Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[Kes13a]

I see I see, thanks for the info! I'll keep an eye out and see if I notice any.

you have your world market/crafter bots, single job high level fc leader, and then 7 or 8 fc members who are JUST high enough to have retainers.

then you have data center ones that have every item on all the worlds made by one person. often they have retainers of the *world name*-r-1 to 7 naming convention. nothing suspicious tehre right? no reason to investigate someone making gil on EVERY world.... they are just greedy or something, and they continually operate.

STF enforcement is a running joke, and SE just does nothing. GM's hands are tied and cannot enforce any action against bots, since it all has to go through the STF.

the company needs to do something. period. because this is not working

[Prrringles]

The new hot thing is arbitrage trading. Buy cheap on the JP data center and sell higher on the US/EU data center. They spam all the expensive mounts/minions/glamour items. Otherwise the same usual bot account setup, automatically undercut every ~10min by 1gil, etc. Check the mounts on your server and see if a handful of the same retainers is selling batches of them.

Also create a character on the Mana data center for fun. Check out all the buy-outs going on for the mounts/minions. It's non-stop buying in batches of 5-10 by the bot accounts. But why would SE bother, right? I think we already established this years ago. They don't care if the market is run by 1 giant bot/rmt imperium or a thousand individuals. It's all the same for them.

EDIT: Just made a character on Crystal to check the situation over there. EXACTLY the same problem lol. I already spotted all the same retainers selling the exact same items as on the other data centers.

[Lieri]

On Gilgamesh near Limsa MB there's this one character that has been online for months. The only time they were off was during maintenance but after that the normal service resumed - starring at the summoning bell all day everyday. It's pretty weird and so blatant. What else do you think they're doing? just clicked on summoning bell and stepped away from the computer? I thought they had AFK protection that made it so you can't avoid getting kicked out by opening a window menu.

[Prrringles]

On Gilgamesh near Limsa MB there's this one character that has been online for months. The only time they were off was during maintenance but after that the normal service resumed - starring at the summoning bell all day everyday. It's pretty weird and so blatant. What else do you think they're doing? just clicked on summoning bell and stepped away from the computer? I thought they had AFK protection that made it so you can't avoid getting kicked out by opening a window menu.

Meh, I do that all the time too. Doesn't mean that much imo. Suspicious at best. Most bots run multiple characters across worlds so they log in and out frequently.

[Kes13a]

On Gilgamesh near Limsa MB there's this one character that has been online for months. The only time they were off was during maintenance but after that the normal service resumed - starring at the summoning bell all day everyday. It's pretty weird and so blatant. What else do you think they're doing? just clicked on summoning bell and stepped away from the computer? I thought they had AFK protection that made it so you can't avoid getting kicked out by opening a window menu.

this would be a bit odd. I mean the assumption is they are selling, but then they would need to leave to either pick up the items to sell from the mail, or craft themselves

[Prrringles]

It's sad really. Roughly 3 years later and 65 pages in after the first post and still nothing has changed - nothing. I still can not sell any items without getting absolutely frustrated. Same old bots still running the show. New names but the same people. Just wanted to thank SE for their hard work and confidence they have created amongst their subs. The way you guys handle reports about RMT/bots from concerned players is amazing. This really is a sign of trust and respect. Thank you for making my (just speaking for myself here) gaming experience a great one. It soothes me to know that my money is well spent and that you guys are doing your absolute best to keep your loyal player base safe from RMT/bots. Thank you for always being transparent and addressing the RMT/bot topic during Q&A's so we know you guys are right on top of it.

So a big THANK you to you!

[Commander_Justitia]

placing items on marketboard should cost a fee

players should be able to set up buy order so the competition is not just on the seller side fighting each other

WoW and GW2 did that over a decade ago, SE still cant, feelsbadman

[Masekase_Hurricane]

It will never change they either dont know how to fix it or cant be bothered.

[dspguy]

On Gilgamesh near Limsa MB there's this one character that has been online for months. The only time they were off was during maintenance but after that the normal service resumed - starring at the summoning bell all day everyday. It's pretty weird and so blatant. What else do you think they're doing? just clicked on summoning bell and stepped away from the computer? I thought they had AFK protection that made it so you can't avoid getting kicked out by opening a window menu.

There is nothing in the TOS that says you can't stare at the summoning bell all day, nor does it say you can't relist items 1000 times per day. While it might be obvious what they are doing, proving that it is automated isn't so easy.

[Jojoya]

placing items on marketboard should cost a fee

players should be able to set up buy order so the competition is not just on the seller side fighting each other

WoW and GW2 did that over a decade ago, SE still cant, feelsbadman

I don't know how GW2 sales work but WoW has no limit on the number of items a player can list on the Auction House (or at least didn't as of when I last played in Legion). The deposit fee and time limit on listings were to prevent players from using it as additional storage (though I know a lot of players who still did because they had enough gold not to care about the deposit) and from clogging up the database with junk no one would ever buy,

The limited number of listings we get per character (even with the ability to purchase additional retainers) already serves those purposes.

As for buy orders, I would love to see those added. There are some items that are valuable but don't sell often enough to be worth listing if you have a lot of other things you also want to be selling. Buy orders would take the guess work out of whether to list those items and could also encourage players to revisit the content that rewards them when they see how much some players are willing to pay for them.