Are bazaar automated price script users causing lag?

There are a number of people using third party programs to run scripts that check pricing every XX seconds on all the items they have for sale and adjust their pricing to undercut.

As there are are a number of these player accounts constantly hammering the servers from the bazaar zone is it possible this activity is contributing to the worse_than_normal lagfest we're seeing?

Also DB when will you ban these people? This is an easily detectable script!

And petition all you want, they say they will investigate and take appropriate action, but unless appropriate action is doing absolutely nothing, they are lying.

YES.

Bazaar searches ping the server (like /who all) which means it adds to the server processing. They even had to limit it years back so you can't search more than 1 every few seconds. This didn't stop the bots, of course.

The bazaar bots also make it difficult for legitimate players to keep up. If you take 10 seconds per item and you have 100 items, that means it takes over 15 minutes to update your prices. Few people want to do this multiple times, so the bazaar bots that continuously check can always beat your prices.

There are ways to fight back, but it's not the easiest.

Best way to beat the bots and any undercutter is to lower your prices to the point where they dont want to go any lower.

just reduce your price until it's low enough, then buy their item and raise your prices

I will try to buy the slightly more expensive items that have been slightly undercut.

Small price to pay to help the non-bots.

This isn't that hard to band aid. You could just limit one character to 500 searches a day. A lot better than the 10,000 - 20,000 searches they can do right now.

Per account. Or else they'd just move the items to a new character.

thats what i do . I lower my items dirt cheap almost and if botter lowers it to what i have mine set for or lower i'll buy all his and then raise my price to off set the cost he just cost me
I dont do it all the time but on occasion its soo frustrating to see them jack my price by say 100p . i'll have something for sale for 7500 and they undercut and go 7450 .. or 7400 .. then if i lower it to 7300 then not much longer i see same person has it for 7250 .. back and forth we go .. so thats when I slash prices and low ball it to 2500 then if they cut me i'll buy it ..

I just don't see them doing much about it as it would most likely cut into their profits. That seems to be #1 not customer loyalty or ability to enjoy the experience.

I would love to see them ban the heck out of those people. Not to mention take a stand on 3rd party software use. Its getting ridiculous watching the amount of people using that stuff.

They also really need to cut way down on the number of procs players have along with swarm pets. Give the players either a boost or one big proc and reduce the multiple pets from the "Swarm" to 1 or 2. I get it seeing a lot of pets can be cool until your watching and a ton of swarm pets get popped and then you can see and feel the lag kick in. Swarm pets also clog up the extended target window when they inevitably get charmed by mobs, whole other issue.

I think there is a lot that could be done to reduce overall lag in the game. But I don't think any of them are a small undertaking and would use a ton of Dev time to not only develop but then implement.

100 a day would be even better. You can only sell 100 items a day anyway. A person REALLY doesn't need to update things more than once a day.

They could probably limit it to 100 a day without anyone(non-bots) noticing anything, except for the fact that the severs would be more responsive.

Could probably go down to 25-50 and not bother most actual players.

Limiting searches would also limit your buyers.

To get a better return on searches you can customize them using the price or level, class etc ranges on the left.

This also helps weed out sellers with tons of the same item that overrides other sellers with only one or two of that item. If they have large amounts of item X then your item X is not going to show up no matter what your price is unless the searcher has put some sort of parameters on their search.

I just used up 10 searches on collectables between certain prices and if I expand my plat parameters I would use many more. Now there goes another 20 searches for ornaments for cloth or chain and the word glacial. Now going to use up more searches looking for 1hd or 2hd or bow for my different classes and then levels etc. The options are limitless. But if you limit my search then there are many who are not going to get a sale cause I won't be able to find them but I will see the bot sellers all the time.

I don't drop my prices and stuff sells fine. In fact I have a tradeskill item I sell for 120 plat all day and night even though there are 2 other sellers offering that same item for 50 plat. Yes, I know its not 7500 plat but if I leave my high dollar items at their price then they too will sell...why? Because the bot will run out of product and mine will be next.

I feel bad for the players or servers who have this lag issue. But this is just another suggestion to stop bots in the game since they are not getting stopped via the other reasons. I don't doubt it may have some merit as far as lag but disabling all auras, mounts, pets and nimbus's on sellers when they go into seller mode would also help and not be detrimental to sales. I have by passed many a seller who has that stuff going on since they are too hard to target.

I think the bottom line is bots are here to stay.

True, If you want to buy some collectible sets, you can easily surpass 50 searches per day.

I wish they had a bazaar-filter for collectibles you already have/haven't collected... but that would probably also be server-demanding.

I don't think bazaar searches are causing server performance issues. It's something else on the backend. However I'm all for limiting bazaar bots in anyway we can.

Good point with all the mounts, nimbus and junk they keep up while in trader mode.

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: Look to world of warcraft... they recently gave their auction house a facelift and added some preventative measures; people had been doing the same exact thing you describe here, using an addon. So yes, they do cause lag.

I would imagine that mounts and nimbus-effects are strictly client-side lag. Familiars are probably handled server side though, although it would be possible to just have them as a client side GFX-effect(no-one cares if 2 different players see the same familiar in 2 different positions).

Every "transaction" you do that requires data from the server contributes to lag. Just being logged in and getting updates on character/mobs position, facing, speed, etc all require processing.

This morning I hit the "Welcome" button on the bazar and it reported there are 17491 items in the bazaar. I don't know how the data is organized on the server but I expect the server will loop over all those items for each search request.

While this is a fair number of items to compare/filter "slot", "race", "class" , etc. for the EQ devs already have placed limits on how often you can request items, and the total number of people ( even bots ) doing baz searches is fairly low.

The majority of the server lag I see during raid time is limited to the the zone itself and generally only kicks in once everyone is in place spamming all their abilities and generating 100-200 pets all doing combat checks, movement checks, spells, timers, melee spam, etc.

You can see the same thing happen if you go to a level 80ish zone and swarm kite 50-80 grey mobs, they start rubber banding badly.