Eorzea census: window into RMT botting practices

[Gunspec]

Personally I had a LOT of jade and misc. things ... because I used it to grind way back when and sent the left overs to my alt.
Heck, my FC has a running joke from 1.0 about making an entire airship out of Flax and Jade.

I'll admit I had a couple hundred rolanberries back in the first month of 2.0, when I was leveling botanist. Gathering leves were not rewarding much xp before the patch that boosted them, and I didn't have a keen grasp on which high level plants were useful in large quantities. Rolanberries were giving me good xp, so I just kept gathering them while watching tv.

But that clearly isn't what is going on with the top 3 items here. Even assuming that all 5 million registered accounts were used by active players, and that every one of them was out there farming jade, each player would need to farm 431 jade for this statistic to make sense. Furthermore, the useful items such as iron ore, alumen, cotton balls, and even your example of flax, do not appear anywhere on the list. There is simply no legitimate reason why players have farmed 2 billion of this nearly worthless item, while far more useful items are not represented.

Maybe some of the jade is a holdover from 1.0, but I thought it seemed odd. I do a decent amount of mining and crafting and never have jade on hand because it's pretty worthless (though I did pick some up after 3,0, but still not much). A lot of the other items are really low level and it makes some sense that people have a bunch of that. Even hippo skins. Personally I have 198 from ventures and things (I began throwing them out/ selling them when my retainer had a full stack of HQ and NQ) because one of my retainers seems to love them. Still, with shards leading the market and a few oddball items you can certainly see the RMT influence.

Was jade more common in recipes back in 1.0? The only levequest that used it in 2.0 is for jade crooks. And while I personally have tried to farm lots of hippogryph skin for various reasons, the fact that both hippogryph skin AND sinew appears on the list indicates that they are in fact being killed directly, and not from retainers. Add to that the absence of hippogryph leather, black alumen, or any other reagents of that item level, and it just smells suspicious.