Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Eloc]

Just to chime in on what the threads are discussing and to keep this thread going strong:

While demand was high for the new gear that came out most of the bots were chasing that market. Demand was still high enough that the bots could not dominate that market and a lot of regular crafters could make many sales. Now that demand has dried up those same bots are now seeding every item on the market. Literally 4 of these bot users have almost every item seeded currently on Excalibur. It's not that these bots directly take the fun out of the game and make it "unplayable" its more that its an outrage that it goes on blatantly, in our face, mocking our hard work and ethic and undermining what we feel is a rewarding part of the game to us as crafters.

If you banned even the most blatant offenders you would potentially be taking billions of gil out of the game and it would take a lot more than just a couple of days for these FC botting ring leaders to level up and then get every craft to 80 again so they can begin their operations again. By then you could identify their patterns again and continue to cut them down. It is a never ending cycle. But it is a necessary responsibility of SE to do this. I find it completely irresponsible of SE to only have 4 people dedicated to policing a game of millions.

If SE has the money to have someone go over every chat text that you can do while interacting on your MSQ, you know where every scene you can click on your allies and they say something about the quest your on, they can have a few more people dedicated to enforcing their terms of service and ensuring a quality gaming experience.

I enjoy seeing the posts that try to look at the problem from a development side i feel this adds good information so that we who are angry at SE for their lack of action can maybe see how a developer would address the problem. I do feel that both sides of the conversation are important if we are to find a solution that can work. I personally feel that some more man hours by SE would go a long way as it definitely is not hard to track these bots down with their behaviors.

I feel the hard work of a few individual in here in compiling and sending data to the STF should be commended. I hope the STF takes this effort seriously and we get a genuine reply from them.

Carry on!

[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.

[TheLoveJenovan]

It is a never ending cycle. But it is a necessary responsibility of SE to do this. I find it completely irresponsible of SE to only have 4 people dedicated to policing a game of millions.

Thanks for the post Eloc.

I don't think we're at that point yet because there are hundreds to thousand of obvious bot rings and dummy accounts that should be addressed. No one, other than some of the defenders for the status quo, have proposed that all bots should be eliminated as a (counter-)argument, but SE could at least take care of the obvious ones. I hope they make more than a casual effort, as you said. Similarly, we don't expect banks to catch 100% of fraud, but we expect them to make a good-faith effort to catch as much as possible.

We all love this game, and most of us would like to play with other players rather than bots.

[Nixxe]

nor are they compelling or well argued.

That's rich.

[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!

[Kes13a]

As with most things in life, different people have different views. If Nixxe and Jojoya dont see any issues, that is entirely possible depending on how they play. everyone is going to have a different value on if something in game adversely affects them or not. much like any discussion, both sides have different opinions and standards on what the problem is and how SE should address it. This thread is mostly about if SE was going to do something about it or not, so its natural on a public forum that we will get dissenting views on it, and with those views may get some who are less than respectful in how they express their views. it may make them harder to read, but, they are still valid.

Jojoya, in context for what I wrote earlier, it is deemed "bot friendly" because SE has zero client side monitoring, and the chances of being banned are miniscule unless they do something "stupid". stupid being use of teleport hacks, leaving it on 24/7, crafting in a public place etc. I am not sure if that provides enough context for you. Blizzard has client side monitoring for 3rd party programs, does that eliminate botting? no, there are ways around that and people use those, but it does catch and deter the people that are not "professionals" which does lessen the problem somewhat. it is difficult to say if that approach would work here, or if it should even be implemented.

I do think that a 4 person STF team would be adequate for the Japanese player base of around 250,000 active players. However it seems ALL reports go through them so thats about 650,000 active accounts worldwide. The reports to the STF in Japan would need to be translated, and we all know translation can cause its own issues. For that reason each region, Japan, NA and Europe should have its own teams for sheer efficiency. I cannot imagine how many reports they receive, but I would think that the 4 people in Japan are always operating on a backlog since each case would require some form of investigation. in short, I feel 4 people is not nearly enough for what is required.

[Jojoya]

Jojoya, in context for what I wrote earlier, it is deemed "bot friendly" because SE has zero client side monitoring, and the chances of being banned are miniscule unless they do something "stupid". stupid being use of teleport hacks, leaving it on 24/7, crafting in a public place etc. .

Thanks, that was the information I was looking for.

I do think that a 4 person STF team would be adequate for the Japanese player base of around 250,000 active players. However it seems ALL reports go through them so thats about 650,000 active accounts worldwide. The reports to the STF in Japan would need to be translated, and we all know translation can cause its own issues. For that reason each region, Japan, NA and Europe should have its own teams for sheer efficiency. I cannot imagine how many reports they receive, but I would think that the 4 people in Japan are always operating on a backlog since each case would require some form of investigation. in short, I feel 4 people is not nearly enough for what is required.

It's possible that the STF is understaffed and could use a few more on the team. I don't know if that number 4 that gets circulated is entirely accurate because I've only seen it coming from players and not SE. It could be there are others working with the STF but are in the game credits under different headings or not listed at all.

I still don't see how separate teams are needed for each region instead of putting them all on the same team working together.

Translation from English is not a problem for the Japanese team members. English is a compulsory subject in the school system there and they usually understand it quite well even if they can't speak it vwell (I was the same way with Spanish when I was younger).

German and French? I don't know the team's fluency in those language but there are SE employees who are fluent and able to translate as needed.

As for the number of players in each region, that's irrelevant. There aren't half a million players using bots. SE doesn't need enough employees to monitor every single account. They only need to monitor the ones showing suspicious behavior and they will have tools to identify and flag those based on login/logout patterns, frequency of activity, etc. in addition to the player reports they get.

If the bot defenders want to help us with that, then so be it!

Quit acting childish. I don't see anyone here who's trying to defend bots. They're trying to discuss the problem from the personal experience and knowledge they've gained through years of playing MMOs and competing in the player marketplaces of those games.

You can encourage others to block out differing (not even dissenting, just differing) points of view all you want, and all you accomplish is seal yourself up in an echo chamber of ignorance bewildered by why everyone you're willing to listen to agrees with you but the world doesn't became what you want.