Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[Jojoya]

Something which would help, but not really solve the problem is to deduce the tax when putting an item on sale and not when it is sold. Let's say you want to sell an item 100k and the tax is at 5%. When you put the item on sale, you pay 5k. And when it is sold you get 100k. If you change the price, you pay the 5% again on the new price. This will prevent undercutting a little bit because, well, you loose money each time you do it.

What about when the tax is reduced to 0%? There's no tax to be collected. Botters probably would have little issue with leveling their market characters through the MSQ far enough to unlock the reduced tax markets if they could keep changing their list price at no charge.

Better just to make it a listing fee that's separate from the tax and non-refundable. Even 1% would probably be enough to deter the majority of repeat undercutting (someone might relist if their item still hadn't sold after a few days). Players would still have incentive to move their retainers to the 0% cities to avoid the additional 3 or 5% when the items sells.

[Darkmoonrise]

oh yeah sure. The idea is, as you said, a listing fee. How it is implemented doesn't matter. As long as changing the price cost something, the idea is here.

But I think only one "tax" is suffisent. So I would say, fix listing fee of 5% is a good deal.

More if you put a biiig fee (like 20+%) we'll see some chat market emerging to prevent to pay this big fee. I know this will never append because it goes against the "mainstreaming, less player interaction possible" way that SE is currently following. But this will prevent botting like crazy.

[Jojoya]

oh yeah sure. The idea is, as you said, a listing fee. How it is implemented doesn't matter. As long as changing the price cost something, the idea is here.

But I think only one "tax" is suffisent. So I would say, fix listing fee of 5% is a good deal.

More if you put a biiig fee (like 20+%) we'll see some chat market emerging to prevent to pay this big fee. I know this will never append because it goes against the "mainstreaming, less player interaction possible" way that SE is currently following. But this will prevent botting like crazy.

The reason the market tax is variable is to get players to move their retainers around to reduce strain on whatever system stores the market data (evidently one of those 1.0 holdovers). If every city had the same fixed fee, there would be no reason to move a retainer once "hired". 90% of retainers would end up in Ul'dah since that's the closest city when retainers get unlocked in the MSQ.

As a result, SE would still need to use a variable listing fee if the market tax were removed. Or they would need to find a way to create a truly global market system so where retainers are assigned doesn't matter (which would open the door to having all listings for an entire data center available on every world on that data center).

They won't ever increasing any market fee to as high as 20% unless who ever controls the decision has lost their mind. That would become an excessive burden to less wealthy players, especially those new to the game, while already wealthy players could shrug it off.. It would drive players away from the game. It would also make chatting about anything else other than what people are selling nearly impossible as chat channels of all types would get flooded with sale spam.

And no, a 20% fee is not going to prevent botting because it's impacting all sellers equally. All it would eliminate is the frequent undercutting. If you really want to eliminate botting, you need to heavily penalize those who are doing it to the point they're at a disadvantage compared to those who don't.

[ForteNightshade]

And no, a 20% fee is not going to prevent botting because it's impacting all sellers equally. All it would eliminate is the frequent undercutting. If you really want to eliminate botting, you need to heavily penalize those who are doing it to the point they're at a disadvantage compared to those who don't.

To quote someone who knew avid botter, "I could crash the consumable market to 500 gil per item if I really wanted to. It's still profit in the end."

You will never beat a botter through price scrunching since they aren't putting in any effort to begin with. Therefore, their time isn't being "wasted." What would scare people like this away is SE making an example out of known botters. It's become increasingly well known that SE does precisely nothing to non-RMT botters. So people aren't afraid to use cheat problems when they know they'll never get caught.

[Gojin]

no they dont

[NamidaTekika]

I half wonder if after so long if you can report them for harassment of the playerbase and get an actual live GM to look at specific ones lol cause it is kind of ridiculous how long they are allowed to run, fed by the same bots that gather forever. Literally players cannot fairly compete with this and it destroys the markets.

[KageTokage]

You should probably remove the names mostly because the typical mod response to such is to just delete the entire topic which is largely counter-productive.

[Kes13a]

Yeah, its not fair to those who are flouting the rules to do RMT gil generation. naming and shaming is beneath warrior of light types who always let the bad guys speechify instead of rushing them and letting it end right there.

We have to think of the feelings of those poor bot wielders, sitting behind their computers all lonely... hmm.. except the whole purpose of bots is so they dont HAVE to play the game like the rest of us.

I dont know, after 7 pages its nice to know I am not alone in my frustration at lack of any effort on the part of SE to deal with this issue. Of course, it just crystallizes the fact that SE is not going to do anything about this issue. I had considered the idea mentioned earlier of a coalition of real person crafters/seller working against these bots... but for it to work, every crafter/seller needs to be on board, and that would never happen. new crafters coming in, having spent a lot of gil to get to where they are would want to make gil fast, which would break down the whole idea

No, the only way to deal with this is for SE to step up.And until they put GM's in the game that do ALL aspects of the game, not just combat, then they will never identify this as a problem.

[NamidaTekika]

Yeah, its not fair to those who are flouting the rules to do RMT gil generation. naming and shaming is beneath warrior of light types who always let the bad guys speechify instead of rushing them and letting it end right there.

We have to think of the feelings of those poor bot wielders, sitting behind their computers all lonely... hmm.. except the whole purpose of bots is so they dont HAVE to play the game like the rest of us.

I dont know, after 7 pages its nice to know I am not alone in my frustration at lack of any effort on the part of SE to deal with this issue. Of course, it just crystallizes the fact that SE is not going to do anything about this issue. I had considered the idea mentioned earlier of a coalition of real person crafters/seller working against these bots... but for it to work, every crafter/seller needs to be on board, and that would never happen. new crafters coming in, having spent a lot of gil to get to where they are would want to make gil fast, which would break down the whole idea

No, the only way to deal with this is for SE to step up.And until they put GM's in the game that do ALL aspects of the game, not just combat, then they will never identify this as a problem.

As players maybe we just need to start working with our FCs and people we know and such to start building our own direct markets (ie we have a community we put what things we want to buy and place orders with the gatherers and crafters more directly). Stop using the MB altogether. The more people we manage to gather for such a thing the less gil made by RMT people and less incentive for this. Be a long term/massive undertaking but seems like the only thing we as players can do. Square probably wouldn't like it either since we'd stop using one of their main game functions.

[Jojoya]

As players maybe we just need to start working with our FCs and people we know and such to start building our own direct markets (ie we have a community we put what things we want to buy and place orders with the gatherers and crafters more directly). Stop using the MB altogether. The more people we manage to gather for such a thing the less gil made by RMT people and less incentive for this. Be a long term/massive undertaking but seems like the only thing we as players can do. Square probably wouldn't like it either since we'd stop using one of their main game functions.

You'll never get players to abandon the marketboard because there are too many players. It would be too difficult to find the player selling the item you want to buy, especially for rarer items.

SE would be fine if players chose to switch to person to person trading. If they didn't want us doing that, we wouldn't have the trade option in the first place. The marketboard is actually a mess from SE"s perspective. A some of the things they'd like to accomplish are hindered by current limitations of the marketboard (like mandatory retainer assignments).

If you want to pressure SE into doing something about the bots, you'd have to get a significant number of players to quit the game and state that's the reason they're quitting. The problem is not enough players feel negatively impacted enough by their existence to quit over it. Some players are even happy that the bots are there, not because they're using them but because the bots have driven prices down so they pay less.