Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[Muutaras]

My 7 day naming ban is over. I watched the topic. It's nice that people are interested in the problem and post their stories.

[Muutaras]

I will repeat my post, without naming. Hi, from Brynhildr.(I am from Ukraine and play on the American server, sorry if i made mistakes ^_^)
Shortly before 5.3 release I was starting make gils for huge house. And from this moment I see many bots like gathering-crafting. Some easy rule you can check this in your worlds for try find bots or cheracter oriented on make gils for RMT. 1) They use Chocobo. 2) They love use Busy status. 3) You can check they jobs, 99% have one battle jobs and full gathering-craft list, some bots oriented only in gathering jobs. 4) You can check their profile on Lodestone and 99% they have only basic minions-mounts. 5) Sometimes it's a FC bots and twink for storage and free new retainers.
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Some bots as mentioned above use own algorithms for items price, in ours server I can highlight two. They drop price in ***. If items cost 200-230k(and people on server buy it) they can easy lower price with step 10-50k gils.
For examples .
They destroy price on items, and sometimes you need wait for prices will stabilize and you will be able to benefit from the sale, rather than sell items at their cost. Now on on different items fight for price and craft only bots, sometimes ordinary players too try sell their item. But you need live near board or hope bots in this moment crafting, gathering recources or a lot of buyers.

[Muutaras]

At the moment, 4-6 bots are participating in the trade of 480-490 items on our server. Except that when you arrive to collect resources. There are 5-6 bots and 1-3 real people sitting there (at night and in the morning for America). There are also multi-world bots. Searching across Lodestone showed that this bot works for a FC of two bots of crafters on Goblin server.
At the same time, they cover all items that, in principle, can be put up for action, and they buy huge packs of resources for crafting.(All this was purchased by one bot)

[deonfoxfangs]

Easily can point out bots on my server, just to have fun with them I set the price to one above the vendor sell price (430-ish gil) on an item that is going for about 200k on the market board. Within one minute the seller had lowered their price to nearly 100k. No human micromanaging the market board would do that (instead they would just buy the 430 gil item), so I bought his half price item and am now reselling it.

Makes it extremely difficult to sell stuff on your own though. Obviously this behavior should 100% be acted upon but also honestly I'd like to see buy orders so there's less 1 gil undercut competition for people who don't mind coming down a little to just go ahead and sell their stuff.

[tierney12]

We got away with that for a while on my server, but now the bots can tell and will buy your items and resell it themselves.

[Muutaras]

Time for big detective. I was interested in one nickname let it be Lisa (I don’t know if it fits the rules of the forum or not. But this is probably used for banned people or for things that have lost their name when the person producing them changed their nickname. I have a couple of things since 2017 and my name is not there) on Brynhildr Market Board. And search it on Lodestone. So I find RMT multi-server accouting. On Brynhildr I know one man and his second window bot both gathering bot, maybe and craft(Blue mark). Owner FC bots for more profit, all members have identical name(or have a name for the task of which it is made) and appearance. Number 1 and 2
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That man have very long thread bots. On Lamia I found this man Lisa he has FC bots, all members have identical name and appearance like on Brynhildr. Also there are names about combat, which makes it clear that these bots also use automation for farming dungeons or something like this Number 3 and 4
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Then I check some gear naming on his items and I find another man, as i thought. Ok Lodestone help me again. I found this name on Faerie world, this character have identical appearance from first Lisa on Bryngildr but bot live on normal FC was since in 2013 year. Number 5
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That Lisa have many start account on 15 servers, with identical appearance and only in Brynhildr this bot work in high-end content. Number 1

[NamidaTekika]

Time for big detective. I was interested in one nickname let it be Lisa (I don’t know if it fits the rules of the forum or not. But this is probably used for banned people or for things that have lost their name when the person producing them changed their nickname. I have a couple of things since 2017 and my name is not there) on Brynhildr Market Board. And search it on Lodestone. So I find RMT multi-server accouting. On Brynhildr I know one man and his second window bot both gathering bot, maybe and craft(Blue mark). Owner FC bots for more profit, all members have identical name(or have a name for the task of which it is made) and appearance. Number 1 and 2
____
That man have very long thread bots. On Lamia I found this man Lisa he has FC bots, all members have identical name and appearance like on Brynhildr. Also there are names about combat, which makes it clear that these bots also use automation for farming dungeons or something like this Number 3 and 4
____
Then I check some gear naming on his items and I find another man, as i thought. Ok Lodestone help me again. I found this name on Faerie world, this character have identical appearance from first Lisa on Bryngildr but bot live on normal FC was since in 2013 year. Number 5
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That Lisa have many start account on 15 servers, with identical appearance and only in Brynhildr this bot work in high-end content. (snipped image)

I took one look at the characters in that group and the face looks and I know EXACTLY two of those in that group that are gathering bots that are on 24/7 feeding this. I've literally reported them well over 60 times over the course of months as have others and they still exist. One's name is like a unpleasant rabbit for example and the other is a J (hope that avoids the naming and shaming rule).

Pretty sad when I can look at that and I know exactly what names of what bots are fueling this junk on my server.

The market bots and gathering bots are directly entwined since they fuel eachother and both need crushed to fix this, though breaking the gathering ones would starve the market bots. Either way it needs enforced, oh it might cost money to have staff do it, but doesn't our money for the game make us worth fixing this for? We do the heavy lifting most times since as shown we actively checking this out, making sure even our accusations have weight and evidence and we want to avoid catching legitimate players. I'd not be as upset myself if AT THE VERY LEAST one of the multiple bots I've seen EVERY DAY for the last 4 months had been banned, but they haven't they still are running gathering circuits and still dominating the markets for months on end when supposed ban waves happen.

[MilitaryVet123]

I took one look at the characters in that group and the face looks and I know EXACTLY two of those in that group that are gathering bots that are on 24/7 feeding this. I've literally reported them well over 60 times over the course of months as have others and they still exist. One's name is like a unpleasant rabbit for example and the other is a J (hope that avoids the naming and shaming rule).

Pretty sad when I can look at that and I know exactly what names of what bots are fueling this junk on my server.

The market bots and gathering bots are directly entwined since they fuel eachother and both need crushed to fix this, though breaking the gathering ones would starve the market bots. Either way it needs enforced, oh it might cost money to have staff do it, but doesn't our money for the game make us worth fixing this for? We do the heavy lifting most times since as shown we actively checking this out, making sure even our accusations have weight and evidence and we want to avoid catching legitimate players. I'd not be as upset myself if AT THE VERY LEAST one of the multiple bots I've seen EVERY DAY for the last 4 months had been banned, but they haven't they still are running gathering circuits and still dominating the markets for months on end when supposed ban waves happen.

The market and gathering bots are typically from the same player. Only breaking the gathering ones does nothing. It only takes 2 days to level a gatherer to Lv80 starting from scratch (with jump pot). Only breaking the market ones is even worse than doing nothing since it takes 2 hours to get a market bot up and running. So you do need both to be crushed to fix this. But then that only means they'll only take 2.5 days to get back up to speed.

The ban waves target egregious cases where some botters get too greedy and even hack the game. That is an easy ban. For some reason SE also really likes catching MGP botting so that's another part of the "ban wave".

[NamidaTekika]

The market and gathering bots are typically from the same player. Only breaking the gathering ones does nothing. It only takes 2 days to level a gatherer to Lv80 starting from scratch (with jump pot). Only breaking the market ones is even worse than doing nothing since it takes 2 hours to get a market bot up and running. So you do need both to be crushed to fix this. But then that only means they'll only take 2.5 days to get back up to speed.

The ban waves target egregious cases where some botters get too greedy and even hack the game. That is an easy ban. For some reason SE also really likes catching MGP botting so that's another part of the "ban wave".

Ya, the ban waves don't really do anything to the main issues fueling RMT and the like either. And thats 2.5 days of them not generating money. If they were actively hitting the accounts on the weekly, losing 1/3 of a week of bot activity on all or most of their bots would make it a bad ROI overall to relevel the bots constantly (especially if they get caught during leveling too).

Basically have to make it worse and worse ROI for botters to make it a bigger hassle releveling constantly and very little overall uptime on the bots (since it does take them resources and time to get all the gear too for the bot to be able to effectively gather things or to even generate crafted goods)

[Kes13a]

Ya, the ban waves don't really do anything to the main issues fueling RMT and the like either. And thats 2.5 days of them not generating money. If they were actively hitting the accounts on the weekly, losing 1/3 of a week of bot activity on all or most of their bots would make it a bad ROI overall to relevel the bots constantly (especially if they get caught during leveling too).

Basically have to make it worse and worse ROI for botters to make it a bigger hassle releveling constantly and very little overall uptime on the bots (since it does take them resources and time to get all the gear too for the bot to be able to effectively gather things or to even generate crafted goods)

I think when they ban shouldnt be just an account ban, run the IP as well. SE's bans are basically lip service, I mean seriously, you ban hacked accounts and the stupid botters, the smarter ones they arent even touching