Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[SolidsnakeMgs5]

How is it impossible to list items to sell from an apartment if you have a Summoning Bell in it? Not to mention you can place a Company Chest in an apartment as well to easily transfer what gets crafted to other characters in the FC.

What you can't do in an apartment is buy items from the MB - easily solved through the use of other characters and the Company Chest.

Because its impossible to sell anything, how can you compete with a botter?

[Kes13a]

Because its impossible to sell anything, how can you compete with a botter?

there are some in this thread, that advocate that you should not try and compete with the, find a market that the bots arent in and sell there. which is basically surrendering the market to the bots so that the cheaters can get ahead. perhaps giving up has worked for them. maybe they can happily work up their crafters to level 80 and then just have them all geared up and essentially wasted once having done so because the cheaters and rmt bots have taken over the markets for the top 30 levels of gear, harvested materials etc.

it IS possible to compete and sell, but you are essentially standing on the market board to respond to price changes. and you'll be changing prices a lot, generally about every 5-10 minutes depending on how many bots you are up against and their intervals. dont delude yourself into thinking that your sales are hurting them in any way. they have items in every piece of gear, so they lose one sale its not a huge deal, they arent playing anyway.

but its about the only way I have found to sell anything against them. so, currently your choices are doing that, or giving up and letting the market bots win like someone else here has.

[Jojoya]

Because its impossible to sell anything, how can you compete with a botter?

You don't compete against them on what they're selling. You sell what they aren't selling. There are thousands of items to craft and sell.

Pay attention to what's happening on the marketboard. There aren't so many bots on every world that they've covered every possible corner of the market to the point that no real players have a chance to sell anything at all. If you look, you will find opportunities to sell and profit.

[Auriya]

You don't compete against them on what they're selling. You sell what they aren't selling. There are thousands of items to craft and sell.

Pay attention to what's happening on the marketboard. There aren't so many bots on every world that they've covered every possible corner of the market to the point that no real players have a chance to sell anything at all. If you look, you will find opportunities to sell and profit.

I have followed this thread and other threads about botting for a long time almost from the beginning and I tried myself to fight the marketboard botters ingame as well AND it's just plain infuriating to see your responses about the problem and miscrediting players for delivering their experiences about marketboard botting. I don't know what your agenda is whether it comes from plain ignorance, or it's from protecting yourself, protecting friends or something else. But stop spreading FALSE information about that their isn't a marketboard botting problem cause it's there right in front of you. It's so massive that you can't even miss it!! And if your server is so blissfully unaffected then just plain acknowledge that other servers have a huge problem.

[LystAP]

I feel like the bots have been really aggressive as of recently in nearly all item categories. Perhaps their RMT masters are anticipating people wanting to buy gil at the last minute before 5.35 for housing.

I have been aggressively competing with them. As I work at home, it's easy for me to log in every hour or so to change prices. It's gotten to the point I think everything is crashing down.

[TheLoveJenovan]

I feel like the bots have been really aggressive as of recently in nearly all item categories. Perhaps their RMT masters are anticipating people wanting to buy gil at the last minute before 5.35 for housing.

I have been aggressively competing with them. As I work at home, it's easy for me to log in every hour or so to change prices. It's gotten to the point I think everything is crashing down.

Thanks LystAP,
I hope you're right. SE should have addressed these bot rings a long time ago, as some of them have been in operation for more than 2.5 years. If they cool down after 5.35, that would be great though.

[LystAP]

Thanks LystAP,
I hope you're right. SE should have addressed these bot rings a long time ago, as some of them have been in operation for more than 2.5 years. If they cool down after 5.35, that would be great though.

I also think they're operating on multiple servers - I see consistency in their markets, since I've bought some of their goods to sell on my alt servers - however, I mostly focus on Balmung, I don't have the time nor energy to keep on jumping servers - this market warfare is fun sometimes, but I like to vary my activities (like doing instances/pvp). I like to think I keep driving down their profit margins. This isn't just one person/machine. It feels like there's a strong correlation in operating procedures between all of them, at least on the Crystal Data Center, which indicates they may all be under one organized group. Even if you manage to take them all down on one server, as long as they have an account live on another, they can just transfer stuff from the survivors to a new account, and start over quickly. You can trade gil and items cross world/server if your on the same Data Center.

It was controlled on Balmung for awhile, but since it opened up they were able to make MB alts to expand their reach. There is most likely a RMT connection, which explains why they just keep on going - there's real world money involved. Even Blizzard gave up eventually and had their WoW Token. They'll keep trying as long as people keep buying their gil - which they will given the housing rush coming up. In the end, I'm just focused on driving them out of the market I want, even if it means minimum profit, although I confess it's starting to be less of that and more of defeating the enemy - no matter the cost.

[TheLoveJenovan]

Thanks LystAP,

I also think they're operating on multiple servers - I see consistency in their markets, since I've bought some of their goods to sell on my alt servers - however, I mostly focus on Balmung.

They definitely do. When I was playing on Crystal (Zalera server), I was able to identify the FC bot rings on each of the Crystal datacenter servers. On Balmung, the FC is the Alpha Knights (https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...9148295235275/), and they're currently ranked 6th for the server. There's also a datacenter bot on Balmung that crafts and sends items to retainers on all other servers--I won't name the bot because of forum rules on identifying individual users.

I agree that there are patterns. I surmise that the FC bots on every server are run by one RMT gil company, while the datacenter bots are run by a different RMT company.

They'll keep trying as long as people keep buying their gil - which they will given the housing rush coming up. In the end, I'm just focused on driving them out of the market I want, even if it means minimum profit, although I confess it's starting to be less of that and more of defeating the enemy - no matter the cost.

I did that for a couple of months while I was on Jenova (Aether), and I had some success. The FC bot would stop selling for a few days on some markets then come back. On Zalera, players have responded by selling most items below the FC bot's floor prices. This has crashed the market for a lot of items, and that bot has moved into selling most items to make money.

There are still some items which the bots won't touch, but these are for crafted items in which the market prices for mats are the same as the crafted items itself. To make a profit from these, you have to farm the mats yourself--ex: Nagxian Silk from maps.

[LystAP]

I think it's been especially bad since SE announced that the next wave of housing will remove the personal lockout - that's when I started noticing a certain someone's name showing up in the market that I have only been competing with one or two competitors. Now everyone wants gil to buy a house, which creates an ideal market environment for RMTs and their bots. And it'll only get worse if there is Ishgardian housing. I am better off due to my gil hoarding since the start of ShB, but as the first wave of housing openings is next week - the procrastinators are getting desperate - desperate enough to buy RMT perhaps, which prods the bots to increase their activity.

[NamidaTekika]

Joy,

The issue is that your suggestions ignore even the fact that bots that have been operating for long periods of Months+ in the same manner the whole time aren't changing patterns or anything, they just operate and nothing is done. Your 'trust' is akin to going "they don't bother me personally and I don't care so whatever happens to them happens!", sorry but some people want something done to actually deal with those. Your statements would hold any water about SE taking action if we actually saw those long term bots go away, if even one was dealt with and I didn't see the same ones at nodes, or the same ones sitting in their apartment all, the, time.

Your ideas also aren't that well thought out because as has been brought up there are a myriad of tools and ways that they could identify the bots quickly without even changing game code and address them, in ways that it would be painfully obvious that false positive is highly unlikely, and they have ADDITIONAL means at their disposal that they could run that we don't have access to, yet we are already identifying bots with reasonable certainty. (things such as gil gained in a time period wouldn't be hard since inventory changes to a characters currency and all would no doubt be logged someplace for some time period, and who gold is sent to etc since they likely use such data for RMT tracking anyway). So your doom scenarios are pretty half hearted at best and more come off as crying that the sky would fall if they took a harder stand on the botting.

I don't think I can't have fun, I try to enjoy myself as much as possible with my FC members and where I can, I personally however feel the game could be healthier and more entertaining for the many by dealing with cheaters. Wanting the game to be entertaining and have a healthy PLAYER economy and fun for all PLAYERS without them needing to jump through hoops to play around cheaters is not such a horrible thing that you seem to make it out to be.

Your whole thing feels like if you joined any game where people were cheating and just told everyone else "Just play around them." while the cheaters kept coming through and messing up things for people. Then when they go "The developers should deal with these cheaters!" you come back and go "But you should just avoid them and it'll be fine." and now "The devs shouldn't make changes because it might break something to try to fix the problem! I don't have faith they could do that so best not try!"