Market Board Abuse

[Veliaire]

There are some players out there who abuse the market board by using auto trade bots. How do I know this? One player in particular (tracked by the signature on crafted gear) was tracked by me and some friends for 3 days straight. We all listed items and this player would undercut us within 15-20 minutes every time. We lower the price, they do the same... once an hour for 3 days straight. It is not humanly possible for one person to be able to adjust the price of their listed items at least once an hour for 3 days.

Not only that, but I have identified over 30 retainers that this person uses REGULARLY to list their items. I googled the person's name and found their FC and it is filled with characters under lvl 30. This person is abusing the two free retainers per character system to list an unending number of items, all managed by some trade bot.

I have reported this player to Square Enix and nothing has been done. I even gave a list of 31 retainers that this person uses regularly -- that I have seen all over the market board selling dozens of items, all of which are undercutting the next seller by 1 gil!!! I have been dealing with this person for weeks. No matter what time of day I log in, this person will undercut by 1 gil in 20 minutes or less.

Square Enix does not do enough to protect the markets from people who abuse the system. I pay for two extra retainers, for years.. and now I feel like a chump because I could have created a dozen characters, created my own FC, and had dozens of free retainers to flood the markets with. Why won't Square Enix do anything about this??

[ElazulHP]

...and what will Square do about it? Nothing! I've been reporting these for years and they never do anything. There was one that operated in a house next to me a while back and I would see an endless procession of naked level 20 alts updating prices. Reported them all for years as well as others I observed and Square did jack to them. At the beginning of Shadowbringers they all, except 1, left the bot FC they were in and moved shop somewhere else. Crafting is pretty much, ruined atm due to the bots. It's impossible to compete with bots that update prices every 15 minutes and craft inside a house 24/7.

[Krojack]

I'm positive people run bots to do things like this. They can do it from the privacy of their house too.

SE won't even ban the 2 level 80 gathering bots I have been reporting for the past 3 years now. I just gave up.

[SavishSalacious]

There are some players out there who abuse the market board by using auto trade bots. How do I know this? One player in particular (tracked by the signature on crafted gear) was tracked by me and some friends for 3 days straight. We all listed items and this player would undercut us within 15-20 minutes every time. We lower the price, they do the same... once an hour for 3 days straight. It is not humanly possible for one person to be able to adjust the price of their listed items at least once an hour for 3 days.

Not only that, but I have identified over 30 retainers that this person uses REGULARLY to list their items. I googled the person's name and found their FC and it is filled with characters under lvl 30. This person is abusing the two free retainers per character system to list an unending number of items, all managed by some trade bot.

I have reported this player to Square Enix and nothing has been done. I even gave a list of 31 retainers that this person uses regularly -- that I have seen all over the market board selling dozens of items, all of which are undercutting the next seller by 1 gil!!! I have been dealing with this person for weeks. No matter what time of day I log in, this person will undercut by 1 gil in 20 minutes or less.

Square Enix does not do enough to protect the markets from people who abuse the system. I pay for two extra retainers, for years.. and now I feel like a chump because I could have created a dozen characters, created my own FC, and had dozens of free retainers to flood the markets with. Why won't Square Enix do anything about this??

this is why you over run the market, drive the price of an item straight down with vast quantities of it so all they can do is buy from you. Don't list one item, list 100's of its, 100's of stacks too. Bots don't attack me when I do that.

[MistakeNot]

There are some players out there who abuse the market board by using auto trade bots.

We know. That has been going on for years. Everyone knows.
Proving it and stopping is more difficult though. SE is bad at stopping bots, and even when they do ban them, the people behind the bots just create a new account (often using a stolen credit card number) and keep doing what they are doing.

[Veliaire]

We know. That has been going on for years. Everyone knows.
Proving it and stopping is more difficult though. SE is bad at stopping bots, and even when they do ban them, the people behind the bots just create a new account (often using a stolen credit card number) and keep doing what they are doing.

I'm sorry but I don't buy that its too hard to catch bots. In Starcraft II, which is free to play, they can catch cheaters based on the number of actions they make and where a person is clicking and when. I find it hard to believe that one of the most popular subscription based MMORPGs on Earth can't figure out how to keep bots out of the game. Where is all that money going to? Not to mention the thriving cash shop. Square Enix just doesn't care enough to stop it. It would be easy to see that a person is on 24/7 constantly making actions on the market board, and come to the conclusion that human beings must sleep, therefore a bot must be in control of the character. Even if they don't have the ability to log clicks and actions, which would be absolutely ridiculous, they should still be able to observe a player and investigate any accusations of cheating. They simply choose not to do it.

Why am I playing extra for retainers when I can just create a ton of alts and abuse the free company chest? Square Enix doesn't care. Heck, why am I even paying a sub at all? I've been playing this game since 1.0 and these bots are making it so that I don't even want to bother anymore. If Square Enix addressed the issue and made plans to end it, that would be one thing.. but they completely ignore all reports. They don't care.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

To say they don't care is probably wrong, Im sure they are aware of this. It is just that dealing with this isn't flipping a switch or writing twenty lines of code. They could go with the nuclear option and prevent bot programs somehow, but this usually means blocking ALL third party applications interacting with the game at best, preventing modification of files at worst (including UI and shaders). Frankly both of these have great benefits without affecting other players negatively, so I for one would not like to nuke it off the orbit just to deal with market bots.

[KageTokage]

It takes an unreasonably large amount of effort to get them to act against even a single bot if they're not doing something that's easily detectable like hacking, and that really shouldn't be the case when their patterns of behavior are largely shared due to there only being a handful of different scripts in use.

I have never once managed to get any of the bots on my server banned despite several reports over the years, and the only time some people did actually get banned was because they were trying to cheat the DoL Restoration rankings and likely got spotted/reported by multiple people in Diadem.