how to fix market board botting

[Shougun]

In theory the law of supply and demand should take care of finding the correct price point. However there's a few problems which prevent it from working properly in most MMOs:

• Too small economy. Someone deciding to do a big crafting project can gobble up a significant portion of the supply, increasing prices.
• No buy orders. Players are unable to indicate in advance how much they are willing to pay for an item, so prices will decrease until the above happens.
• No historical data. When you can't see how an item has sold in the past, it's hard to guess what the going price is. (FFXIV kinda has this but 20 last sales is just too few.)
• No commodities market. A lot of crafting materials are sold in huge stacks, so someone wanting to craft just one or two items will have to either buy ten times what they need or gather the materials themself.

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.
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Oh yeah - I think if you were going to do this you'd combine the market of all the servers on a data center first, that'll really help pump a lot of data (and also add a lot of consistency to pricing cross severs). Not sure if the players NEED to see it but the server should definitely be aware of more than 20 data points on an item.

For stackables you'd sell them for the NPC at any number you wanted and then as a buyer you'd buy any number you wanted. Similar to what you could do with gold in Diablo 3. Of course the NPC would change prices based on how many it had, how many you were giving it, and the demand it's experienced in the past. If you sell one it might be 500 gil, but if you try to sell 500 units at 250 units it might decide the item is worth less and give you only 450 per item past that (as you might be overstocking the npc). So you couldn't wait till an item was selling instantly for 10k and then sell 900000000 and turn the market into a gil printer. The npc being mindful it should be a sink.

As for the rest of it the auctions in the beginning, and minimum price in the beginning, would help protect new sellers, but likely prices would be a bit high in the beginning, but that's true already in our markets lol (stuff always starts over priced).

There would still be some fluctuation but the npc would be designed for minimal rocking, always trying to make a gil sink (but not one so frustrating to avoid, so just like now with our tax on purchase / sell), and also would be fairly smart beyond having many data points of history, being a consolidated stocking point (owns all the stock), understands the rates of sale, and of course if someone was crazy they could still rock the market but it would be a bit more painful to do as the npc would be designed to be resistant to hyper changes (no more 200k one day and 2k the next).

You could still play market games if you were a person who liked to do that, but the ship would be far more auto-piloted, basically zero 1 gil underbidding, and stable.

Not saying it would be perfect or easy, I just don't like having to touch the market that much so for me something that is more set it and forget it is nice lol. I'm sure those who like to own parts of the market would prefer a more manual hand.