Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[TheLoveJenovan]

1. Tierny12, did you receive a response to your message and, if so, would you post it here? At this stage, I'm just hoping for at least an acknowledgement that this is a bad issue on NA and Europe servers.

2. Kes13a, banning by ip could work to some extent, but spoofing IPs and VPNs could circumvent this approach. I think they should ban by the name that appears on the credit card to also avoid virtual credit card numbers. Stolen credit cards wouldn't be too useful to bots, since these can get cancelled after a couple of weeks.

3. Cheating stats. Does anyone know how these stats relate to the bots we're discussing? Has anyone witnessed a market/gathering bot getting banned? Last week, 1,721 accounts were banned for RMT advertising and 2,634 bots were banned for "other" RMT offenses. If the "other" category covers the market and harvesting bots we're discussing, this would be ~39 bots per server (68 servers). I have never seen a market or harvesting bot banned. At the same time, "non-RMT" bot bans are only 1 with 26 accounts suspended, which makes me think the bots we're discussing aren't considered RMT activity. If this is indeed the case, I think they're only enforcing RMT bans at the last transaction between vendor and player.

https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...92a05c481b70ff

4. I'm not sure SE reads this forum (or the Japanese one). Are there other suggestions for venues in which we could tell the devs this is a problem?

5. Does anyone know if there is an allowed access to the FFXIV API? I looked into writing a script to identify market bots, but the sources of data appear to be quite stale. For example, xivapi.com doesn't post market data anymore, universalis doesn't have fresh data and the companion app api appears to be a violation of the TOS. If SE is willing to give some developers access to the API, writing scripts to identify these bots should be fairly straightforward.

[Kes13a]

True, just the IP would only be a start, account, IP and name on the credit card should be the basics they do.

Yeah, their bans only grab the low hanging, easy to spot in your face kind of bots. and they never post WHERE those bans took place. lets face it, those could all be stats from Japan for all we know and no bans take place here in NA or Europe, which, if you ask me, seems more to be the case.

In all honesty, I think it would take 50% of the player base cancel;ling their subs and listing market/harvest botting as the reason for any word to get to the devs. unless we can get a question to Yoshi P in one of their broadcasts to have him answer, we wont know