how to fix market board botting

[Mugenity]

I'm amazed SE hasn't figured out how to solve this yet. When I google "market board bots ff14" this is the first thing that pops up.

Could it be possible that SE owns the bots themselves and are the ones who make money off this?

[Hanayumi]

Simple post fee/tax would certainly help, 2-5% of posted item's price. Would certainly still get undercutting but it should be far less from bots, as a majority of botting folks try to minimize in game expenses.

[Neihel]

the market could use a rework to deter bots

[dezzmont]

The only MMO with an actual working economy I've seen is EVE Online. But it has hundreds of thousands of players on the same server, implements buy orders and commodities, and has good tools for viewing market data.

EvE online works so well as an economy not because of things like buy orders or good pricing history tools, but the fundamental way its economy works. Mainly that it is hyper-tuned to allow resources and tools to leave the economy.

For those not in the know: Imagine if after wiping enough times in a raid you needed an entirely new copy of your sword, materia and all. This would certainly allow the economy to be more stable as the infinite supply can meet an infinite demand (with the price being set by how hard the supply is to obtain), but it doesn't really work in XIV's design.

In fact, the few markets in XIV that actually works 'correctly' also share this property, mainly being the consumables markets. Introducing buy orders to FFXIV would be REALLY BAD for the economy because it would massively accelerate the inevitable: prices bottoming out.

Also it isn't like items leaving the game to force you to buy more is a magic bullet in of itself. Part of why EvE's economy is so complicated to the point you can play the game without ever undocking from a space station is because they have full time economists working to keep things tuned. EvE's entire gameplay is about the economy, either indirectly or indirectly, in a way that XIV can't support. There is also the fact that EvE internally seperates markets, so if a price gets too low or high in one location you can move it to another location. Or you can create value by moving the object, as sometimes transit costs are the lion's share of the price of an item compared to material costs or the cost of facilities or skills to create the item.

As for the idea of a fee to post the item for sale, that is a bit problematic because of how it would actively punish you for going to market 'early.' Because its not really a fee for undercutting someone by 1 gil... it is a fee for getting undercut. The person doing the undercutting pays the fee once to get the advantage, and then the other person has to pay the fee twice (first for the initial sale, and again for posting up again) in a way that is obviously extremely unfair. 1 gil price cuts are frustrating and not ideal, but they are a heck of a lot more fair than price change rate limits and taxes.

Stopping botting on trading networks isn't exactly a new thing SE needs to figure out, its kinda a known science at this point. Its just a question of if they can implement stuff to detect that into XIV considering how spaghettified its code is.

[Xeros_cl]

I really think the problem is that SE is TOO SLOW on the crack down of bots or RMT in general

For example, were I'm right now in the game the same bot has been for over a week... They shoul check the RMT reports and ban instantly

Other cause IMO is the server travel... actually the bot is from another world LOL