Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[TheLoveJenovan]

A twitter account was created as well, and these will be posted on Thursdays as well.

https://twitter.com/ffxivbotreports

[TheLoveJenovan]

A poster requested updated stats:

Date October 11, 2020
Bot rings not terminated: 87
- Aether datacenter 16
- Primal datacenter 9
- Crystal datacenter 34
- Chaos datacenter 11
- Light datacenter 17
Accounts associated with bot Free Companies: 448
Average bot ring age: 230 days
Oldest bot ring: 1026 days

[TheLoveJenovan]

Thanks for the posts ItMe and Kes13a.

I think SE North America and Europe have more fundamental problems than just adding more STF staff in the region. I'd apply for a job, but my degrees are all in the physical sciences, and it appears that they prefer to hire Japanese bankers (not MBAs) for these, like Daishiro Okada.

[TheLoveJenovan]

Actually, I was wrong about management for SE NA and Europe. It looks like this is lead by Phil Rogers.

[Eloc]

How are these FC rings laundering the gil so that its not being picked up by the RMT automation detection? I can see just by how many sales of items daily these accounts generate on my server alone it has to be tens of millions/week so therefore their has to be billions of gil on these accounts. How can they move that gil without having it trigger a flag into their trades? If their are many large gil transactions wouldnt this trigger investigation and banning? I know other MMO companies have gone directly after the RMT websites by filing lawsuits against them. That would be a step in the right direction for SE. But i highly doubt they want to try going after entities in other countries.

We know that they have measure in place to track gil trade transactions so why is that not a simple tool to ferret out these RMT FC rings?

[Kes13a]

it is likely a lot of "sold" items on the market.

you know, a single ore going for a million gil or something like that. that procedure has been used in many games over the years and seems to be "overlooked"

unless the buyer is previously flagged as possible RMT, then it is likely passed off by the system as a regular sale and not a transfer of funds as a paid service

[TheLoveJenovan]

Thanks Eloc and Kes13a. I'm not sure how SE monitors gil transfers, but I suspect RMTs use a couple of strategies to circumvent these checks. Looking at existing services, purchases for under 10M gil (ex: 9,819,999 gil) are pretty common, so my guess is that SE only looks at transfers of 10M and higher. RMTs could very well circumvent audits in the same way that people in the US do so by making deposits under $10k.

Separately, I believe this is patch day (5.35) with new housing. Some people on the thread have postulated that market botting activity has gone up recently in anticipation of increased housing. Can anyone share their experience over the next few days as to whether market botting has started to decrease? I would think that RMTs wouldn't need to be as active after demand starts to go down. (I would do so myself, but I'm not paying for a sub until this botting nastiness is sorted.)

[Eloc]

Nice try with the post to the JP servers. I wish that had garnered more traction but it seems its pretty hard to give a detailed explanation of what the bots are doing with google translate. It also seemed that the consensus there was that those types of bots are regularly banned. So maybe we have the right of it that the STF only investigates the JP servers and the only thing that happens on the NA servers is that the RMT Spammers that you can right click chat and report get banned thus they get to say they are banning RMT accounts.

For others reading this go check out the JP post, worth a read even in translate. The oddest part of the read was one person seemed to say that the MB Bot was ok because all it does is automate something you can do anyways if you were "diligent on updating your prices" therefore all it does is "make you happy" hahaha

[Kes13a]

I dont expect a huge decrease as it was rising even before the announcement of more housing

[Charlotte_Wells]

Yes, why should they decrease their activity when they still can make even more gil.
The less gil other people make the more can be sold to them for real money.

Right now those who undercut 24/7 run the entire market.