Baz price scripts are getting out of hand

Yup, I don't disagree. However its not the exact time your after, its the pattern happening all day every day. Its likely the scripts are not sophisticated enough to only update a random subset of whats for sale each tick, so your looking for someone searching each item they have for sale; adjusting them, and the ones that are updated change by the same fixed %, then relisting. Over and over all day long. It'll suck to sort out for a while, but again if they take real action on the ones that are abusing this, it'll stop being an issue before very long.

Boze's nuclear option would be another stopgap, but they would adapt the scripts to that too; and a lot of the other things that would throttle them or annoy them, would annoy real players too. (if I am running an on-line trader, its often because I'm looking for something to pop up for sale.. I don't want to have to end trader just to check)

Its also not just trader mode they're manipulating either, its the barter prices as well. Its an ugly problem, that is just the next evolution of the automated gameplay bots (gotta sell that booty, and get them krono).

A listing fee per item, of some sort, when updating prices would definitely dissuade this scripting. Could end up having payed more money than you made by the time you sold it.

I like the current cap but maybe they should lower it - I could not of bought some thing I needed last night at the current cap if they had it higher.

Instead of putting operational limits on searching and updating the bazaar, how about tracking searches and price updates from a client? Identify the ones that are obviously scripted (constant, periodic, etc) and ban them.

A way to circumvent what you're saying is to integrate the variance I described earlier, but apply it to individual bags of items. So 1 bag gets updated 15 minutes from now, bag 2 gets updated 9 minutes later, bag 3 gets updated 30 minutes after that, and rinse/repeat. The accusation of cheating would be iffy, and it would need to occur after serious data crunching. Also, its not just items changing multiple times... imagine a scenario where someone puts an item up, the botter puts one up and undercuts the previous price, but the original seller never updates their price. The bot-enabled trader will stay the lowest priced item for hours or days or longer without a change. That would add additional variety.

Do you really think this bazaar issue is such a huge problem that you want devs who claim to be too overworked to fix things actually wrong with gameplay to be sitting around searching for ways to make the bazaar slightly more annoying to people who will probably figure out a workaround anyway? It seems like a low return on limited time. I'd rather them working on the next expansion, working on making worthwhile changes to THIS expansion, and generally improving gameplay.

With that said, I am a huge fan of the changes to /barter to limit how many buy lines one person can have for one item. That was seriously ridiculous and an obvious exploit.

Most of that would not work since someone running a script could run multiple toons on ftp accounts to do the searches, then feedback the results to the account doing the selling.

It might be easier to limit selling price updates to once a day. That would make bot manipulation impractical but not affect real players that much since they relatively rarely update their prices.

All these Updates to reduce price changes are Insane. LOL once a day to fix my price? I am not allowed to leave a trader up and update my prices after a tv show? seriously? Botters might be an issue but everything i am reading is basically Nuclear. destroy the bazaar or Spend Thousands of man hours to Ban Botters.. Why not come up with a Solution that works without Destroying the baz Nor banning the Supposed botters? Like a Auction House System or Allowing Barter to work The world Over and not need to be in Any Special Mode, - I like this idea as it would let People Know i want X item without making it so I cannot Play.

-Increase time between searches, dont help a lot, because can always use another char for search, the next 3 same problem , might help a bit, .

Best would be to freeze the price you put on an item for 1 hour.

My first thought would be to do nothing at first, except start to log when people change prices, then you should pretty fast to be able to generate a report over the people who there is a problem with and their ip numbers. This is to see if the problem is big or if are excaggerating.

Best always to find out, if there is a problem, and then how big is the problem

This seems like the best option. Other proposals would decrease usability of system for actual players. You could give a person 10 minutes to log off, and then have a script run to find players that are bypassing this by turning trader off and back on. So if a person has a trader on for an hour but not in offline mode, you can assume a script was being run.

Overall, I see this being a minor issue. I am much more concerned about DBC making baz trading less user friendly.

I didn't say lock the account out. I said lock the character out from entering world

Hard to think of something that wouldn't penalize those who actively play the bazaar side of the game. Would be much easier if we were just dealing with very casual bazaar users.

X number of price changes per hour?

Problem is I think that would be overly harsh to those not cheating. Some players play the baz game more then the rest of the game. This is the problem. I think we have to be careful in generalizing how everyone uses the bazaar.

This is so true. Many of the solutions that I've seen may not address the automation, but they all absolutely punish the non-automated players that just want to sell some stuff on the market.

Further, with a new expansion coming that includes a level increase, there will be many brand-new items where the market price changes constantly (spell gems are a prime example). Being unable to update a price except once per 24 hours just means that most sellers' prices will be out the running for 23.5 hours a day.

I'm seriously afraid that the developers will absolutely annihilate the bazaar's limited functionality for regular players.

Maybe a mechanic that highlights search patterns that appear too regular or too quick, but there HAS TO BE a manual mechanism that involves a human interaction to verify. Heuristics are good, but they're not perfect.

I don't mind paying a tax when I sell an item, but I'm not sure if just adjusting a price is sufficient to incurring a fee.

So what you are saying is that it is impossible to develop code the detects when someone is using automation because that would be the best way to handle this type of thing.

Let's just screw other people by putting a band-aid over a gushing wound and hope it sorts itself out.

Not impossible to do, but it may involve reading the system's memory addresses for other application threads that may represent automation. This is technically possibly, but politically abhorrent due to the invasion of privacy it represents. If I were part of their team, I would warn them to stay FAR away from trying to read what other applications on the host system are doing at a moment in time. It's none of their business, and they have no right to ask for the information. A definite breach of trust. Even if they put it in the EULA and made us "accept" the intrusion in order to play, it is still not ethical to ask for, and I have no idea if it runs afoul of privacy laws (but I suspect it would in most countries).

I really like this. Seems simple enough to implement and has minimal harm to regular game play (It's hard to think of a time where I was actively playing while in bazaar mode). The only annoyance would be accidentally starting your trader before you were ready and then getting kicked out of the game early - but after a time or 2 of that happening, people will be more careful.

This would probably work to curtail the automation, but there are many legitimate sellers that have a bazaar window open selling small items while they /auction for other items like buying/selling Krono(s) themselves or any host of items that regularly sell for multiple kronos.

If you make it an either/or (offline/online) decision, then you will end up driving a busload of sellers to just abandon /bazaar in favor of just /auctioning their stuff in general chat. If you thought general chat was untenable before, wait until you double or triple the number of sellers in there. Sure, it's not feasible to /auction 100 items in any chat window, BUT if I have to pick between selling an item for 3 kroon vs selling a befouled silk for 3-5kpp... uhh... easy decision to make. I'm selling the big ticket items only.

Having said that, what about if they wrap up an Offline Trader Mode ONLY with a mechanic that allows people to ACTUALLY set Krono or Noble as a functional bazaar purchase currency? So, you can set your asking price in copper through platinum like you normally do, but if you want, you can also set your asking price in Krono(s) and/or Nobles.

So... that Visage of Brownie love that sells for 3.5 kroon? Perfect, put it in a trader bag, and set the price to 3 Krono AND 5 Noble...

That would not only take care of the automation problem, but it also serves to fix the grips in another thread in this very forum that requests a way to get past the 2mpp bazaar limitation. A multi-faceted fix.

Very good idea. More of this type idea. I don't think it is a nuclear option though, but does have implications all its own.

I am aware of the other concerns about the ideas I suggested and their impact. I am not about to go and implement any of them on a whim. I wanted to foster discussion about this type of thing to come to a good solution, and just gave some spit ball ideas to solve one part of a multi-faceted problem. Hopefully my ideas spark some more ideas and a good collaborative solution will arise.

If we leave the problem up to log analysis and CS, then the problem is only solved as long as CS is checking the logs and tools. Additionally throwing infinity labor at the problem is not a good solution; even if the log scraping and banning is automatic there will be those caught by such a system in error - requiring more CS intervention, and even more upset players. So yes this is definitely something we could do short term, I do not think it is viable as a long term solution.

I am reading the replies and do care about this, however I may not give each post an individual response. I think it is a reasonable player expectation that you should feel that you have a fair chance to make a sale in the bazaar. I sympathize with the concerns here. I very much do not want to make the bazaar a pointless fruitless effort for the average player.

Thanks guys please do keep constructive posts going and any ideas that help to solve the problem..

If you went the offline trader/buyer option it would be nice if you could log in another char to play while selling. I know a lot like to sit in general and advertise their wares while selling, also offering discounts for multiple items purchased.

1: reimplement WoWs auction style system with fees to basically make it easier to offload goods
OR
2: add a listing fee to force players and bots to commit to a price.