Adding to this.

I play the marketboard a lot, so it is a glaring problem for me that seemingly, no matter how often I report it, never gets addressed.

Item listings, en masse, of non-craftable drops that are extremely hard to get, like last room rares from treasure dungeons. You cannot tell me that this person with his keysmash retainers has 20 of the same item. No, this is the result of multi-boxing. It's not super well known in FFXIV but as an ex WoW player I can smell the signs from a mile away. They have multiple accounts running their characters together through these instances and gathering maps with them to spam the content and farm items to dump on the MB. There is external software to chain accounts together with automated accounts, specifically for this stuff. It usually was used in WoW for crafting material farming but since that is not as lucrative on FFXIV with the market moving very slowly in comparison they just often times choose to instead invest in the high value tradeable drops.

You'll see them listing these 10-20, sometimes less, sometimes more depending on the drop rates, then nothing for weeks. Then suddenly something else is flooded onto the market. They don't really undercut much but it does absolutely ruin an item's listing for months since it forces people to either wait ages for all the botted items to sell or undercut them even further and lose value on the drop.

It is intensely frustrating and the fact that they just let it slide unless you catch them in action (you won't, it is well known that players will clip under the map to stay unseen. RMT bots have been doing it for years).


When it comes to the nodes that is a bit more of an iffy issue. I will not dox any of the members I see on the regular on my server but there are a good amount of people farming orange scrips for the mounts. You need - i think - 50k of them to get it which is a damn lot so they have been running a rotation of nodes for hours almost all days of the week and they do tend to fill the cycle with regular, non-collectible timed nodes, probably to make some extra gil on the side for their teleport costs. Folks who have been doing the same thing for a long time may appear bot-ish because they are in a routine. That is a little more difficult to vet and only SE will be able to monitor that by checking in the backend for exact timed keystroke input. Talking to them is not a good way to check either. I can almost bet you they are doing stuff on the side, be that on their phone or a second screen, to keep entertained so missing a whisper is easy.