Part 1/2

Common comments regarding MB bots that tick me off:

"I undercut by 1 gil, so am I a bot?/how do you know they're a bot?"

"Just take advantage of them, sell at a low price and buy off of them."

"I've sold x of this recently, readjust what you're selling."

"Who cares about trading, play the game a different way."

You should undercut by one gil, it's common decency towards your fellow traders. The point is not how much they undercut, but how frequently. These bots take crafted items, at the moment the most common thing is the neo-ishgardian set (all pieces), list twenty items on each one of their ten retainers and continuously cycle through them with a script that compares the price of what the lowest is on the MB and undercuts it. We know that it's a script because we can predict within seconds when they will undercut regardless of when the last update to the items being sold was, i.e. we can put a cheaper item on the board at a predetermined time and watch it be undercut in an impossibly fast time for a human player.

Bots are not as simple as they were a few months ago, they have preprogrammed floor functions that can catch players trying to bait them and they can buy off you and resell for a profit if they are so inclined.

The bots can sell literally anything: they regularly sell materials that have been bot farmed, and they can sell crafted gear that has been passed onto them. There is an expectation that there should be a fair, player driven economy where there is a limited supply and demand for most items. Items that sell frequently can be taken advantage of by a bot listing several of them and routinely undercutting every minute (or less), and can restock from their inventory when their items have sold, pushing legitimate players out of the potential market even though there may be a high demand. Similarly, highly valuable items can be passed onto a bot that can routinely undercut in the same fashion, locking players who have had lucky drops/spent a considerable amount of time farming out of converting their items into gil as well.