Light Datacenter market taken over by single bot operator

[Obsti]

All mature Light servers (Lich, Odin, Phoenix, Shiva, Twintania, Zodiark) have had their economy taken over by a single bot operator. I have been reporting this ingame and to the Special Task Force in detail for weeks now but nothing has changed. A GM has asked me to utilize this very forum to supply additional feedback that may then be forwarded appropriately to get something done.

As for the bot's modus operandi: On each of the servers mentioned above, there is a single crafting character that operates exactly like their counterparts on the other servers. There is one character that has a single combat character levelled to 90 and then all crafters at 90. There are two exceptions to this: one server has the crafter character at almost full 80s with a single 90 while on another server the crafting character has full 90s and even some flavor text, so I suspect that to be the original culprit in control of the scheme.

On each server, that crafter character is in a FC consisting of 10 chracters. All the other 9 characters are levelled only roughly to have retainers available. The bot then uses this huge amount of retainers (on Shiva, I counted about 50 retainers run by the bot merely in markets overlapping with mine) to push a mass of items onto the market.

The approach to market utilization is similar to another bot on Shiva I witnessed months ago which later suddenly disappeared: Only craft single items (so not like 15 top tier crafted battlegear chestpieces at once, but just one), distribute items of a set randomly among the retainers and then rotate logging-in the retainer-controlling characters one after another to adjust prices 24/7. Presumably due to items being redistributed, the times for price adjustments are somewhat flexible.

The crafting character is always online in an appartment, with always one of the retainer-controlling characters online as well, so their FC-status always shows 2/10 online. Due to the sheer amount of retainers the price adjustments don't necessarily happen as quickly as other short-lived bots with spammed items (like the aforementioned 15 chestpieces) which maybe adjust like every 5 minutes or such. Due to sets being spread among multiple retainers this bot is not as obvious to spot as others, especially to players who only sell a few items. It is a very obvious bot to those players who have a wide market spread themselves who then notice the mass of retainers and 24/7 price adjustments.

The slightly slower price adjustment frequency of the bot is also beneficial to the bot in the middle-long run because it increases the chances for players to sell items. It is still very frustrating as human to have a bot in the market, so I have witnessed lively markets dying out with only the bot remaining. This leads the bot to absurdly hike prices (like, from 30k to 150k where nothing sells at all) and watch. Once another human enters the market at a reasonable price, he is undercut by the bot again. The undercutting isn't always by a single gil, some items are undercut by e.g. 9 gil or such. This adds to a perceived randomness and is obviously done to hide the botting.

Through these actions, the bot slowly dries out markets while still selling with zero effort and in the end sells at massive margins unless trolled by players. This whole concept only works with an ungodly amount of retainers, but the current iteration of the bot has just that. On every single server of Light. I have witnessed exodusses of players from bot-dominated markets (especially slow-selling ones) which then lead to dumping and feud in other markets... before the bot annexed those as well.

Something needs to be done and I am completely disgusted that nothing has been done in the 1.5 months since the bot(s) went into full force mode. The only thing that has happened is that the frequency of bot pricing adjustments has increased, so the operator is probably still testing what exactly they can get away with. Right now it appears that they can get away with everything and extrapolating from my own gains they earn multiple billions of gil per month which most likely go straight to RMT. This is a single-source disaster for the whole game.

So, what can be done about this? Am I just supposed to watch? Can I get my own bot to compete with less effort? What is necessary for you/SE to finally act and stomp out this obvious rot from the game?