Anyone notice botting DoL has gotten exponentially worse recently?

[Spald]

In the last week, I've found things like shards significantly overbotted. Much much moreso than before. I used to be able to farm a couple hundred while I waited for queues and they'd sell fast for a decent chunk, but suddenly a dozen new retainers popped up posting stacks of 2,000, 3,000, even 9,999 thousand for 9 or 10 gil each (about 1/4 what they were going for).

This morning, I see a retainer with a keyboard mashed name (something like "lhasdfklhjas") who is posting no less than 57,000 lightning shards in stacks of 9,000. I don't even know how he does it being only able to hold 9,999 in your inventory.

Does SE comment in this forum? Do they plan to do anything about it? Or will this be like FFXI where everyone knew the RMT and they stayed for years?

Edit: Crunching the numbers, a human can farm about 7-800 shards/hr. This guy would've had to farm for 76 hours earning 12,000 gil/hr to do this legitly for lightning shards alone. And he's got similar postings for every other shard type.

[poh]

If you see shards for 9-10 gil quit complaining, buy it use it or flip it. I'd kill for that price. But yeah the botters are getting out of hand, on my server stacks go for 50-150 each

[Spald]

You can't flip shards when one guy using a teleport hack is literally farming 20-30,000 shards a day (something is wrong when the demand of a whole server is being met by one or two guys).

I'm mad about hyper deflated shards because I leveled my professions the hard way. Farming most of my own shards, buying a few here and there at more normal prices. Now, anyone with 100k gil can buy all the shards they'd need to level every profession to 50 which further devalues my professions. It may seem cool for you, but you don't live in a bubble. What you can do for cheap, anyone can. Think about what the economy as a whole will be like in this game if every player had all maxed professions. Literally the only market would be materia farming. Nobody would buy what they can make.

[Lyein]

You assume everyone wants to make everything. Plenty of players fill a niche and sell piles of their product to afford all the other ones they need- a functioning economy. Even if I push all my crafts to 50 and can make everything, I'll still be more likely to do the above rather than run to Northern Than to grab some ore, then to Southern Grid to grab some logs before crafting my new sword.

Shards and their rarity are currently a problem. Those should not be the greatest limiting factor in crafting, it should be the materials themselves. Whether it be you yourself running outside to grind out shards for two hours or some guy you pay for his time. However, solving that problem is a huge undertaking and SE needs time to work on it. RMT's flooding the market certainly aren't all good, but they aren't devil-spawn either.

Also, you certainly can flip those shards. I for one would never buy a stack of 10K even at 10 gil per. Buy his stack and dole it out in 1K stacks for 15 gil.

[Spald]

You assume everyone wants to make everything. Plenty of players fill a niche and sell piles of their product to afford all the other ones they need- a functioning economy. Even if I push all my crafts to 50 and can make everything, I'll still be more likely to do the above rather than run to Northern Than to grab some ore, then to Southern Grid to grab some logs before crafting my new sword.

Of course regular players won't farm the materials on their own. That's the main point I'm trying to make. With RMT supplying the shards and ore for next to nothing prices, players will just buy all the materials and craft the end products themselves. There will be no market for HQ gear when everyone can make their own. There will be no market for materials when teleport bots will sell them for less than any human would want to farm them for.

[Spald]

Sorry for the broken up response. These forums don't allow long posts:

Shards and their rarity are currently a problem. Those should not be the greatest limiting factor in crafting, it should be the materials themselves. Whether it be you yourself running outside to grind out shards for two hours or some guy you pay for his time. However, solving that problem is a huge undertaking and SE needs time to work on it. RMT's flooding the market certainly aren't all good, but they aren't devil-spawn either.

That's your opinion and against the design of the game. If you want to justify cheating as okay because it makes your life easier, that's fine, but remember that SE designed crafting professions around the idea that they should be somewhat hard to level and not be maxed on everyone (creating some kind of specialization for trade in the marketplace). That means they decided recipes should require specific ingredients (ore, skins, etc.) as well as reagents (shards, crystals, clusters). They were trying to avoid the whole notion of just farming up 400 silver ore and then having all you'd need to level a craft 15 levels.

[Spald]

Also, you certainly can flip those shards. I for one would never buy a stack of 10K even at 10 gil per. Buy his stack and dole it out in 1K stacks for 15 gil.

Again, I'll reiterate that these teleport botters are farming 30,000+ shards per day. Their limiting factor is actually finding people to sell them to. They are farming faster than they can sell them. So me buying all their supply to "flip" would just end with me owning 50,000 shards and them immediately posting 50,000 more.

[waca]

Shards and their rarity are currently a problem. Those should not be the greatest limiting factor in crafting, it should be the materials themselves. Whether it be you yourself running outside to grind out shards for two hours or some guy you pay for his time. However, solving that problem is a huge undertaking and SE needs time to work on it. RMT's flooding the market certainly aren't all good, but they aren't devil-spawn either.

I agree with Spald, I don't think current design of crafting which draw high demand on both shards and materials is a problem that needed to be fixed near future, it slows the players' progression down, maintaining the crafting profession, stabilizing the market, and thus extending the longevity of the game. I am a bit shaky though, seeing SE unable to respond effectively to overwhelming farming bots.

[Jedediah]

but remember that SE designed crafting professions around the idea that they should be somewhat hard to level and not be maxed on everyone

LOL. This is funny..!

[Kyronex]

Botting tools are getting more advanced recently too. There used to be teleporting botters that were partially embedded underground where you can just see their nametags but now they're completely underground and cannot be seen. All you can see are their gathering "swings". They also gather more than 1 item per swing too.

Not only that, the Gil seller tell spam is getting ridiculous and my blacklist is full at 200/200. I contact SE support to tell them my blacklist is full and if there's another way to block the tells. Their response was a cut and paste answer to "use the blacklist". I would if it WASN'T EFFING FULL. They're not even reading complaints anymore.