Are there bots checking the marketplaces?

[milosralevic]

I personally never heard of anyone investing bot mechanics onto marketboard price-fixing in FFXIV, although I am pretty sure it might exist somewhere somehow, unfortunately. With years of personal experiences selling items on the marketboard, I have never had an encounter with them.

I will say that experienced sellers often look up and update item pricing from retainers and that as much as they can for some players. Every time I log into the game for the first time in the day I collect Gil accumulated and update the pricing of unsold items. When I know an item isn't bought frequently, I want to make sure it stays to the cheapest and/or most rationable price possible, as much as it can, so I might even update the pricing in between duties or even on the Companion App. Another key thing would be an increase in item quantity. Sometimes item pricing drops by half just by people selling more of the same kind. We all know the laws of offer and demand. The same applies in-game. It's easy to confuse these two points for bot mechanics.

One thing that would definitely give it away as bots would be the timing and frequency of the price being updated. If you see someone's retainer price-fixing an item below yours repeatedly under quick and similar intervals, that would be a dead giveaway.

Although for the love of the gods I cannot understand why someone would do that, bots were more common in the past and are scarcely encountered now, believe it or not. This will probably reinforce the statement that SE has been working hard on this. I did read a similar post back when 2.0 launched in 2013 about a player finding a loophole with bots and managing to make a profit from them, but I can hardly recall the story and if it was related to the marketboard or not.