Salvage Bans v 2.0

[vivbiibasjiu]

Yeah but that'd make me a jerkoff. I'm one of those "never talk to the po-po" types. You don't narc, you don't squeal. You got a problem with someone you talk to them and let them know. You converse, you be polite and civil and try to reach an understanding, a consensus. And so that's what I've tried to do and this person wasn't receptive to that. That's ok, he's allowed to be a jerk and I'm allowed to call him on that shitty behavior. Whatevs.

But like I said before, I know others who've told me that they've reported him. So either SE will do something about it or they won't - so far they haven't, and this has been going on for months now. Most of the stuff I'm wanting to buy is stuff I'd get anyway from mog garden or whatever - it's just that it takes longer. He's not preventing me from skilling up, just slowing me down. And if it's impacting me, it's impacting others on my server - which is what makes it a community issue rather than just a personal grudge or whatever. I have no previous history with this person, don't know what LS they're in, what they do beyond what I see on the AH and ffxiah.

So if someone is cheating at monopoly and robbing the bank you're not going to tell the banker because you're afraid of tattle-tailing? This isn't elementary school, man up. Someone is ruining your game experience by cheating. The only solution is to remove the cheater. Trying to be a "bro" to cheaters by not "narcing" on them isn't going to get you anywhere. What are you trying to prove? Just report them. Square Enix isn't the "po-po"

[Hoshiku]

I always buy things that npc for more than they ah for to npc. I don't need a bot to do that! Dasva's advice here is sound. If you want people to stop buying stuff to npc, pay more than the npc price for it and those people will go away. I had to do that for king truffles a few months ago when I was skilling cooking and it was an excellent solution.

[enoch]

I appreciate everyone caring enough to respond to my ramblings. My original intent in posting about this seems to have gotten lost - to alert folks that SE isn't banning for AH botting.

I don't know how AH botting works - whether it messes around with packets or whatever - but you can consider this evidence of how they may be conducting their dragnet in the recent series of bans. Furthermore, if the folks who've told me that they've reported this botter actually have reported him (and I've no reason to distrust friends) it means that the STF reporting tool isn't an instant temp-ban, even if you've got multiple people (including JP's!) reporting the same person. Maybe it means SE can't tell AH botting activity from regular AH activity (can the bot be configured with random wait times and shit like that? dunno). Maybe it means they've got a backlog of folks to investigate - we already know they're operating on a skeleton crew - is this evidence of not using some sort of automated process?

These are the sort of things I thought would be in the resulting discussion from my post, as they are relevent to this thread. I'm not interested in circlejerk moral/philosophical debates with tortured metaphors, nor on primers for how market capitalism works.

[dasva]

I think some people were getting banned but iirc they were also bidding away from the ah so that would of course be fairly easy to figure out also i believe there was a way to just bid without going thru the menus which is probably easy to detect. But I'd assume a normal ah would just bid on some stuff at certain prices every so often. I doubt a guy using a bot to check/bid every say 10 minutes would look all that different than a real player and probably not something they are on the alert for. It doesn't necessarily mean the process isn't at least somewhat automated it just means this might fall outside of the parameters they use. Like they might only consider people who perform at least 1 action every 5 minutes when looking at how long they have been doing things. After all people have been known to catnap between say ph pops when camping nms. And of course if you do something that is literally impossible legitimately like breaking game physics that might be auto. Have seen a lot of what looks like clipper related bans

[vagus]

The bot I used to use would just keep bidding in an item with a certain price. Was super basic since it was key strokes mainly.

[arus2001]

AH botting may be minor nowadays, but it's still a hindrance. I had difficulty nabbing some GEO spells recently because if they popped while I was AFK, out in the field, sleeping, or whatever, the same suspects would buy them and just NPC them off for profit. The logic employed behind such activity really isn't much different than what flippers used in Diablo 3 to ruin the AH there, only replace "What they feel the item is worth." with "The NPC value SE has determined." The end result is still the same, however, in that items people intended to use are being kept out of their hands via the pursuit of greed from others. Try as they might to argue they can use that gold/gil to get what they want, such conversion is a one-way street.

Kind of why I've wanted to see games flag item sold on their respective AHs so they can't be (re)sold for periods of time based on their value acquired at. This puts a lot more risk on the flippers, or in the case of Rare items, complicating the hoarding process. Otherwise, the surest way to kill any kind of in-game economy is to make it so the players can't get what they're after with fair effort. XI is maybe better about that nowadays than other MMOs with the Skirmish augment mats, but that's not saying a whole lot since crafting arguably "dead" outside of the in-demand consumables.

[vagus]

On a scale. Ah botting was minor. I even set the bot to bid on kraken clubs. Idiots selling for 1 Gil. Never got one though.

[Niiro]

AH botting may be minor nowadays, but it's still a hindrance. I had difficulty nabbing some GEO spells recently because if they popped while I was AFK, out in the field, sleeping, or whatever, the same suspects would buy them and just NPC them off for profit. The logic employed behind such activity really isn't much different than what flippers used in Diablo 3 to ruin the AH there, only replace "What they feel the item is worth." with "The NPC value SE has determined." The end result is still the same, however, in that items people intended to use are being kept out of their hands via the pursuit of greed from others. Try as they might to argue they can use that gold/gil to get what they want, such conversion is a one-way street.

Kind of why I've wanted to see games flag item sold on their respective AHs so they can't be (re)sold for periods of time based on their value acquired at. This puts a lot more risk on the flippers, or in the case of Rare items, complicating the hoarding process. Otherwise, the surest way to kill any kind of in-game economy is to make it so the players can't get what they're after with fair effort. XI is maybe better about that nowadays than other MMOs with the Skirmish augment mats, but that's not saying a whole lot since crafting arguably "dead" outside of the in-demand consumables.

Seems like the issue could be pretty easily solved by just not allowing you to sell an item on the AH for less than its NPC value.

[enoch]

Seems like the issue could be pretty easily solved by just not allowing you to sell an item on the AH for less than its NPC value.

That's a good idea, but iirc (and this may have changed sometime without me noticing) NPC value relies on your current fame in which locale the NPC resides - and now there is at least one item (maybe more? dunno) that increases that value as well (Alliance Shirt +1). I think SE intended the NPC pricing of items to be social cues as to their value. If SE has an in-house game theorist/economist, I wish they'd let that person talk directly to the community. And if they don't, well, that explains so so much.

[Niiro]

Oh right, forgot about fame.

Well they could just use the base NPC sale value before increases from fame and such I guess, wouldn't be as effective but it'd probably help.

[Lolwutt]

If you go to list something for 20k and when you highlight it you see 'Minimum sale price: 18000' or the like, most people would just NPC it anyway. It might eliminate buyers taking things off the AH to NPC, but it'll likely cause the source of those things to NPC it instead.

[enoch]

If you go to list something for 20k and when you highlight it you see 'Minimum sale price: 18000' or the like, most people would just NPC it anyway. It might eliminate buyers taking things off the AH to NPC, but it'll likely cause the source of those things to NPC it instead.

Absolutely. I already do this with spell scrolls and the like. The game does drown us in freebie items these days. But then it becomes a market decision. If the minimum sale price is 18k and you want to sell it for 20k you then look to market indicators. If there are 15 of them up on AH, might as well NPC it. If one hasn't sold in 3 weeks, you might be able to get 30k for it. Not rocket science even for someone as economically-challenged as me. Pegging AH minimum bid price to NPC sale price would also do away with the 1g quick sales. I have no conception what this would do to the economy and would love for SE to chime in on this stuff and actually communicate with us, but I'm not going to bother because it's like a black hole of uselessness over there.

(reminder that we're veering off-topic)

[LiquidFriend]

On a scale. Ah botting was minor. I even set the bot to bid on kraken clubs. Idiots selling for 1 Gil. Never got one though.

AH botting was a real bastard if you were a crafter.

Think I kept Goldsmithers from getting ores or ingots off the AH for around a good solid month back when I was skilling it up and was running an AH bot around the clock on a mule.

Made a lot of money selling phrygian gold ingots.

[Niiro]

If you go to list something for 20k and when you highlight it you see 'Minimum sale price: 18000' or the like, most people would just NPC it anyway. It might eliminate buyers taking things off the AH to NPC, but it'll likely cause the source of those things to NPC it instead.

In this scenario what should happen is the price of the item would go up enough to be worth selling on the AH over selling to an NPC.

Enough people sell to NPC causing the item to become more scarce -> those selling on AH can increase the price.

[arus2001]

That'd be an option here, I suppose, but it's not what I'd call a fix. It still leaves room for a third party to manipulate pricing. Let's say there's an item that sells for 1m, but eventually a few sell for 900k. Someone, who believes that true value is 1m, buys all the ones listed at 900k and attempts to resell them at 1m or even higher. If these things are fast moving, but somewhat rare, there's a good chance they'll be able to get away with this. On the other hand, it puts the item out of reach of those with more limited budgets while also stymieing the likelihood of its cost decreasing further. For a game like XI, I'd say anything that sells under 10k on the AH could remain unchanged. However, at 10k and every place value past that, add a 1 day (re)sale/trade prevention. So, in the case of our 900k item, they would have to wait 2 days before they could attempt to relist it. 3 if it was bought at 1m. If its something stackable, the timer would reset to the highest value if different values wind up mixed. Items on timers also couldn't be mailed.

There general idea, of course, is to only get something if you intend to use it. Meanwhile, pricier items become more of a risk to try and manipulate since you're looking at enforced minimum turnaround times. A game like XI would require a craft request function, however, that way you could buy mats and get someone else to synth them without actually changing hands on the components. Would also be a damn good excuse to eliminate breaks on items you're at/above cap on. When it comes to tradeable equipment, it'd also be nice to have a means to view an ownership history. Though that's more difficult to pull off with the AH's "anonymous" listing. Just kinda too late for XI overall, really.

[Hoshiku]

Actually it's the under 10k items here that are the most likely to be purchased to be NPCed. I don't see much manipulation of pricey items on the other hand (mostly because SE did actively ban for that for quite some time).

[arus2001]

Yeah, I won't deny that's an issue with current XI. The other end of the issue is the supply avenue. Like, for the GEO spells I mentioned, you probably aren't able to self-acquire them while leveling the job since something like Aerora II comes from Skirmish or an absurdly priced NPC in Adoulin.

Then again, SE has kinda historically treated mages like shit in XI this way.

[Draylo]

You can get that from so much Adoulin content, is this really an issue? I can't imagine people struggling to get spells these days lol.

[arus2001]

Okey dokey, you tell that level 80 GEO to do Adoulin things to get a spell. If your answer is to get it on another high level job or camp the AH, you're completely missing the point of the conversation.

[Malithar]

I'd just tell em to get it from the NPC like I did. Up hill in the snow and all that jazz, spoiled with these 10k AH spells.