Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[Kes13a]

At every time of day, even during night, same retainers on every single piece of exarchic armor... undercutting by 1 with no more no less than four items. Every 5 minutes... all of them with Polish names... it's been like this for more than two months now. It's unreal how shit this game is at dealing with bots.

The only thing I can do is crash the prices and hurt their profits while hurting mine as well, and I don't care about profit anymore at this point, I just want to see them suffer.

I have certainly been there thats for sure. yet these are "just normal players" apparently and zero evidence of botting

according to the lack of action from the SE side of things anyway

all we can do is submit a report to the "Special" (I think short bus hockey helmet kind of special) Task Force and carry on...

[Sugon]

I don't see why they don't just move the gimped, weird tax system currently in place, and make it so that you're taxed when posting an item. This would render the 1gil undercutting useless, as you'd quickly devalue your own item from posting it over and over, which is much preferable to crashing the market.

5% fee for listing your item, helps with people stalling the market with ridiculous over pricing as well, also requires RMT gil buyers to have 5% of the Gil they're looking to buy before posting an item at 500,000% markup.

[Kleeya]

Since an item is never garanteed to be sold, wouldn't such a tax hurt players who don't cheat as well ? There is some times where some of my items dont sell, and if the prices did drop too much i then take them out from the market to put someting else instead. I am sure glad i don't get charged a 5% tax each time i do that because some other people are using undercutting bots on some other items. I am not fond at all of "let's punish everyone for the fault of a misbehaving minority" solutions to a problem.

[Sugon]

It's how every other game does it, and how it's done IRL as well, to avoid this kind of behavior. It basically encourages botting.
I see no other way to fix it that would be less detrimental, me myself would rather prefer it to tax me 5% (or, lets go for 2.5%) whenever I list something, get the 2.5% back whenever I sell something and remove the 5% tax all together.
With 2.5% and the return, you'd be able to relist your item three times if we assume that you get it sold the third time you post it, compared to the 5% tax that's in place today, while also solving the undercutting bots.

[Kes13a]

It's how every other game does it, and how it's done IRL as well, to avoid this kind of behavior. It basically encourages botting.
I see no other way to fix it that would be less detrimental, me myself would rather prefer it to tax me 5% (or, lets go for 2.5%) whenever I list something, get the 2.5% back whenever I sell something and remove the 5% tax all together.
With 2.5% and the return, you'd be able to relist your item three times if we assume that you get it sold the third time you post it, compared to the 5% tax that's in place today, while also solving the undercutting bots.

I dont think we would lose the bots doing that. while their sole purpose is gil generation, a tax would cut into that process a bit, the bot isnt going to care. it only stop real people from trying to compete with the pots because of the tax. so actually, would aid the bots in their market control.

the only effective control is going to be remove the pool of RMT gil buyers. "vacations" and bans get the message across that its not allowed and eventually the slice of the RMT market diminishes enough to lessen the gil generation bots on the MP.

[Jojoya]

I don't see why they don't just move the gimped, weird tax system currently in place, and make it so that you're taxed when posting an item. This would render the 1gil undercutting useless, as you'd quickly devalue your own item from posting it over and over, which is much preferable to crashing the market.

5% fee for listing your item, helps with people stalling the market with ridiculous over pricing as well, also requires RMT gil buyers to have 5% of the Gil they're looking to buy before posting an item at 500,000% markup.

Wouldn't do much good unless SE removed the 0 tax incentive to get players to distribute their retainers to the less used city states (makes me curious exactly how the marketboard data base works behind the scenes). There was only about a 7 week period back in the middle of Spring when I didn't have a 0 tax option on my world. The massive flood of new players in June and July snapped Ishgard, Kugane and Crystarium from 3% back to 0 tax fast, and Kugane and Crystarium have remained at 0 tax since (Ishgard went back to being reduced around the start of August).

Leave the 0 tax incentive in place and the bots just MSQ skip their mules to get Kugane access. It's not like a MSQ skip is expensive compared to how much those rings are probably making.

If SE is starting to take a harder look at gil sink effectiveness(like the teleport fee and Aetheryte ticket changes announced for Endwalker), they probably should review market taxes as well. Go from 5-3-0 to 7-5-3 perhaps, though that would be a burden on new players. Any attempt to temporarily relieve tax burden on new players for X period would result in the botting rings constantly rotating in new listing mules. Or just drop the 0 and leave taxes at 5-3 to continue to encourage retainer distribution across the different city states.

I dont think we would lose the bots doing that. while their sole purpose is gil generation, a tax would cut into that process a bit, the bot isnt going to care. it only stop real people from trying to compete with the pots because of the tax. so actually, would aid the bots in their market control.

the only effective control is going to be remove the pool of RMT gil buyers. "vacations" and bans get the message across that its not allowed and eventually the slice of the RMT market diminishes enough to lessen the gil generation bots on the MP.

The bot wouldn't care. The bot operator would.

If they're doing these 1 gil undercuts every 15 minutes, then all their profit has disappeared if their item is still listed 5 hours later. But it would also take a fair number of sellers for that particular item to appear to make it happen. If there is no new listing, there's no reason to undercut.

[Truman]

Late to the crafting game and just started trying to sell Exarchic/Aesthete on Diabolos a few weeks ago. There is a person who has been logged on for at least the last seven days, 24 hours each day. They have one of at least 80% of all Exarchic and Aesthete listed on their numerous retainers at any given time. No matter when I adjust my prices for any item I list that they also have the same item listed, they will reprice theirs 1g below mine within 15 minutes of my price update. Doesnt matter what time of the day, I have tried several random times over the 24 hours period - like clockwork, they will undercut in that 15 minute window. I have luckily sold a few things , but it is just luck that someone bought it when I fell into that small 15 minute window before the inevitable undercut.

Like all other bots, they are /busy all day and locked away in an inn room in Limsa. I've reported the player, but dont expect anything to happen.

I'm considering just trying to find something else to make some gil with, but it stinks that I even have to consider that because the bots make the market I want to sell in impossible.

[KageTokage]

At this point I just spam levequests if I want gil because it's instant returns with no competition and minimal effort involved.

The first few weeks of a new expansion releasing or the first few days of a new patch are really the only major profitability windows for legit players these days as once the framework for a botting script is established it only takes minor tweaks for them to get it up and running again.

[Kleeya]

On another note do we have an estimation of how many players would go back to sell their crafted items if undercutting bots were not a thing anymore, and what would be the consequences of it ?

Actually we are in a situation where the prices on some items becomes always lower, and where legit crafters trying to sell them become pissed off being undercut all the time, because a few bots have the monopoly on these items. But if these few bots were gone, wouldn't they be replaced by a lot of crafters not cheating ? If there is too much of them, the prices will stay the same, and the exasperation about undercutted every few minutes will stay the same as well. Because instead of being undercutted by the same bot every 15 minutes, you will then become undercutted by player A at +8 minutes after having put your items on sale, then player B at +13 minutes, player C at +21 minutes, player D at +32 minutes, etc.

With even the risk of A, B, C, or D undercutting not by 1 gil only, but like 20% of the price to sell their items faster, because they are impatient humans and not a bot programmed to always use the same price reduction. Except that E, F end G will then follow the 20% decrease, making the prices drop even faster.

While the bots are for sure a problem that needs to get rid of since what they are doing is forbidden by the TOS, i am not sure that you should expect to suddenly become rich and not being undercutted all the time if they were not around anymore. Especially since the gathering and crafting rework, which made all the crafted items way easier to make, and the competition way bigger than before.

[Illmaeran]

On another note do we have an estimation of how many players would go back to sell their crafted items if undercutting bots were not a thing anymore, and what would be the consequences of it ?

While bots certainly have a significant impact, I think they'd have to do away with retainers bringing back crafted items from ventures as well as get rid of the bots. I've got little incentive to work on crafting certain things like housing items because of the number of people posting the same items, but gathered by their retainer, at prices that are much lower than the cost of the raw materials alone. I hate to use the term value, as it's subject to supply/demand and personal opinion, but I think most people don't know the actual value of the items because they have no reference on how much they cost to make since they're effectively free.

I'd love to see retainers be able to bring back the full scope of material items gatherable via nodes for their respective DoL class and the full scope of items gatherable via world drops (skins, horns, wool/fur, etc) on their DoW/DoM classes. We're able to target gather these things via hunting/botany/mining ventures, but I'd like to see this expanded to the other two ventures as well, except with random rewards appropriate for the level and a higher quantity of items returned for the 18 hour venture.

For example; my level 80 Miner would have access to all non-timed or legendary node items that are gatherable by the Miner class. If I want to send it out to target a specific ore, I could do that via the current mechanic. If I just wanted it out earning its keep then it would bring back a random gatherable item in quantity appropriate for the duration of the venture. It may be something valuable or it may be copper ore, that's the price of doing the random ventures. HOWEVER, the random ventures would bring back a higher quantity of items than the targeted one.

The same would apply to DoW/DoM ventures.

Anything that's craftable should be removed from retainers' loot lists. As much as I'd like to include things like ingots, thread, cloth, and logs to the loot list, given the loss of HQ gatherable items, I foresee a market for HQ processed/intermediate materials emerging and I'd hate to see retainer returns impacting that.