Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[TheLoveJenovan]

Thanks for everyones' comments; I found this thread very informative and helpful. I had been working the MB for the last couple of months to help my FC save up for a large house, and I noticed (and reported) this botting behavior for at least 2 months.

I don't mind the undercutting. The part I don't like is that the bots extinguish markets on dozens (hundreds) of items. We've had a Jenova bot that follows the exact same behavior listed at the start of this thread. For the Jenova bot, it will start with an underserved market, like a Titanium Axe, in which the bot might price it at 2-3 times the average selling price, like 120k. When other players enter at the average selling price (50k), the bot will loop through an undercut-sell-restock cycle of the item to such a point that it becomes too time consuming to sell items at the bot's floor prices. Our bot used to do this on lvl 70-80 gear, but it has recently moved to lvl 50-80 gear. I've worked for the last few weeks to push the bot's prices to its floor prices on each item, in order to help new players with gear. It's not really what I want to do when I play a game.

At the end of the day, you can live with it or excuse the bots. If you're ok with that, then that's fine and this thread might not be for you. At the same time, we're paying customers, and it's reasonable to have an expectation for a base level of quality in a product. For me, this means that the devs take an active role in addressing cheating and harassment in their online game. In my experience, FFXIV's role here has mostly been lip service for any bot more sophisticated that an RMT advertisement bot. It is for this reason that I've cancelled my subscription, and I've sent a note to the Support Desk to let them know that this is the reason.

Finally, I also believe the devs have not done a good job with some aspects of the game and bot incentives. The two clear examples that come to mind are crystal farming and purchasing a first house. I believe both of these are setup in such a way as to strongly incentivize botting--which is why I haven't engaged in these activities on my own. I'm not sure there's a perfect solution--perhaps a crystal vendor NPC or a housing lottery--but surely there's a better solution than the current implementation. The fact that these have been known, unaddressed problems for years tells me that the devs are more concerned with generating more content than fixing fundamental problems with their current platform. For me, this supports my decision to leave.