Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[Yureina]

If you want to stop cheating, parents and the education system need to teach that cheating is wrong to children when they're still young and the lesson will sink in.

If you want to stop cheating, all games whether multii-player or single player need to stop incorporating cheat codes and allowing mods that players can use to avoid playing the game as intended. That cheat codes even exist in games teaches that's it's okay to cheat.

This is a utopian's hope. It sounds nice, but it will never ever happen and is not a viable solution to the immediate problem.

I do agree that this stuff eats way too much of my time and energy as I've become increasingly frustrated by how poor my sales have become. I did know the golden days after 5.4's launch wouldn't last forever, but sales are still very strong. It's just that it's these market botters who are getting all those sales because I can't auto-update my prices every five minutes like they can. These bots are directly harming my gameplay experience of wishing to sell lots of items and making a gil swimming pool for myself someday. The worst part is I tend to avoid overpricing stuff anyway, so the argument that the bots "keep prices down" is a complete farce. I was doing that anyway, and still am. It's the bots who drag prices back to 300k+ for items that were under 100k. I'm the one who brings it back down to "acceptable" levels, which those bots then take advantage of.

But the fact that it's cheaters who are doing this and how SE seems completely unwilling to remove them that makes this as obnoxious as it is. I've already moved past hope that SE will enforce their own rules without some major disruption that they cannot ignore. Something that affects not just a few grumpy crafters like us, but a significant chunk of the playerbase.

[Jojoya]

This is a utopian's hope. It sounds nice, but it will never ever happen and is not a viable solution to the immediate problem.

Oh, I know it will probably never happen. Cheating is too entrenched in society, especially over things considered unimportant like games. There are those who like to earn what they have - and those who will use any means to get it, especially if they don't want to go to the effort of earning it.

The problem is finding that viable solution to the bot problem.

SE is willing to ban cheaters. They post the weekly ban notice, which does occasionally list a ban other than for RMT related activity. We've seen the results when players complain about their account suspensions and bans. We've even seen posters in this thread state suspected bots on their local marketboard disappeared (just to be replaced by new bots a week or two later).

I think the problem might lie more in what they've set as the benchmark for sufficient proof. I know a lot of what I've seen listed in this thread and others as "proof" isn't any such thing at all. I could do the same things listed manually if I was inclined to, somewhat tedious perhaps but certainly possible. It doesn't mean the suspected players aren't botting, just what was listed wouldn't be sufficient evidence by itself to warrant an account suspension or ban.

SE can't go banning players out of hand just on suspicion without raising a huge backlash in the player community. There will always be that fear of a false positive leading to a player's own account getting banned and the fallout if and when they do happen.