 or less, it was complete stacks.

It would take far too much time to get 198 of One type of Materia, even if they were Spiritbond all day everyday.

I think you underestimate the efficiency of a party of 8 bots lol. I can mindlessly park my character in my normal SB area and spam a macro if I wanted to. In around 30-40min, almost all of my gear would be 100% bonded. Faster if I actually moved around (or used low ilvl gear). That's just one person mind you. Imagine what 8 bots that function better than someone spamming one hotkey can do lol. Chances are, that's not the only party they're using too. There's at least 2-3 party of bots somewhere. That's 16-24 (if not more) "players" spiritbinding gear 24/7 with a completion rate of under 1hr for a full set of gear (12-13 materia created per bot, 96-104 materia per party, per hour). Obviously, they won't all be Savage Aim, but it's fairly common to get.

It could very well be item duping though, as you think. This wouldn't be the first time people found ways to manipulate data on the servers for this game. The immediate possibility though (botting) seems much more plausible/realistic to me is all.