Attention Firiona Vie AFK Bazaar Bots!

Bet you don't get much work done sitting at work watching bazaar prices.

100% takeaway from current EQ. Cheat or go home. If your not willing to cheat, don't bother playing.

This is (IMO) how EQ finally dies. Not with a wimper or a bang, but with only bots/automated characters playing the game farming stuff endlessly to sell to noone because all the real players have quit. Today it seems if you want a classic EQ experience free of cheaters, you are required to play on 3rd party servers... which oddly enough are better policed then the paid live ones.

I do hope some day they get this sorted and its worth playing on their servers again. Even live servers have this issue. Its only going to keep getting worse until they either do something about it for real, or close up shop because its just automated bots all the way down. (I'm betting good money on the latter)

The easiest thing would be to change the code so that you can only go into offline trader mode. I'm sure that some would try logging in and out constantly but that'd show up and be easily caught.

The best thing to do is not play ShopQuest. Why buy and sell stuff? Fun?? That is like going to the shoe store with my wife. By the way, shoe stores need a waiting room with man magazines for us poor saps that get drug into these places.

If you need stuff, just play EverQuest. If I need money for spells, I just do a lesson burn in Frontier Mountains. What else do I need plat for? Don't need Krono either.

If some of you worked as hard at your real life job as you do in ShopQuest, you would never need those two items. Heck, I bet your Cheetos and Mountain Dew expenditures each month far outstrip subscription costs for Everquest.

Best suggestion yet

What about when sellers of crafted items no longer craft items because the effort to make them for anyone but themselves and friends is too great? What about when tradeskill supply prices are completely regulated by the botters that acquire them in their exp farms?

Directly it does not effect many. The big picture is what its about, if you cant expand thought beyond your own interest then its thinking like that that is the ruin of eq.

If it weren't for the bots the price of crafted items would easily be 100x higher than they are.

Fast? Most would never bother doing that and being able to do it while you are at work or afk cutting the grass or whatever is the issue. Even auto updating prices while you are sitting at the computer is unfair as those playing the game as intended would have a hard time keeping up with that. *shrugs*

Maybe if there was no botting DBG would adjust the drop rate for TS items?

Hi, my wife teaches painting to toddlers on 4chan and I raise salamanders in my bath tub. Today, I’ll be undercutting your prices. Thanks for letting me know about this sweet script that I could download! Holy cow is it fast! More importantly, now I know I won’t be banned for using it! This was a very informative post.

Thanks!

-Steve the Salamander Farmer

When something isn't worth your time to do, you stop doing it. The nice thing about crafted items in EQ is that every single toon has equal opportunity to craft everything themselves. If something isn't available in the /baz, you can make it yourself.

From the testimonies in this thread and from my own experience, botters (along with all of us non-botters) have been regulating the prices since the beginning. But the botters can never dictate how low you are willing to go. If they are willing to go lower than you, that's good for all buyers.

And if you happen to drop low enough that your competitor buys your stock? Great! You made a sale at a price you set. Win/win!

Some folks in this thread have talked about trying to reach out and cooperate with their undercutting competitor. You might think it would be benevolent to work with each other. But if you did agree on a mutually beneficial higher price, wouldn't you actually be creating a monopoly, which is terrible for the community as a whole? For me, the fact that the other guy refuses to work with you is a boon for the community.

From another perspective, it sounds like some of you are arguing for the ability to fix prices and force consumers to buy from you, at your chosen price for a period of time. That's not a marketplace I would want to shop in.

When I read this, I thought, "Brilliant!" But what about any player that is manually watching their market and updating their prices without autobot software? This move would punish legit players far more. In fact, it would require a player to have two accounts to even be able to monitor prices to know when they should update.

I'm going to be out of town until Monday, so I want to leave off with this earlier reply of mine - to make sure I'm not misconstrued

Definitely the idea here. An even playing field is what Id like to see happen. How? I don't know, and my ideas are lacking. But if for the time being, the only way to resolve the issues is to Ban/Suspend people for violating the ToS, then so be it, they knew what they were doing could make that happen. What is wrong with punishing people for doing wrong when they know it is wrong? Regardless of what we think something *should* be. It isn't, bottom line, its against the ToS, violating the ToS can get you a warning, a suspension, or a banning, all of which these folks know and have earned fully.

For one, price fixing is not great either, at the beginning of an xpac desire rules the price, it shouldn't carry on forever by price fixing.

An auto undercutting game script built in would stop people from investing time to provide items to sell to others who don't have that time or knowledge and just want a White Dragon Helm for their twink or whatever it may be. I have met countless people who have just returned, who refuse to even work on leveling without having decked out a twink, or two, or three in all the old droppable loot they remember being good. That is good for the economy, people invested time to acquire those items. Why would anyone allow a game to dictate that because the item is old it is now worthless? The price should decay over time if not sold? All of these ideas, except the idea where the fella said to change it to offline mode for everyone, will inevitably drive people to use chat channels to auction their wares and dissuade people from selling in the bazaar and thus discontinue their trader accounts.

No amount of justification, logic, or reason applied can justify what is occurring. The rules are being broken and there should be a punishment. Punishment to these cheaters is compensation to the legitimate traders if DBG is unable or unwilling to do anything to make the changes to prevent this type of thing. This entire thread has been a great discussion.

The auto undercutting gets counter productive for the user once there are several players with overlapping goods. I guess, they would end up manually adjusting their minimums all day. Adding legit support for the functionality would be a disaster. It is also probably more work than they would be willing to commit.

If they were to do anything, it would be nice to see 20 slot trade skill only trader bags. Between collectibles and trade skill items, I have so many odds an ends banked that I could use that trade skill warehouse talked about elsewhere.

I'm with you on this one.

I used to have several traders on different servers but parked all of them because it's impossible to compete with these people.