Baz price scripts are getting out of hand

Competition is healthy for the economy, this scripting destroys fair competition. Im not saying to eliminate competition in any way. But for people to sell anything if they aren't scripting is impossible. I manually update my trader, I used to do it multiple times a day, and made great money. Now when I don't, I make trash, I cant keep up with the auto update scripts. Too much time, effort too great.

Offline trader only removes the option to be social (ie. chat, read guild chat, etc) while in trader mode. As the people bot farming & selling typically also have multiple accounts in both trader & buyer mode, it just moves the goal posts.

As someone who's dealth with patern detection for 20 years, automatic detection of these practices are both cheap & easy (and seldom wrong). The only reason not to pursue this route is to avoid banning an offender, ie. customer.

The fact that there's a dev in this thread that thinks it's a "very good idea" to force people offline in order to sell things because undercutting exists is just downright hilarious.

It's the best solution there is. Everything else can be circumvented with a few extra lines of code.

If we could log in another account and leave our offline trader up, I'd personally like the change =)

This. I discontinued my traders because it's not possible to keep up with people running scripts.

Similar background but would add if some anonymous person were to publish the same script or something similar in outcome... well, problem immediately solved. OK, not terribly legitimate but it would add enough data to the mix where eliminating that type of behavior would already be obvious and easy to control.

Used to know the platform and software EQ was originally on but has been crammed out of my head for other less useless facts. Either way for a security person this type of thing is pretty easy to find. Fixing it as we say is 'layer 8'. If you know the joke/story - cool. If not well, go look it up.

- Coag

If there’s such an easy cheap solution to bot software, then does it run rampant in almost every modern “live service” that’s worth anything? DBG track record for suspension/ban people who did nothing isn’t very good.

I’d rather any see other measures tried first, before the random bans for no reason.

Search time scaling up is bad. I know when I setup my trader (rarely) I need to reset all my prices after doing a search for the items, so it's already 20-30-50 tedious searches as prices have changed drastically between times I feel like trying to compete with the bots.

Ideas:
1. (I realize this would require alot of extra server side book keeping)
Allow toons to change their price once per week/item.
Don't allow them to trade/parcel/shared bank/shared real estate items that have been added to their trader until the week is up. (to avoid using other toons to get around the limit)

2. Offline mode only and limit it to entering trader mode once every X hours. So your main could log in to play if you were trading on your main, but couldn't go back to trader mode until the time was up.

Not being allowed to trade an item for a week is dumb. What if I find a buyer outside of the bazaar? What if I decide to not sell something and instead pull it down for an alt?

How about this one? I’d delete the item and reclaim it. I thought about this for 2 seconds and I already have (albeit expensive) a workaround. Do you really think other workarounds won’t pop up?

Unfortunately offline trader only isn’t going to solve the problem, just make it more annoying for people who aren’t running scripts. It’s very easy to automatically log in every hour or 30 minutes or 15 minutes even to update pricing and log out again in offline mode.

I think the “best” solution would be to limit the amount of times that you can price change an item in a given 72 hour period. Maybe do like 5 price changes in 72 hours and then you’re locked out from price changes for 72?

Even in a 72 hour time period, someone will have 5 opportunities to undercut your price in an automated fashion. It also probably wouldn't stop someone from doing their 5 automated script updates, then just handing off the goods to another toon standing next to them in the bazaar, and letting them start undercutting. Also, who do you know that updates their prices 5 times in a 72 hour period? I will sometimes wake up, log in my trader, update prices, and then go back offline until the evening.... but I can't modify/observe my trader at work.

I don't see a "solution" to this that doesn't screw normal players who leverage the bazaar to make money and churn out krono to play the game.

*shrugs*. You could just ban everyone who uses third party programs? I think the game would be pretty empty if we did that tho.

They'd have a few people on the TLPs and the Live servers would all look like Brekt, if what people say is true with how prevalent it is. I've been lightly impacted by that crap... frankly, I've been grieved way worse by a couple buttfaces in a top raiding guild. I've never met a boxer who was half as crappy as those guys were to me.

It sounds like the macro provides something that people want, so rather then looking at a bunch of negative ways to penalize them. you should look at what benefit they are giving and just make it part of the bazaar everyone uses. then they have no need for a macro and everyone is equal.

1. So far it sounds like they just adjust price down to undercut, why not just allow people to set a range they are willing to sell, then the product should go to whatever the natural lowest price is. or maybe like the auction systems others are talking about where you turn the item in set the price and it doesn't change till the auction is over.

2. add other positive good changes to make the bazaar more useful, like:
a. Toggle to show only 1 of each item returned at the lowest price.
b. Toggle to show only collectible's you need.

I only use the Baz to buy collectibles so that's all I can think of, but I'm sure there's others and these changes would just be positive and make it level at the same time.

I just really hate the idea of trying to implement something negative as usually that ends up penalizing everyone.

I actually like this take on the issue.... thanks for sharing.

Just nuke the bazaar and create an in game auction house. The bazaar is an old antiquated system for trading. Take EQ into the next generation with a real auction house already.

It's funny, none of this would be an issue if we all were better at business. Just match price. We all get sales. Everyone's happy.

OMG IF MY PRICE ISN'T THE LOWEST IT'LL NEVER SELL WTFQQ

Yup, good idea

Have to agree with the offline idea. A popup saying "Are you sure you wish to enter offline mode" when you hit start trader. Making that the only option would really help. In today's EQ there's no reason to run trader online. I think this is a fantastic idea!