Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[tierney12]

Title:

Stricter action towards market bots, and gatherers, because of a recent and massive wave of bots designed to sell high value items on the market board by updating their prices every few minutes, 24/7

Body:

Hi there,

First I'm going to link a thread on the SE forums:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...Market-botting

As you can see that the thread has over 5000 views in a few months, this topic has a lot of interest within the community and those who spend a lot of time crafting/gathering on the Chaos, Light, and some US data centres. At the moment there are dozens of bot accounts on each world who's sole purpose is to take crafted, gathered, and farmed items and sell them on the market board. These bots aggressively update their price to undercut real players every few minutes, which run perpetually. Because of this, many DoH/L players have moved away from interacting with these systems since the bots are very unpleasant to deal with, since it would require an extreme amount of dedication to compete with them. Also we have documented cases of these bots running uninterrupted for months on end, with evidence that these accounts are using third party tools that I'll link to here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...games_economy/

This page documents the history of several bots, and how a player was able to manipulate and record the time intervals between the bot account updating its prices to the point where he could predict when it would update to the second. He also had received threats in game from the bot accounts for successfully manipulating the prices of the bot. However since this event took place, the bots have adapted to identify and counteract players trying to manipulate them by aggressively buying out undercut items with their effectively infinite gil.

We also believe that the gil earned by these bots is encouraging RMT activity, which goes on to support the targeted hacking attempts at other crafter players accounts, likely in retaliation for competing with them. Our community has noticed an increase of compromised accounts within the crafter community, which then attempt to attack players through links to phishing websites sent in game through tells.

My suggestion would be to aggressively monitor the market boards, especially for the newest crafted sets, for activity that would suggest that the account selling the item is likely to be an automated seller, then deal with suspected bots in the appropriate manner as well as to report these cases differently to how the other RMT related bans are.

[TheLoveJenovan]

Thanks tierney12. That's a nice post and message. The only comment I have is that the bots can move from the newest crafted sets. On Jenova, one of the bots moved to about 50-60 items at lvl 50+. Almost everyone else has given up on selling these items, which is most gear at lvl 50+.

[TheLoveJenovan]

I also recommend to players to post their experience to this thread (and/or the other Market bot thread). Don't include bot account names though. The more visibility this issue receives, the more likely the community will get a response and possibly have this addressed.

[KageCM]

It seems to me the least SE could do is add a 'Right Click > Report Botting' like they did for RMT.

[Yayoi_Kise]

Hello, I'm glad you address this. It is a huge issue on the Louisoix server. I have noticed it getting worse and worse over the past 6 months. Now the marketboard is pretty much unusable as a high level crafter. I have observed the same as the rest of the thread, independently.
I want to add the following suggestions to how Square Enix can detect them. The rest is a matter of actually doing something instead of ignoring the reports.

- Check the time the player was online and in which area they were. If they were online 24/7 for weeks in an inn, just updating prices, ban them. Because humans die without sleep. The better bots have a ~6 hour sleep window a day during which they afk or go back to the title screen to avoid this.

- A GM can bot-check players. This already exists. They can message a bot to see if they respond and hold a human conversation. This bot-check gets shown even if you set your status to busy, which would normally block /tell. If they don't respond but just keep updating their prices, ban them. A good bot would attempt to detect this kind of /tell and alert the human to take over.

- Do statistical analysis on user input. If the player always clicks on the exact same pixels, it's a bot. If it moves the mouse in a perfect straight line all the time, it's a bot. If it always has the same delay between keystrokes with just a few millisecond rounding error inbetween, it's a bot. The good bots will attempt to randomize all of those.

- Bots have to read the prices off the marketboard. They do this by accessing and reading the game memory. The only other way is optical character recognition, but that's prone to errors and a lot of effort to set up when you can just find the base pointers and offsets in a couple minutes and read the prices directly out of the game. Find out if another program attempts to access the marketboard price part of the game memory and just straight up ban them if that happens because under normal circumstances this wouldn't happen. If that's too harsh, check how often they access it. If they do it all the time while updating prices, that's obviously to feed the bot the data it needs.

And here is how users can detect them, though this is of course not as conclusive as the above and can only be used as a basis for a report:

Use the player search to see where they are. If they're a bot, they're probably not in a public area (to avoid being suspicious to bystanders), but in a private instance that has a bell, usually an inn. Check them every now and then over the course of a week or multiple weeks. If they're a bot, you can check whenever you want and they'll be always online and always in the instance. Exception when they go to a marketboard to buy new crafting mats. They're not playing the game and they don't take human breaks. Also check how often they update the prices. With simple bots, you can figure out their interval up to the second and predict when they'll update their prices next. The more sophisticated ones have a random interval but they won't go over 30 minutes for example because they're after profit. Stupid bots will also blindly follow prices, so if you put an item that usually costs 150k up for 1k right before they update, they'll either set their price to 999gil or to the lower limit that the bot has programmed in, for example 30k. If everyone tries to sell around 150k, and one person sells for 1k, why would a human player go down to 30k? There's no reason. A human player would just buy the 1k offer and relist it. Or they would ignore it. They surely wouldn't try to compete with it.

You want to know my experience? It's looking like this now, on every item I check:


The red marked offers are from bots. There are 6 offers, but they come from 3 bots with different retainer names.
Here are my oberservations as to why they are bots:


Bot 1 (name redacted):
- crafting bot and marketboard bot
Evidence:
- Repeatedly baited his bot into undercutting neo-ish items at 1k gil
- After doing this like 50 times he sent me a /tell and threatened me
- Then he added a floor price that the bot won't go below (30k)
- He also bought a username change (previous name was [redacted])
- His FC is just him and four level 1 clones (they all look the same)
- Only has crafters levelled
- Undercuts by small but random amounts
- Online 24/7, always at "The Roost" inn (alone area with retainer bell to avoid being reported)


Bot 2 (name redacted):
- Always undercuts by 1 gil
Evidence:
- Only has crafters levelled
- Online 24/7, always at "Topmast Apartment" (alone area with retainer bell to avoid being reported)


Bot 3 (name redacted):
- Actually resides in Moogle server, but has marketboard bots that sell items with his name on many servers
- He doesn't update offers as quickly because his bot rotates through all the different server characters
Evidence:
- Always undercuts by exactly 10 gil
- Is updating prices 24/7
- Only really has crafters levelled
- suspicious 3-person FC
- At some point his bot malfunctioned and he put about 30 neo-ishgard items on the market for standard shop price (about 1k gil)

[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.
---—
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.