Can the market board system be improved ?

[Mitsubashi]

Items being sold on the market board have their price updated every 5 or 10 minutes. On some retainers this is happening 24 hours a day. It's either bots or someone (or probably more in shifts) is working constantly at this. It covers the whole of the market on every server in my local data centres (EU). Any of us can quickly gather the proof.

Is it possible that this isn't RMT or bots (bearing in mind the 24/7 nature of it) ?

Can the market board system be improved and does it matter anyway ?

[Jojoya]

Items being sold on the market board have their price updated every 5 or 10 minutes. On some retainers this is happening 24 hours a day. It's either bots or someone (or probably more in shifts) is working constantly at this. It covers the whole of the market on every server in my local data centres (EU). Any of us can quickly gather the proof.

Is it possible that this isn't RMT or bots (bearing in mind the 24/7 nature of it) ?

Can the market board system be improved and does it matter anyway ?

What is it you want improved on the marketboard?

The bot updates are a different issue. Trying to improve the marketboard for regular players wouldn't affect those.

[Mitsubashi]

What is it you want improved on the marketboard?

The bot updates are a different issue. Trying to improve the marketboard for regular players wouldn't affect those.

Let me offer some observations and maybe folks can consider whether anything can be improved ?

I'm on EU servers. With the advent of an X.2 patch it's easy to identify mass crafters and their retainers. I spent the last couple of days observing a group of the most prolific crafters on a server. I went through the market board at length and found a number of crafters using 11+ retainers.

I identified items that were being crafted by these people and made the same items. This allowed me to easily identify how long it took for these people to change their prices and over what time period they were operating.

When I changed a price items crafted by this small number of people will undercut you within 2-3 minutes every single time. 24 hours a day. On most items introduced with the 6.2 patch.

Interestingly they won't get in an undercutting 'war' with one another, only when someone outside the identified group undercuts them. So at random times through the day I would undercut a price. Over the next few minutes this group of 4-6 crafters would each undercut me and each other by a few gil. But they wouldn't further undercut each other.

This leads me to believe it is a single or co-ordinated operation. It's happening on every server on the majority of the most profitable and consistently selling items. Note I'm not saying you can't make money as a crafter.


As for what could change - maybe introduce a limit on how often you can change price on sold goods. Maybe change how long it takes until your changed price comes into effect. With it being so easy to identify what's going on you'd also hope SE could be more active in analysing what these people are up to.

[Scruit_Bigtime]

one way to curb bot undercutters would be to implement a timer between price adjustments, for example, you can only adjust a price once every 2 hours per listing.

but that'd probably be easily worked around by delisting and relisting

*shrug*

[Risvertasashi]

I think the best solution would be to have "buy" listings instead of the current system of only sell listings.

This would not only limit bot undercutting, it would stop human undercutters too and further, it would also mean players that just want to dump everything and get quick sales - also a frequent source of complaints from the "SE pls control the markets for me" crowd - wouldn't impact sell listings, since they'd just go for the immediate revenue from filling buy listings.

I don't have much faith in it happening, though. Only real changes to marketboards since pretty much ever have been expanding taxes.