Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[Kes13a]

nice,
I never would have thought of that

[Auriya]

Thank you guys for bringing this to more players' and (attempting) SE's attention. Now I know I'm no longer alone with this! I've reported this several times and I've come short because SE see it as an undercutting issue and I'm a hurt player who can't get my items sold (!!!). Which is not alone the case. It's far more serious than that..but you guys already know that. To you TheLoveJenovan - great job!


On the whole Data Light Center Market Board botting has become a huge problem as well.
The whole crafted glamoring market, mid range market (lvl 50-80) for all crafting and gathering related gear, armor and tools are dominated by one single lvl 80 craftername with many altnames scattered all over the data light servers and gazillions of retainers that frequently have name changes. The alts are also used to buy off huge amounts of mats from other servers in an attempt to conceal it's the same player in various disguises seemingly with neverending gil-wallets, which could imply RMT activities.. It's not hard to check the history of items sold.
Most crafters on the servers have given up already and only sell a thing here and there. You put one thing up and there's immediately 10-15 items being put up to undercut you. You try to adjust your prices – don't bother, it's a fight lost if you can't stay in the game 24 hours a day. Too many have given up already, cause on some of the data light servers the competition is completely non existing.

In the 2 years I've played it has never been so obvious as it is at the moment. You have to look at the Market Board with CLOSED EYES in order to not see this!!

[TheLoveJenovan]

Thanks Kes13 and Auriya.
I've only been playing for 4 months, and learning that the problem has only recently gotten worse is interesting. The major bots on Jenova were created around May 2020. I wonder whether this is Covid-19 related--which would still be weird because the cheating reports can be processed remotely.

Just an update on my thread on the JPN board.

I've received a lot of views and a couple of posts. The posts basically say that there are some measures to track bots, but it's a bit pointless because bots circumvent these measures almost immediately. One poster suggested that the thread might be closed (I'm not sure why, as it doesn't violate Forum guidelines, TOS or anything). The same poster also said that they had taken measures last year because of a bad botting problem on Europe servers.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...727.1588716301

Does anyone know anything about this?

This was my posted reply. (Note that if you decide to post on there with Google Translate, I suggest that you first start by apologizing for the difficult-to-read message and state that you used Google Translate)

English->Japanese->English
Thank you for your reply.
We apologize if the message is difficult to read. Translated by Google Translate.
Our problem is that the bot is never investigated. When I create a detailed report about the bot, nothing happens. The bot is easy to identify. The bot logs in 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and does not play games. They change the market price every 10 minutes or harvest temporary nodes. Their behavior is 100% consistent.
Better bot detection is good, but we just ask people to read the cheat report. Square Enix bans 6-9 bot accounts per week. In other words, it takes 20-30 weeks (4.5-7 months) to ban one bot per server (68 servers).
Does Square Enix have to pay more staff to solve the problem? We just want to play honest games.