Prescript: Big thanks to the mod team for checking that the bulk of this post followed the rules, i've added a little bit but it's nothing too controvercial.
Hi everyone, so the thread on the offficial forums discussing the abundance of market board bots on the EU and US datacentres has reached over 5000 views. This is evidence that a lot of us are really annoyed at the inaction of SE regarding this topic. I've typed up what I think would be an appropriate statement to send through the in-game 'leave a suggestion' feature, and hopefully with enough people sending the same/similar posts we can finally get some GM/developer eyes on the problem. Here's the thread on the SE forums: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/419959-Does-Square-intend-to-address-Market-botting
I would really appreciate as many people sending this base message as possible, as well as including your own personal experiences with bots in your messages, and responses to this thread. Between the time of writing this post and sending it to the mods, I managed to catch a gatherer bot and trap it using the trade dialogue. I got about a dozen people to come and send reports from the same area/instance and nothing happened for an hour before I gave up. Appearances are part of the problem and the lack of any action whatsoever doesn't fill me with confidence for what should take a GM less than a minute to deal with. What we talked about on the SE thread is the possibility that the EU/NA teams have no control over what they're allowed to do and this is out of their jurisdiction, and the JP team doesn't care about bots since it's not a part of their culture and it's not a problem on the JP servers (I would absolutely love someone from the JP server to tell us what the situation is like over there). Really what I'd love personally is a detailed description of how support works so that there's more transparency with what the GM team does, because I've never heard a single person say anything good about them (I'd also love to hear stories about positive and negative interavtions with GMs). Finally if there is a way to highlight this problem to the GM/Developer team I'd love to know about it, since this has been a big problem for so long. The forum post has a lot of great suggestions for countermeasures, and I'd love to see some ideas here as well. For more information about the bots I'll link a previous (ill mannered) comment I made about common misunderstandings. https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comm...z?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Finally it's very important that we don't name any bots here, or otherwise publically. Personally I don't have a problem with it but SE do (wrongly) consider it harassment, and I've gotten a warning about it in game.
Please enter the following suggestion in game through Support Desk -> Contact us -> Leave a suggestion
\Title: \**
Stricter action towards market bots, and gatherers, because of a recent and massive wave of bots designed to sell high value items on the market board by updating their prices every few minutes, 24/7
\Body: \**
Hi there,
First I'm going to link a thread on the SE forums:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/419959-Does-Square-intend-to-address-Market-botting
As you can see that the thread has over 5000 views in a few months, this topic has a lot of interest within the community and those who spend a lot of time crafting/gathering on the EU and US data centres. At the moment there are dozens of bot accounts on each world whose sole purpose is to take crafted, gathered, and farmed items and sell them on the market board. These bots aggressively update their price to undercut real players every few minutes, which run perpetually. Because of this, many DoH/L players have moved away from interacting with these systems since the bots are very unpleasant to deal with, since it would require an extreme amount of dedication to compete with them. Also we have documented cases of these bots running uninterrupted for months on end, with evidence that these accounts are using third party tools that I'll link to here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/gljb29/undercutting_bots_are_ruining_the_games_economy/
This page documents the history of several bots, and how a player was able to manipulate and record the time intervals between the bot account updating its prices to the point where he could predict when it would update to the second. He also had received threats in game from the bot accounts for successfully manipulating the prices of the bot. However since this event took place, the bots have adapted to identify and counteract players trying to manipulate them by aggressively buying out undercut items with their effectively infinite gil.
We also believe that the gil earned by these bots is encouraging RMT activity, which goes on to support the targeted hacking attempts at other crafter players accounts, likely in retaliation for competing with them. Our community has noticed an increase of compromised accounts within the crafter community, which then attempt to attack players through links to phishing websites sent in game through tells.
My suggestion would be to aggressively monitor the market boards, especially for the newest crafted sets, for activity that would suggest that the account selling the item is likely to be an automated seller, then deal with suspected bots in the appropriate manner as well as to report these cases differently to how the other RMT related bans are.
Edit. removed some duplicated text from the end of the post.
submitted by /u/tierney12
[link] [comments]
Continue reading...
Hi everyone, so the thread on the offficial forums discussing the abundance of market board bots on the EU and US datacentres has reached over 5000 views. This is evidence that a lot of us are really annoyed at the inaction of SE regarding this topic. I've typed up what I think would be an appropriate statement to send through the in-game 'leave a suggestion' feature, and hopefully with enough people sending the same/similar posts we can finally get some GM/developer eyes on the problem. Here's the thread on the SE forums: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/419959-Does-Square-intend-to-address-Market-botting
I would really appreciate as many people sending this base message as possible, as well as including your own personal experiences with bots in your messages, and responses to this thread. Between the time of writing this post and sending it to the mods, I managed to catch a gatherer bot and trap it using the trade dialogue. I got about a dozen people to come and send reports from the same area/instance and nothing happened for an hour before I gave up. Appearances are part of the problem and the lack of any action whatsoever doesn't fill me with confidence for what should take a GM less than a minute to deal with. What we talked about on the SE thread is the possibility that the EU/NA teams have no control over what they're allowed to do and this is out of their jurisdiction, and the JP team doesn't care about bots since it's not a part of their culture and it's not a problem on the JP servers (I would absolutely love someone from the JP server to tell us what the situation is like over there). Really what I'd love personally is a detailed description of how support works so that there's more transparency with what the GM team does, because I've never heard a single person say anything good about them (I'd also love to hear stories about positive and negative interavtions with GMs). Finally if there is a way to highlight this problem to the GM/Developer team I'd love to know about it, since this has been a big problem for so long. The forum post has a lot of great suggestions for countermeasures, and I'd love to see some ideas here as well. For more information about the bots I'll link a previous (ill mannered) comment I made about common misunderstandings. https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comm...z?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
Finally it's very important that we don't name any bots here, or otherwise publically. Personally I don't have a problem with it but SE do (wrongly) consider it harassment, and I've gotten a warning about it in game.
Please enter the following suggestion in game through Support Desk -> Contact us -> Leave a suggestion
\Title: \**
Stricter action towards market bots, and gatherers, because of a recent and massive wave of bots designed to sell high value items on the market board by updating their prices every few minutes, 24/7
\Body: \**
Hi there,
First I'm going to link a thread on the SE forums:
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/419959-Does-Square-intend-to-address-Market-botting
As you can see that the thread has over 5000 views in a few months, this topic has a lot of interest within the community and those who spend a lot of time crafting/gathering on the EU and US data centres. At the moment there are dozens of bot accounts on each world whose sole purpose is to take crafted, gathered, and farmed items and sell them on the market board. These bots aggressively update their price to undercut real players every few minutes, which run perpetually. Because of this, many DoH/L players have moved away from interacting with these systems since the bots are very unpleasant to deal with, since it would require an extreme amount of dedication to compete with them. Also we have documented cases of these bots running uninterrupted for months on end, with evidence that these accounts are using third party tools that I'll link to here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/gljb29/undercutting_bots_are_ruining_the_games_economy/
This page documents the history of several bots, and how a player was able to manipulate and record the time intervals between the bot account updating its prices to the point where he could predict when it would update to the second. He also had received threats in game from the bot accounts for successfully manipulating the prices of the bot. However since this event took place, the bots have adapted to identify and counteract players trying to manipulate them by aggressively buying out undercut items with their effectively infinite gil.
We also believe that the gil earned by these bots is encouraging RMT activity, which goes on to support the targeted hacking attempts at other crafter players accounts, likely in retaliation for competing with them. Our community has noticed an increase of compromised accounts within the crafter community, which then attempt to attack players through links to phishing websites sent in game through tells.
My suggestion would be to aggressively monitor the market boards, especially for the newest crafted sets, for activity that would suggest that the account selling the item is likely to be an automated seller, then deal with suspected bots in the appropriate manner as well as to report these cases differently to how the other RMT related bans are.
Edit. removed some duplicated text from the end of the post.
submitted by /u/tierney12
[link] [comments]
Continue reading...