Does Square intend to address Market botting?

[TheLoveJenovan]

I used to be pretty active on this thread. I quit a year ago because of botting problems in FF14, and I came back for 1 month (April 2023) to check in to the game a bit. My account will be lapsing in the next couple of days.

I have a few observations from Jenova (Aether) that might be helpful for some people:

- There are about 1-2 accounts that will undercut almost every item from level 60-90. (I didn't check the stuff <60)

- There are 6 accounts that undercut within 10-30 minutes on the Rinascita/Indagator items.

- Though these accounts appear to use automated tools to undercut marketboard pricing within 10-30 minutes, I believe that they're actively monitored accounts by multiple paid RMT employees throughout the day. (See reasoning below)

- Since RMT isn't very profitable--about $50 USD for 100M--I believe these accounts operate in countries with lax labor laws, like India or China, and they may use a VPN to connect to North American servers. (Kind of like scammer call centers that operate out of those countries.)

- I've concluded that these accounts are monitored because they have changed their behavior in response to some new undercutting approaches I've tried. Whenever one of these accounts cuts my offering my 1-10 gil, I undercut them by about 5-8%. I continue this strategy until I hit their bidding floor, then I sit above their price until their item is sold. Often, other bots/accounts will fill in that place for me, and I can place my item at a reasonably higher price for the next round of undercuts. In doing this, all of these accounts have significantly increased their price floors, and placed update timers that increase as the price gets closer to their price floor. Additionally, some have started to apply a higher bidding floor for my crafts in comparison to other crafters. I'll typically update only once an hour with my retainer ventures.

(We've discussed how these accounts can be identified earlier in the thread--as opposed to legit accounts--but you can tell them apart from their job profile and FCs.)

- My impression is that these accounts/bots disincentivize crafters, who then leave the marketboard. The accounts/bots are then able to place items at inflated rates, which are only accessible to veteran players or RMT buyers (e.g. 180k gil for a Manganese Sword, or 499k gil for a Renascita Earring).

- Even if all of their sales give them net gil, I believe these accounts are very protective of the size of their gil margins because it directly impacts the profitability of their work--in their local, real-world currency. For example, if one RMT employee manages 30 accounts on 30 different servers, and he/she can sell $1M gil net per hour on each server, that's $18 USD / hour (not counting the cut the RMT company takes). If that number drops to $500k gil net per hour per server, then the employee is making $9/hr.

(The RMT rates would obviously change as the supply goes down, but I don't think demand would follow. I could be wrong)