Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[Kes13a]

what I find amazing then Jojoya, is that this issue is something other mmo producers deal with far more effectively.

You say SE can do nothing, so why can other companies? how is it FF XIV is listed in the bot forums as "VERY BOT FRIENDLY" yet you dont see the same in there about all other games?

I didnt see a mention of what SE could actually do thats well within their jurisdiction... hire an actual NA STF team. doesnt matter what code the cheaters break, having people investigating and banning offenders would serve as a deterrent, an option you failed to mention, and that is indeed... something SE can do.

[Jojoya]

Jojoya, I'm replying to you even though I said I wouldn't. I read your post. What are you hoping to achieve in arguing your position? To have people stop complaining about bots on a thread about bots?

I'm hoping some of these other posters will understand that it is a complex situation so there are no simple solutions such as "bots will disappear if SE bans the accounts", that SE does know what they're doing even if the visible results aren't what players are hoping to see, and that cheaters are always going to exist

One way or another, if they want to enjoy a multi-player game they're going to need to learn to find ways to do it despite the cheaters.

Players should continue to give feedback about how the bots are impacting their game experience. They should report any characters they suspect are cheating through the channels that SE has designated.

But they need to stop acting like they're doing SE's job better than SE can when all they're doing is compiling a list of names of characters showing suspicious behavior. SE has already done that and more.

what I find amazing then Jojoya, is that this issue is something other mmo producers deal with far more effectively.

You say SE can do nothing, so why can other companies? how is it FF XIV is listed in the bot forums as "VERY BOT FRIENDLY" yet you dont see the same in there about all other games?

I didnt see a mention of what SE could actually do thats well within their jurisdiction... hire an actual NA STF team. doesnt matter what code the cheaters break, having people investigating and banning offenders would serve as a deterrent, an option you failed to mention, and that is indeed... something SE can do.

What other MMOs developers are dealing with botting far more effectively? What specifically has happened to make you feel those efforts are far more effective?

I didn't say there's nothing that can be done. I said the deterrents SE can implement aren't a solution to the problem. The solution lies with the other side - they need to decide they're going to stop cheating then do it.

You say the bot forums call FFXIV "VERY BOT FRIENDLY". Well, pancake batter is VERY WOODEN SPOON FRIENDLY while meringue isn't. In other words, more context is needed to know what that rating is referring to - ease of set up and use compared to other game bots, or risk of getting banned for using it? Is that a rating based on maker analysis or player anecdote? How are other games described in comparison?

Why does there need to be a separate STF for NA? It's the exact same game on every server being run by SE.

I did mention banning as a deterrent near the top of my post. I said it's not a solution since it doesn't get all cheaters to stop. It's also something that SE is indeed doing even if they're not banning every character that a player has decided is a bot.

Despite what the forums would like us to believe, I still see little evidence of the market board being directly botted.

There are definitely third party tools getting used to facilitate market pricing, though not necessarily bots. Some price adjustments happen way too fast for a system that doesn't have a good scanning tool built in for player use and a clunky interface for making price adjustments.

We know scanning tools exists. They were feeding data to the marketboard websites that SE kept getting shut down. I'd be pretty shocked if someone hasn't developed a partial version of TSM for FFXIV. That's not truly a bot since it does require some player input to function instead of doing everything on its own once started but it can certainly seem like a bot to those who only see changes happening faster than should be humanly possible.

Whether bot or not, third party tools are against TOS and suspected use should be getting reported to SE for review and action if appropriate. If SE goes the "don't ask don't tell" route with these tools, they are opening up a can of worms since player markets are directly impacted. The ACT parser doesn't directly impact another player's game experiences (it's misuse of information the parser compiles that can).

At least in WoW, everyone had the opportunity to download TSM or other add-ons with similar function so a player upset by the advantage an add-on might give could use it themselves. That's not an option here for PS4 players. It's probably why the other multi-platform MMOs keep their player bases and account licenses segregated by platform type. The third party tools that PC users can install won't impact the game experience of the console users who can't install them.

[TheLoveJenovan]

Time to reply to the bot sympathizers….again.

1. “Just try selling something else—the bots aren’t selling every item”

This is a specious (dumb) argument. You should be able to play all parts of the game. Some people like playing the marketboard, some people like farming Allegory Tombstones for gear. If you had to drop out of 1/2 of the Expert Roulettes because crappy bots were ruining the runs, would you feel the same way? Work around the bots!

Also, on some servers, bots have moved into almost every item.

2. “Square is doing everything they can to fight bots”

This is patently false. Look at the FC rankings for every server. You’ll find 3-5 bot FCs. Some of these FCs have 1 account that generates more FC activity than FCs with over 300 accounts. There are bots that have existed for years.

SE sucks at addressing bots. Doing something about bots as a community is already doing more than SE is doing about bots, which is basically nothing.

Finally, why wouldn’t they want our help? They clearly need it.

3. “What other MMOs are bots dealt with better?”

Warframe, Nioh. Honestly, I’m willing to bet that FFXIV is the absolute worst at it.

4. “The STF is large enough, and it’s ok that they are all in Japan”

The STF should have team members that can read and understand reports from all languages. According to the Forum, that would be Japanese, English, French, German. I’m fluent in 2 of those, and I wouldn’t want to read reports in the other two. The STF can stay in Japan, but they need members that are fluent in all languages of the game.

The STF is not large enough. How large does it need to be? At least large enough that bot ring FCs don’t show up in the top 100 rankings of every server. SE has more than 60 people in QA to find bugs in their game. Having dozens of people to find bots in their game wouldn’t hurt. They have the money.

Again as a PSA, if you’d like to block the comments of users that don’t add to a conversation:

1. Click “Settings” at the top of the page
2. Click “Edit Ignore List” on the left-hand menu bar
3. Type the username you’d like to add and click “Okay"

[Nixxe]

I keep on wondering though why the same few on this forum are so eager and persistent in claiming that there is no market board bot problem..gives food for thought

The implication of course being that I'm botting and/or buying gil, which I'm not, which is exactly the sort of thing that makes me not trust your judgment the rest of the time when you go ranting and raving about how it's bots all the way down. You see bots everywhere and think everything that doesn't immediately conform to your personal beliefs about what can be done and how things work is further proof of botting. You're basically the FFXIV version of QAnon, and I don't take you people seriously. The last time I said something similar, people yelled at me for multiple pages and after that one person produced solid evidence of one single bot on one single server. Not exactly supporting the argument that bots control the market board.

There are definitely third party tools getting used to facilitate market pricing, though not necessarily bots. Some price adjustments happen way too fast for a system that doesn't have a good scanning tool built in for player use and a clunky interface for making price adjustments.

...

At least in WoW, everyone had the opportunity to download TSM or other add-ons with similar function so a player upset by the advantage an add-on might give could use it themselves. That's not an option here for PS4 players. It's probably why the other multi-platform MMOs keep their player bases and account licenses segregated by platform type. The third party tools that PC users can install won't impact the game experience of the console users who can't install them.

If you want me to believe that there are rampant problems with third party software that only indirectly affect the market board, I'm much more willing to listen. For instance, I know gathering bots are widespread and they have a very noticeable impact on the economy at the lower end, even if the bots purpose isn't really to interact with the market board itself. People keep trying to say it's all market board bots though or just generally refuse to distinguish between the claim "I don't see good evidence of market board bots" and the claim "I don't see good evidence of bots," which is just tedious.

I miss TSM. I didn't know it was possible to love an addon. I used to maintain an inventory of well over 1,000 listings, yet posting them took like a minute.

[Auriya]

The implication of course being that I'm botting and/or buying gil, which I'm not, which is exactly the sort of thing that makes me not trust your judgment the rest of the time when you go ranting and raving about how it's bots all the way down. You see bots everywhere and think everything that doesn't immediately conform to your personal beliefs about what can be done and how things work is further proof of botting. You're basically the FFXIV version of QAnon, and I don't take you people seriously. The last time I said something similar, people yelled at me for multiple pages and after that one person produced solid evidence of one single bot on one single server. Not exactly supporting the argument that bots control the market board.




If you want me to believe that there are rampant problems with third party software that only indirectly affect the market board, I'm much more willing to listen. For instance, I know gathering bots are widespread and they have a very noticeable impact on the economy at the lower end, even if the bots purpose isn't really to interact with the market board itself. People keep trying to say it's all market board bots though or just generally refuse to distinguish between the claim "I don't see good evidence of market board bots" and the claim "I don't see good evidence of bots," which is just tedious.

I miss TSM. I didn't know it was possible to love an addon. I used to maintain an inventory of well over 1,000 listings, yet posting them took like a minute.

A very important point that you are so obviously missing here is that this thread is not made to convince other players about our experiences . It's a thread– like earlier mentioned – where players share experiences with other players with similar experiences. When other players contribute to this thread I'm curious to hear what experiences they have had ingame and how it has affected their gaming experience in general and to collect more evidence.

What do you contribute with? You contribute with nothing, other than spewing doubts and insults in our direction: We are ranting, raving and imagining things.

You want to be convinced. And... who are you again? You are a normal player like the rest of us. You are not a gamemaster, designer, producer, or any kind of representative from SE so where do you get this lost idea that you are some kind of an authority whom we need to convince?

In all honesty I simply don't get why you and others are even writing on this forum at all if your only purpose here is is to sabotage this thread and you don't have anything topic related to share with us.

[TheLoveJenovan]

In all honesty I simply don't get why you and others are even writing on this forum at all if your only purpose here is is to sabotage this thread and you don't have anything topic related to share with us.

I don't know about you, but I'm aiming to get this thread in the thousands of posts in the hope that it'll get some visibility from SE. If the bot defenders want to help us with that, then so be it!

[TheLoveJenovan]

People keep trying to say it's all market board bots though or just generally refuse to distinguish between the claim "I don't see good evidence of market board bots" and the claim "I don't see good evidence of bots," which is just tedious.

I had to reread your posts to try to understand your position.

I agree that as a seller, you might not be interacting directly with market bots. Sometimes players will undercut bots below their floor prices—this had happened on Zalera, for instance, with the majority of lvl 50-70 gear crashing to the 20-30k range, after a bot started selling that gear.

I’m not sure what evidence you’re looking for with market bots. Perhaps a thread like this could be helpful: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...games_economy/

In the end, they’re accounts that are logged on 24/7 for months at a time, and they’ll undercut the lowest bidder within 10-30 minutes. I’m glad you haven’t encountered one directly, but there is evidence of bots on your server—though I can’t verify whether they’re market bots.

For example, you have the following FCs in your top-20 rankings:

1. Bahubali Great Order —ranked 3rd on the server with 3 members (https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...5048202077853/)
2. Arathi Basin — ranked 12th on the server (https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...5048202075319/)
3. aselmet — ranked 20th on the server with 5 members (https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...5048202055297/)

The first FC with 3 people is easily generating more activity than the 5th ranked FC, which has 487 members. I haven’t confirmed in-game whether these are bots and, if they are, their kind. Based on patterns from other servers, the first one could be a market bot, the 2nd looks like it could be a scrip bot for lvl 80-3star mats, and the third looks like a DOL/Ephemeral bot.

If you’re looking for more evidence on Aether, take a trip to Jenova. I left that server over a month ago, but before I left the bot was underselling by 1gil almost all items between lv50-80. If you find an item in which that isn’t the case, wait 10 to 20 minutes and check again.

Finally, I take issue that the bots provide a service by offering low-level items at a cheaper price—at least, that was my interpretation of your comments, but I may have misinterpreted them. I’ve never found anything in the game too tedious to gather or make. If availability of some items becomes a problem without bots—crystals come to mind—the solution is to offer vendors for the items or to improve drop rates. A game economy that relies on bots will mostly reward RMT vendors in the end. I think most of us can agree that the value in an MMORPG (as opposed to an RPG) is the opportunity to play with other players in a fair way. Bots and RMT purchasers seriously undercut the MMO experience for a lot of people.

[Nixxe]

Finally, I take issue that the bots provide a service by offering low-level items at a cheaper price

"Service" would imply a value judgment here. I'm just stating a fact of the economy. High end sellers transition away from gathering or crafting a lot of their own stuff, instead buying what they need from the board to quickly transform it into something more valuable and then sell that instead for a higher profit and a reduced time investment. Since bots tend to flood lower end markets, this pushes down profits for low end sellers, while increasing profits for high end sellers because the items they sell are not leashed to their replacement cost.

And I've been shown the first link before and previously agreed it was good evidence of a bot. It's just one bot though, which isn't good enough to prove the abotcalypse people keep demanding I believe in. I'm not denying that any market board bots exist, only that they're as prevalent as the forums believe because even when I show up to markets people assure me are bots all the way down (e.g. aesthete's), my own experience does not match the hysterical claims I read on the forums. I find I am able to sell things normally, and that all of the "botting" is just the aggregate of the activities of numerous and largely incompetent competitors.

Likewise, while it's strange that an FC with essentially one person in it is as high as that one, I don't think FC rankings are especially competitive. My own FC is kept in the top 100 more or less entirely through the actions of one member who logs on more often than not, does duties for an hour or two, and then logs off. The rest of the FC basically logs on once a week to raid, and my actions usually don't contribute much to credit generation. If two of us matched the efforts of the first one, we'd be in the top 20 in an FC of 16 "active members" (note: active members just means characters. My FC has 12 players, 4 alts, and several of the players have been unsubbed for over a year now) even though it would reflect the actions of only 3 of us. We're currently 97, and there are numerous FCs with nearly 100 members beneath us. FC credits just don't tell me much about what people are doing, though that FC with 487 people is probably more of a graveyard than anything.

A very important point that you are so obviously missing here is that this thread is not made to convince other players about our experiences . It's a thread– like earlier mentioned – where players share experiences with other players with similar experiences. When other players contribute to this thread I'm curious to hear what experiences they have had ingame and how it has affected their gaming experience in general and to collect more evidence.

What you're describing is an echo chamber where you can all talk about how much you agree with each other and not have to suffer the burden of needing to actually be correct about any of it.

[TheLoveJenovan]

my own experience does not match the hysterical claims I read on the forums. I find I am able to sell things normally, and that all of the "botting" is just the aggregate of the activities of numerous and largely incompetent competitors. .

Can you at least admit that your experience might be different than those from other servers?

I don't think FC rankings are especially competitive. My own FC is kept in the top 100 more or less entirely through the actions of one member who logs on more often than not, does duties for an hour or two, and then logs off.

Also, there's a logical fallacy here. There's an assumption that the the scoring is linear. While it's possible that a top-100 ranking is fairly easy to get, a top-5 ranking is as well. It's likely exponential once you get that high. This should be pretty obvious.

I don't find that your arguments advance the conversation, nor are they compelling or well argued. I'll focus on other conversations on the thread.

[Nixxe]

nor are they compelling or well argued.

That's rich.