Market board botting is a problem

[MilitaryVet123]

You can either focus on subsets of the market that are most profitable and gate (Neo-ishgardian rings cost ~30k to make right now on Crystal). Or you can move to markets such as: leve items, primal weapons (good choice if you can farm ex), Lv70-79 items (which can sometimes be worth more than endgame). Things that move too fast can't be controlled by market board bots: slithersand, sublimes are good options as long as you put it at a low enough price. Materias are good too though the exploit was removed recently.

Btw: when I say cost I'm including the opportunity cost. The total cost is material cost + opportunity cost. Given that rings cost around 30k, and that they move the fastest, you can make a good chunk of gil by focusing on that one market instead of all accessories. On Aesthete gear, the opportunity cost is so high that Aesthete's head, hand, and boots are the most profitable items given that people price them at the same level as body and bottoms even though they cost 20% less to produce. Accessories are too low and so even if they're 40% cheaper to produce they don't give the same returns as head, hand, boots.

And as always, whenever you enter a market, keep in mind that the market board system roughly acts as a N-player Cournot oligopoly game. That means the price will decrease when you enter, so subtract 10%~30% from the price when making the decision to enter/exit.

I'm sympathetic to the harm botting/market board botting has done to the markets and these are hopefully helpful to some players. You have a significant competitive disadvantage. But if you studied economics at a high enough level, you'll remember that the simple Stackelberg oligopoly game with fixed cost of entry shows that as F (fixed cost) decreases, competition increases and price decreases; firms entering later (bots) will be more incentivized to enter. But since bots are not profit-maximizing on the fly, you can exploit their unintelligence and laser-focus on the little pockets of profitability you can find. That means you have to use your brain.

All this theory means that the solution to your woes isn't really market board botting at the end of the day. It's to make crafting far, far harder (to increase the fixed cost of entry) and less bottable. If it takes 60 days to get a crafter to endgame-ready status instead of the current 5 (and to put lots of RNG along the way so that bots can't handle them), botting would be far less profitable and will disincentivize most botters. This is basic economic theory. It's also why, despite the prevalence of bots in 4.1, the significant entry cost during the Ala Mhigan tier held the price high enough on all but the most competitive servers. This solution will not be appetizing to most players. It's also why you should not expect this to change any time soon, since the economically sound solution entails SE backtracking on making the game more accessible, across all facets of the game.

And when making things more accessible, you start getting more botting: there are Savage rotation bots too, and bots that can farm phantasmagoria (most players don't know that). The undercutting bot that exists is also public, despite the common hypothesis held by most players that such bots must be private. On certain servers, you can have 5 players all using the same bot with the same frequency (undercut every 1 min). There are furthermore private undercutting bots that are even more sophisticated that can bypass the need to interact with the summoning bell. On the well-known damage ranking website that ends with "logs", certain top ranking players used hacks (in particular BLM) but have not yet been caught, though the problem is already acknowledged in that community. In other words, the dam has already been broken. Things are far worse than what most players realize, it seems.

Unless people are on board with making the game hardcore and go back to the Gordias/Midas days this is not going to change.

You could, however, get some reprieve by starting a game of cats and mice between the devs and the bot creators. Mild RNG or unknown issues that botters have to deal with can easily tank the profitability. Things such as DCing if you teleport in PotD (which is implemented currently). It's not a permanent solution though. The solutions I've seen suggested in this forum don't work at all so don't bother.

Hmm, also some light commentary if anyone is interested: https://old.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ering_botting/