Bot's on Market Board...? Really?

[Sqwall]

I'm not saying it's something that should be overlooked.

The correct argument to use is that the use of bots to craft/gather and manipulate market prices is cheating. Players who put considerable effort into the game and don't cheat are now at a massive disadvantage to those who invested little effort and are cheating. That allowing the bots to proliferate has disrupted fair play and put the game's integrity at stake. The longer it continues, the more damage done to the game as players get fed up with a game developer that does nothing about cheating.

Make the issue one of how the game is damaged by the bots, not how a tiny percentage of players can't make as much gil as they used to.

I'm saying that crying "crafting is busted because of bots!" is the wrong argument to use because it's not. Proclaiming that you can't profit by selling things on the marketboard because of bots is the wrong argument to use because you can still craft things to sell things for profit on the marketboard (I'm still doing this daily).

Well I'm not crying about it at all. I'm simply privy to this information and it makes sense that I have to constantly check the MB as there is this insane undercutting game going on behind the scenes. This ruins the crafting gameplay, and I don't have the time to out bid a computer program as it's going to win every time. This isn't about profits or costs of materials, it's about manipulating a market from a game that the BOT controller has NO STACK IN.

This individual or group that admins 20-30 or even 50 bots do this not to upset the players. They do it because it's actually lucrative real money business. If they made $250 a day selling gil for real money that's $7,500 a month! this is still a win for the them as it covers there costs of subs for the month, and more money then I can generate in a month given my career. This is cheating and a sheer exploit. WoW had this. FFXI had this. LoTRO had this. And countless other MMO's.

If I was a company and a select few people were EXPLOITING and USING my product for there own personal gain, they would be in violation and I would bring the ban hammer down hard on these people, as well as legal action and seize there capital gained.

This is NO different then cheating in an eSports tournament when real money is at stack. Or rigging a gambling event (poker, slots, blackjack). Or someone writing a song and someone else downloading it for free (napster gone, limewire gone) Or someone infringing on patent regulations until the patent runs out. This is called fairness. There is NO SKILL in cheating, that's why it's called cheating. Same goes for making a bot program do all the work for you to attain real money.