Let us report retainers who sell items from bots

[Narthice]

Maybe I underestimate the ability of a person to collect 9,999 shards, but with 20 stacks of 9,999 this doesn't sound like legitimate mining of shards, or collecting them from some other means. It sounds like this person is using some kind of hack, or that since they are RMT and have access to billions, if not trillions of gil, that they are buying up all the shards, then lowering the price and selling them. What does anyone else think? Hack, market manipulation, or legit?

Perhaps, they are trying to crash the market as to make profiting by normal means almost impossible. Which might drive some of us to buy Gil from them. Nice evil scheme for ya.

[Cakekizy]

Silver Sharks with Magitek Lasers on their head.

[Devils_Lawyer]

Shard bots is the reason people dont have to go low level gathering for 6 hours just to make a batch of items.

Without them the price would go skyhigh.

Dont get me wrong, i dont like bots in general but paying 10-20 gil a shard instead of 500-1000 does make me turn a blind eye to it.

[Whocareswhatmynameis]

I'd like for them to just continue making gil completely worthless except for cosmetic stuff. I like the direction they are going with the scrips for crafters, so crafters/gatherers can earn their gear similar to tomes. All tradable gil does it make games Pay to win. Because let's face it, there's a ton of cheaters that will bot or RMT their way to success.

[Verdan]

I think the low shard gathering rate compared to the speed of consumption is a big engine for RMT. Megacrafters are always buying shards, because they go through them at an alarming rate. It takes forever to get them back. Boosting the rate at how fast we gather shards drastically would cut out the knees of the RMT engine by driving down the value of shards and making it harder to profit, time wise, from shard botting.

Also it'd be nice to be able to report retainers for obviously shady behavior.

[Buff_Archer]

My miner retainer is almost always running quick ventures to gather 60 shards every 40 minutes when I'm in game unless I need something else specifically, because there's no way I'm going to mine them myself if I can help it. But while that's enough for me, I know that's not enough for some megacrafters like Verdan said and I think this is a good reason to increase how many shards a retainer can get per venture especially when they hit lvl 50. Because it's not like the RMT companies are going to get them this way... since there's the whole bottling thing. But more shards from ventures would mean less that people buy that originate from bots.

[Zorvan]

That's genius. Buy high, sell low. Why did nobody else ever think of that?

Actually, it makes sense. Anything that is a main source of income for legit players is a threat to those wanting to sell gil. The more money you can make legitimately, the less tempted you are to buy gil.

Think of it like the windshield repair guy who spends the previous night throwing rocks through a neighborhoods car windows.

[SarcasmMisser]

Think of it like the windshield repair guy who spends the previous night throwing rocks through a neighborhoods car windows.

[Ceodore]

I farm clusters, shards, and crystals anywhere from 5 to 10 hours a day at work. It isn't unusual for me to go home at the end of the day with several hundred clusters, more crystals, and even 1k shards. I don't even break a sweat doing it. I'm not using a bot program, I'm not hacking, I'm not cheating... I'm just someone with a lot of free time on their hands with a job that allows me even more free time while at work. So what everyone wants to do is burn me alive because they think they might catch some RMT seller's retainer? Well done, that's like the justice system sending the innocent guy to the electric chair just because he looked like all the mass murderers. Leave it to whiney players who can't figure out how a market works or how to play it to want to slash the throats of those that might be more privileged just in the name of their own pockets. If you can't figure out how to make a profit from your time, then maybe you should go back to economics to learn a thing or two. Yes, these RMT sellers are out there, and sure they are throwing shards and crystals up like a drunk teenager on prom night. But the method of targeting them mentioned in this thread is idiotic. You're asking SE for the ability to report retainers that you don't actually know if they belong to RMT sellers or not. In a court of law, it's the burden of the accuser to provide proof, and in this case, not a single person supporting this thread could even come up with a way to garner said proof. You run the risk of reporting someone who is entirely innocent, which clogs up the system of reports and verifies SE has to go through even more. What is shady behavior? What is it really? How can you prove it's shady? How about courtesy of taking a moment to think about what you're saying before vomiting this dribble into the public eye.

You want to know how to deal with RMT sellers? You ignore them. If you are tired of the tells and you absolutely can't ignore them, edit your channel to not show tells. Make one channel just for tells, and go there whenever you want to see if you got any tells periodically if RMTs are THAT much of an annoyance to you. Frankly, I request people to friend me and send me mog mail instead of tells, because while I'm online anywhere from 10 to 12 hours of the day, I'm not on 24/7, and the people on my friends list are generally the only ones that are going to want to reach me anyways. There are plenty of ways to deal with the private messages with out SE bending over backwards to address an issue that no one can HONESTLY fix foolproof. Yes, people buy gil and feed these leeches, but if these leeches are driving down market prices so that crafting isn't the easily abused system it could be, then good for them. If you want to make gil, then your best bet, the way that is 100% sure fire to make a profit, is gathering. It probably won't be the prettiest penny you ever made, but eventually, pennies will turn into millions. It's just people are too lazy to do this themselves. Even if the RMT sellers are putting shards up for low, the fact is, there is a profit to be made still. Also, it's not that hard to get a gatherer to 30 to farm crystals, or even to 50 to farm clusters. That's where I see the profits at. I've made more than 10 million gil for my free company in less than a month just by doing some casual farming while at work. This only just started too when one of my last officers stole a bunch of gil from our chest before leaving. I don't normally farm a lot or keep the majority of the profits for myself. If I had been doing this from the moment my bot and min hit 50, I'd probably be able to buy out an entire housing ward. It isn't unusual for me to place 90 clusters up for sale then come back an hour later with 90 more clusters to find 100k gil waiting for me in my retainer's banks.

Also, making gil shouldn't be so easy. Get out there and put in some effort and you can reap the rewards. The market is currently being kept stable because these RMT sellers do drive down market prices. Would you really like it if they disappeared, then someone like me steps in with the time, energy, and work ethic enough to sell the clusters I'm farming for double, even triple the current prices and dominate these markets? No, because the newer players wouldn't even stand a chance against someone like me then. So while it might cut into my profits as a player, I have no qualms with these RMT sellers because it is a good way to keep the markets in check from being abused by players like me. I'd simply have a laugh if there were anyone here who thinks they might be able to compete with someone who has 5 to 10 hours 5 days a week to simply waste, no... not just waste, but get paid real money to waste, farming clusters, crystals, and shards. Believe me, it would be in the majority's best interests to keep these farmers around so that the markets for these three NECESSARY items don't get steam rolled by players like me. If I kept my profits for myself, I could probably buy most of these markets myself and rip product from players who tried to under sell me to resell higher. But I can't do that because the fact is, the RMT sellers keep me in check. I have to wait and hoard product to sell when the times are right, like the expansion coming up. I'm already sitting on a nice dragon's hoard just waiting for the new crafting system to hit and for all the desperate and time deprived crafters who eagerly want to race to 60. Even the RMT sellers won't be able to keep up with the demand from thousands of crafters looking to shave time in the name of progress.

[Vlady]

Just ignore the forum trolls. Some of them are most likely botters that want to try to downplay the biggest issue any mmo has in the game. I watched UO/EQ/DAOC/WOW and countless others go down the crapper from bot to win scum of the earth cheaters. I will report every single one of them and continue encouraging my friends who play with me to do so as well and send in suggestions to Square/enix website suggestions email.

Only thing I hope is Blizzard manages to do a TKO knock to these bots which benefit FF 14 as well.