Tired of bazaar botters, seeking advice

So some of us on Ragefire depend on the bazaar, farming items, selling for plat, to buy gear, krono's, or just to make plat. but lately, there are 7 or 8 accounts atleast, using third party software to maliciously undercut prices every 15 minutes. After some painstaking trial and error I have identified several of them , and purposefully drove prices well below /barter, bought all their stuff, and made nice profits.

but it takes 10 hours or so to lower the prices 10k. checking in every 15 minutes, and I risk someone buying my product for much lower than I intend on selling, so its basically a full time job just to sell my stuff.

I've watched the same people do it, in offline mode, never coming out of offline mode, and I've talked to other prolific tradeskillers that are running into the same problem. I am tired of putting my trader up night after night, to know 10 minutes after listing it, it will be undercut and I won't sell crap. I hate to be a whistleblower, or /petition or /report, but it is really screwing up the economy, and %($W*(R)(@W#$*@#)(()#$@()#$ing me off

New Member but not New Trader, eh ?

Sounds fun to look forward to this.

Well that would explain the race to the bottom on Lockjaw.

If they are undercutting you, by whatever means, aren't they shooting themselves in the foot? If they can afford to do that, it seems like it's in my best interests to see to it they continue. I don't particularly care if you get rich, or make any plat at all, I want the commodity for the lowest price available.

Yeah make a new trader. Put up only one piece of the item up for sale that they are selling too. If they really are just undercutting using somekind of automated script, then you should be able to push them down to such a low price you could buy-out their whole stock for nada quickly before they realize?

So, because of them items are cheaper?

Sound like heroes.

Personally id go the make a vendor and put up a single item low to drive the price down and buy..but you can petition and provide names and a gm should be able to recreate and
Test if afk autobotting is going on and ban if needed.

Runes

If i found a way for my competition to sell to me below cost id be celebrating not complaining.

Ding ding ding. We have a winner.

I don't think you realize what it actually takes to drive the price, and they have percentages built in, so I have to lower it by less that 1% every 15 minutes for hours, so on an item that costs 100plat, I lower mine to 99 he lowers his to 98, it goes down 4plat per hour... yay! All the while making sure someone doesn't come along and buy my item, so example

they have item A for 100 plat, I put mine for 99 and walk away for 15 minutes, 15 minutes later, theirs is at 98. So I go 97, 15 minutes later they are at 96, 1 hour in, someone /bazaar oh Eqfanatic1777 is at 96 buys all mine, for cheaper than I wanted to sell, because I went to the bathroom and didn't watch close enough to end trader as someone ran up

Not a big deal with 100 plat items, so we have a krono at 100k , I go 99, he goes 98500 I go 9800 he goes 97750... I want to sell mine for 100, not 97, so I have to stare at my PC for 8 hours to get him low enough to stop undercutting me, /barter is at 91, so 8 hours later I get him to 90500 and I buy all his and go make 2k, YAY totally worth 8 hours of my time? I don't think so

I don't care that people use third party software to enhance their playing experience, but at the point where it negatively impacts me is where I draw the line. I don't want to waste 10+ hours a week to sell a freaking krono, for the price it should bring, I'll never sell one just typing /trader on / offline mode, and 15 minutes later they are .0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% cheaper than mine for the next 12 hours I'm gone

Interesting... some thoughts that may not help:

What happens if you go lower by more than 1%? If it take less than 1% to trigger the lowering, wouldn't going 1.5% therefor not trigger the lowering? Taking 1.5% off the top would be closer to the original price than repeated cutting down by 1% no?

They sell at 100. You sell at 110 after buying them out. There are other ways to control a market.

Earlier in the thread you mentioned tradeskills. Buy up all the mats (even of one type) used to make the tradeskill goods in question. Drive up the price of making the items so your finished product sell price is a deal and it costs them too much to replace stock unless they go farming the mats.

Use channels to auction at the price of the lower person, without having to lower. Old school commonlands style...

You have trader friends... coordinate your price dropping/fixing (ahem...) efforts? As long as at least one of you is on in every 16 minute window (to cover the 15 minute adjusting you mentioned) and you put your prices back to default when going afk. As long as no one drops the baton so to speak, how's the afk bot cope? If they are truly AFK botting, you're going to drive the price to the abyss because your online team just exits trader mode and says "sorry, out of stock. but so-and-so has it up still at almost that price" so you're not even using your own plat to deplete the now underpriced stock on the theoretical botter, and might even push the prices super low.

So undercut them by more than 1% and that solves the entire problem no? Yours will be cheapest and sell first.

Botting is against the rules. Wouldn't it be healthier for the game in the long run, to enforce the rules and ban them?

If it's at a regular 15 minute window, spend a few minutes to figure out when his timer fires. Drop your price a LOT right before it does. 50%? 90%? The script might be set to ignore massive price swings. Obviously, this is safer with 100p items than 100k items. Stay on your trader so you can see if someone runs up to buy and you can exit trader mode (don't know if that server has remote purchase enabled). As soon as their price drops, exit trader and buy their item.

Ssraeshzian pure logic, Jaime, ha !

Or, play a real server where you have 1 or max 2 accounts to pay for? Instead of trying to farm 18 Krono a month to play on LJ / RF.

You mean a server where people need 6 laptops and force lower level people to buy kronos to pay for power leveling? RF has been a great place to be using only a single account. (post- mage army nonsense at server launch)

@OP - No one buys kronos off the broker at inflated prices when you can WTB in gen chat and pay 85-90k instead of what you are asking.

Which server requires 6 laptops and people are forced to buy power leveling? That truly sounds awful. I play on Phinigel with a single laptop and have never bought or sold any power leveling, so you must mean some other server. Get the warning out!