Botting is picking up and as usual affects all servers worldwide.

[PlanNeun]

1. Botting exist because it is real world money in this it affects all large MMO's with a market hub. This real money is of course evading taxes we are talking about over the last 2 decades billions of dollars in various games.

This money is used for probably all types of crime. This is the sole purpose of botting in WoW, Eve-Online and FFXIV that is affected by this plague. In Wow they do nothing, same in Eve-Online.
I bet it has been numerous debates within the FFXIV team and SQE.

2a Actions of diminishing trade.

Gamer Mr A Botb is has a mule at lvl 10. He sells items way over his station move them from Company chest to his ten retainers.

2b Solution:
FFXIV makes it impossible for him to buy or trade items above their level.
A bot crafter usually got lvl 1 harvesting. Solution he can't trade or buy any item higher than lvl 1, or lvl 2. etc
This new system laws will crash the whole bot system market trade both from MB and of course internally within the FC. The bots will be forced to level up all their mules.
This will make it even easier for FFXIV Task Force Team to locate and terminate them.

More gamers will be able to get access to the wealth that the bots steals from the game and scam dollars in real life.


3 Crystals.
Here you can make many changes, the easiest is to remove it all from Mb and sell them from Crystal Vendors. Another easy solution is that mobs also drops crystals.
As a surplus to Vendors. Problem solved.

4. Materia and bot grinding it.
It is clearly bots only doing one thing, grinding Math for Materia.
With the rules from above, the diminishing trade will make a massive hiccup.
So I suggest that to Tribes, Scrips etc., you make vendors here do the same that sells Crystals also sells Materia to a fair price, thus removing it completely from the market board.

5. Fake melds/bad melds.
At the market board world wide bots and others me included sells High End Items with crap meld. 3x High end Materia, the rest is rubbish.
Solution: A new game law, it is impossible to meld crap into High end, for level 90/80 items, you cant put in level 70 or lower etc.

Materia becomes level based.

6. Market board.

With enforcing a new law Mr Bot A Botb tries himself or with mules to travel stocked up with crafted armor items from Cerberus to Omega he gets denied travelling.
Crafted none bound armor etc gets server bound.

Thus the plague from Cerberus server is stopped. Then the bots will of course try to travel with Math and easy for FFXIV Task Force Team to see whom and hereby detect mules. And Terminate them and the Fc.

7. Enforced downtime.
For example Every Thursday 11-12 downtime, scanning the database for strange gillies traffic, mules with math etc. Scan complete, x-accounts is terminated.

[Final-Fantasy]

I'm going to have to disagree on everything you list as a solution.

The Market Board is not under some kind of huge Bot conspiracy, the fact we have a ton of content creators making videos on how to become rich doing X-Y-Z which just about always lists every single possible way to undercut, out-smart and exploit laziness for massive profit, has laid the foundation for over stocking and fighting to sell wares.

I can literally think of a pawful of ways to get unlimited Gil with no need of the Market Board at all and only a tiny investment required, but everyone should already know by now with creators literally spoon-feeding the obvious out in droves.

You can make unlimited amounts of Gil when certain conditions are met and they don't require Botting, as you need not be logged in for it to work, no Botting required.

Sure, there are cases of players getting caught using a tool to auto-craft, few and far between, most of them will be following guides and trying to skip the boring stuff.
Basically, everyone can now craft with little thought.

Punishing everyone because someone non-stop crafts junk and undercuts to get rid of it, is just silly. And all of your ways would negatively affect the Market Board even more.

[Toutatis]

Oof. The proposed "punish everyone" solutions are 10x worse than the problem. Do nothing is better than all that was suggested.

Here are a few examples:

Gamer Mr A Botb is has a mule at lvl 10. He sells items way over his station move them from Company chest to his ten retainers.

2b Solution:
FFXIV makes it impossible for him to buy or trade items above their level.
A bot crafter usually got lvl 1 harvesting. Solution he can't trade or buy any item higher than lvl 1, or lvl 2. etc

I have never engaged in botting yet I use an alt to get free extra retainers to store decos both for myself and future sales.I also have another alt in charge of the fc subs that sells the spoils.

When leveling I buy and sell items from above my level. I see a good deal, I buy and resell. I also buy stuff that I'll use later. I also keep some items which I believe will be in demand when xboxers join and 7.0 is released.

For crafting/harvesting, your example doesn't make a bit of sense. It's common to have a crafter that is higher level than a gatherer or vice versa. If someone levels their Culinarian, they may need some plants or fish and not necessarily have Botanist and/or Fishing leveled up. There is no obligation to play every single job and to keep them at the same level.

3 Crystals.
Here you can make many changes, the easiest is to remove it all from Mb and sell them from Crystal Vendors. Another easy solution is that mobs also drops crystals

I have no issues selling crystals. They drop from a variety of content, including leves and maps.

4. Materia and bot grinding it.
It is clearly bots only doing one thing, grinding Math for Materia.
With the rules from above, the diminishing trade will make a massive hiccup.
So I suggest that to Tribes, Scrips etc., you make vendors here do the same that sells Crystals also sells Materia to a fair price, thus removing it completely from the market board.

Many did their beast tribe quests, have subs, the Island, do Alliance roulette and get tons of materia and now you want to remove that from the market? Materia is already easy to get by, especially at higher levels, and there are already vendors. Do the content and get materia otherwise buy it from the MB.

5. Fake melds/bad melds.
...
Solution: A new game law, it is impossible to meld crap into High end, for level 90/80 items, you cant put in level 70 or lower etc.

When I pentameld and have room for only a few points in the last slot (like 3 pts of perception), I don't put a high level materia in it. Instead, I meld low level materia that fits my needs and has a better chance of success. Oh and bots are not the ones putting crap melds in gear. It is a way to get around bots.

With enforcing a new law Mr Bot A Botb tries himself or with mules to travel stocked up with crafted armor items from Cerberus to Omega he gets denied travelling.
Crafted none bound armor etc gets server bound.

When the price is too high on my server, I travel to buy what I need for my main, alts and some friends. That's how the game is designed and it's fine.

[Mawlzy]

I don't doubt that MB botting exists, although I've personally never seen obvious cases of it. I also understand why it's undesirable and should be addressed. Where I'm at a loss is how this impacts the rest of us. I do just enough crafting to ensure my retainers have enough to sell. I make no attempt to optimize the process, since it generates gil at a far faster rate than I can spend it. Consequently, placing complex restrictions on MB transactions doesn't strike me as warranted.

[Astrahime]

2b Solution:
FFXIV makes it impossible for him to buy or trade items above their level.
A bot crafter usually got lvl 1 harvesting. Solution he can't trade or buy any item higher than lvl 1, or lvl 2. etc
This new system laws will crash the whole bot system market trade both from MB and of course internally within the FC. The bots will be forced to level up all their mules.
This will make it even easier for FFXIV Task Force Team to locate and terminate them.

Right.... How is this going to affect the other seven alts inside the FC? I agree with making players unable to buy items off the market that they haven't gathered before, but this really won't have as much of an effect as you think it will.

3 Crystals.
Here you can make many changes, the easiest is to remove it all from Mb and sell them from Crystal Vendors. Another easy solution is that mobs also drops crystals.
As a surplus to Vendors. Problem solved.

Send your retainers off on ventures. They'll bring back 120 Crystals every 40 minutes if they're gatherers and geared properly.

4. Materia and bot grinding it.
It is clearly bots only doing one thing, grinding Math for Materia.
With the rules from above, the diminishing trade will make a massive hiccup.
So I suggest that to Tribes, Scrips etc., you make vendors here do the same that sells Crystals also sells Materia to a fair price, thus removing it completely from the market board.

Math? What? Just admit you're bad at crafting and don't understand the extreme inflation that'll happen if half of the supply is cut off while the demand stays the same.

5. Fake melds/bad melds.
At the market board world wide bots and others me included sells High End Items with crap meld. 3x High end Materia, the rest is rubbish.
Solution: A new game law, it is impossible to meld crap into High end, for level 90/80 items, you cant put in level 70 or lower etc.

Skill issue for not reading, also this is actually BiS sometimes

With enforcing a new law Mr Bot A Botb tries himself or with mules to travel stocked up with crafted armor items from Cerberus to Omega he gets denied travelling.
Crafted none bound armor etc gets server bound.

I don't even understand what you're trying to say here. You realize that someone like this can just make mules on another server and use their retainers too?

7. Enforced downtime.
For example Every Thursday 11-12 downtime, scanning the database for strange gillies traffic, mules with math etc. Scan complete, x-accounts is terminated.

This is incredibly disruptive for literally everyone.

[Astrahime]

I don't doubt that MB botting exists, although I've personally never seen obvious cases of it. I also understand why it's undesirable and should be addressed. Where I'm at a loss is how this impacts the rest of us. I do just enough crafting to ensure my retainers have enough to sell. I make no attempt to optimize the process, since it generates gil at a far faster rate than I can spend it. Consequently, placing complex restrictions on MB transactions doesn't strike me as warranted.

It mostly only effects people who sell glamour items. Source: Friend has undercut a few glam items' value by 80% of the original price in an attempt to have it sell instead of bots' items and still hasn't managed to sell the pyjamas

[Toutatis]

I agree with making players unable to buy items off the market that they haven't gathered before.
.

how can people agree with this is beyond me. It’s a horrible idea. Some people prefer crafting and not gathering or don’t level up all jobs at the same time. You need ingredients to craft. Some recipes also require pre-crafted items of a certain level made by other crafters. Such a limitation would require to level all crafting and gathering jobs simultaneously. It makes no sense.

A crafter should be able to rely on gatherers and crafters of other types selling items on the MB. There is a limit with the retainers ventures when it comes to items not previously gathered and it is sufficient.

[Jojoya]

It mostly only effects people who sell glamour items. Source: Friend has undercut a few glam items' value by 80% of the original price in an attempt to have it sell instead of bots' items and still hasn't managed to sell the pyjamas

I don't know about EU but for NA the pajama market has mostly died out. If I look at the tops on the Coeurl marketboard there have been 27 sales total this month where it used to be a dozen or more of each one selling per day. The last 20 sales of each extend all the way back to October for two of the tops and to early November for the third. In the meanwhile there are still 32 tops listed for sale.

It's probably less a bot problem and more demand no longer exists in your friend's case. You're not the first to mention bots in the EU glamour market so I'm not trying to dismiss that as a non-existent problem but there are other things to consider, with supply versus demand being primary. When current supply exceeds what sells in a month, you're going to have a very hard time getting your item to sell.

[Toutatis]

I agree about the Pajamas market to be down. It’s pretty much always the case with new maps materials. They sell for millions in the early days and it quickly goes down as supply increases and people who wanted the glam have already bought it. I run maps every week and I’ve been selling the mats to craft them and they’ve been steadily going down in price since release. The same thing happened with the more recent Athletikos mat.

[Neoyoshi]

Why does this look like an old reddit post for years ago?

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