The current state of Cosmic Exploration rewards cheaters

[Nero-Voidstails]

my luck is just complete trash I got the emote 2 point the rest is the new metallic color and my friend gave me the mount because he got it 5 time... on day one!!! now missing the minion then will aim for color x)

[OMGJesuis66]

Yeah because crafting is oh so hard in this game, you dont even need any third party tool, there are websites that are completely legit to use and not ToS since they're on your browser in which you can maximize your stats and get perfect recipes by simply copy pasting the macro in game

also I'm very sorry but repeating the same thing for a million times is not entertaining, not saying you should do as they do, but it's really not a massive test to do those, its honestly boring and extremely repetitive content.

Same logic applies to literally every content in the game. Which is very funny to be using here. Learned your rotation? Repeat it until next expansion. Savage? Repeat it forever for mount, even if cleared or not. Savage? Repeat the same pattern forever until next tier comes. Like, bruh. Let people enjoy what they enjoy.

[Nana_Bear]

I went to sell a spare cosmosuit outfit I won and lo and behold the price cratered more than expected. And there was a single retainer selling TWENTY of them. And below them another selling fourteen more!

And right here is the big elephant in the room that everyone in this thread seems to be ignoring: a single player being *able* to take up so *many* slots in a market-board list... and if they have multiples of retainers, being able to fill the *entire* list with things they personally are selling. This goes beyond the Cosmic Exploration stuff, by the way: I and others have seen this in multiple listings where everything on the list is being sold for the exact same price, with scads by one retainer, then scads by another---and often by the retainers' names you can tell it's very likely ONE player who's hogged the entire listing.

This is an ongoing problem. I'd like to see some way of devising a limit on how many items a *player character* can post for sale, whether they have one retainer or nine. Say, five non-stackables of a *specific* item, or if it stacks, five listings of stacks?

Most people don't and won't do this "board hogging," but for the ones who do, if someone tries to undercut them JUST to get an item into the listing to sell, they'll often reprice *all* their listings to knock that person back off the listings page. It's just not right.

[VeyaAkemi]

And right here is the big elephant in the room that everyone in this thread seems to be ignoring: a single player being *able* to take up so *many* slots in a market-board list...

Everyone is ignoring because, and this may sound crazy, that is not as suspicious as you think.

Here's the thing, botting could not magically make you do crafts faster than everyone else, it reduces downtime between crafts, but the character is still beholden to going through all animations, which is the real time sink of crafting anything.

The options I consider likely for this:

* Someone is using multiple accounts and multiboxing, then trading all their wins over to a single account, which I am pretty sure is against ToS, but I am not certain, but also they'd have to be paying multiple subscriptions for this so it's likely SE wouldn't want to take action against this kind of behavior.

* A group of friends is passing all their wins to a single person and having them manage all the sales, I dunno why they'd do this, but they could.

* One person was attempting to buy suit coffers they saw cheap on MB and sell them at a markup, a fool's errand considering the ever-crashing value of those things, but also not against the rules. I also consider this the most likely option.

While the multiboxing option is pretty bad, all other options in the list are pretty valid, if annoying and questionable, ways to play the game, the fact they would frustrate other players is irrelevant to that end, that's just the nature of market board.

[Absurdity]

They will also never limit the amount of sales to some unified number, extra inventory and extra marketboard slots are the main selling point of additional retainers.

[Thurmnmurmn]

And right here is the big elephant in the room that everyone in this thread seems to be ignoring: a single player being *able* to take up so *many* slots in a market-board list... and if they have multiples of retainers, being able to fill the *entire* list with things they personally are selling. This goes beyond the Cosmic Exploration stuff, by the way: I and others have seen this in multiple listings where everything on the list is being sold for the exact same price, with scads by one retainer, then scads by another---and often by the retainers' names you can tell it's very likely ONE player who's hogged the entire listing.

This is an ongoing problem. I'd like to see some way of devising a limit on how many items a *player character* can post for sale, whether they have one retainer or nine. Say, five non-stackables of a *specific* item, or if it stacks, five listings of stacks?

Most people don't and won't do this "board hogging," but for the ones who do, if someone tries to undercut them JUST to get an item into the listing to sell, they'll often reprice *all* their listings to knock that person back off the listings page. It's just not right.

We already have a restriction of 20 per retainer and you want to add even more restrictions? Get that garbage out of here. It's already restrictive enough as it is.
You can undercut everyone else the same as they undercut you. I will continue to sell however many or whatever I want.

[Akamadoshi]

Minion costs 3000 gil and the mount is 200.000 gil ... I fail to see the competition.
Also, auto-crafting from website that calculates it does not make you a cheater but smart player.
Using bots to gather while you sleep = cheating
If you want to craft by your own hands, go for it. I do this too. I don't use macros.
(I am too dumb to figure out how to do it) so I use my own brain (which is a challenge)
What you just did is tell everyone "PS5 users are cheating" because my friends play on PS5 and use macros...
They cannot physically "cheat" the game. They have to manually write the macros down and pray it is proper.

As for people selling ... well. It is worth nothing where I play at. I fail to see how this is ... I guess it is troll post.

[CNitsah]

I would not even say this has to do with cheaters. The drop rate of the rng items is extremely high compared to what it is in other content. I mean, I don't play cosmic exploration that much, I only finished one tool (gatherer), and have two other at step 6 and 7 (one gatherer, one crafter), and I already dropped the mount 3 time, and got all the other rng drops (well, I bought the umbrella because it was 15k and was the only one I was missing, I got the other legitimately). That's also why the drops are so cheap on the market board. I mean, the emote you earn with currency cost more on the market board than the one that is only rng. This tells a lot.

[Nana_Bear]

We already have a restriction of 20 per retainer and you want to add even more restrictions?

You clearly missed my point; so an example:

If you look up an item for purchase, there's a limited number of listings FOR THAT SPECIFIC ITEM the market board CAN display. Let's pick a non-stackable item: lunar rover minion.

If, no matter how they achieved it, a player gains enough of them to fill up EVERY listing that WILL show for that item, and uses multiple retainers to take over that entire listing... sure that person can grossly undercut anyone else, because they know they're going to make a decent profit by selling a huge quantity of lunar rovers. If they have multiple retainers and use the "20 sale items per retainer" to just put lunar rovers in the listing, they literally can take over EVERY LISTING the board will show for lunar rovers. In effect, they are the ONLY player selling that item to people on their world.

People who do this, quite often if they see some person trying to undercut their already super-cheap price, they'll just change enough of their listings to move that person's item far down (or entirely off the listings, if they're using some mod for pricing items).

I'm not talking about changing the number of SALES a retainer can do, just limiting the number of items a PLAYER CHARACTER can put on the boards for a SPECIFIC item. So, our hypothetical player character here could put 5 lunar rovers total onto the boards---and yes, if they want to keep undercutting others, they have the ability to do so. They also can still put OTHER items up for sale... so say they have 6 retainers: that's still 115 total sale slots they have to put OTHER things on the market... stacks of prisms, shelves they've crafted, tradeable gear their retainers brought them, etc... just putting a limit on how much that player can put up for sale of a single TYPE of item---say, our micro-rover---so they can't just flood ALL the listings with only THEIR items.

As it stands now, it's like if you prepared a meal for 8 people, but one of them sat down and ate ALL the food before anyone else could even get a bite: the others who were supposed to be able to eat some of the food were impacted by that person's greed and desire to deny food to the rest, and the host of the meal ought to step in and ensure all their guests get a chance to eat, rather than just standing back and watching that piggy person eat all the food.

Whatever that "single type of item" limit is---5? 8? 10?---the point is that a single player character ought not to have the capability to lock the door and keep other people totally out of the "displayable number of listings" for that item, and if someone manages to get into the list to try to sell as well, to then kick them right back out and off the DISPLAYABLE list for that item. I know people that's been done to (often sprouts trying to build up funds) and honestly, not cool.

[Thurmnmurmn]

snip

That's still a restriction. . .
And again, nothing stopping you from undercutting them and putting yours back on top. And if they constantly lower it, then their crashing their own sales as well.
The exact same scenario you gave happens when multiple people sell the same thing as you as well. Like when the tome crafting items came out. You put yours up for sale and within minutes, it's undercut by a ton of other people.
It's simply supply and demand.