Baz price scripts are getting out of hand

I've played MMO's with listing fees. It's cancer. Avoid it. 20 years of not dealing with that kind of thing and suddenly it's thrust on us is, well - insanity. Moreover, games with fees have a lot more players in it to support sales being made, and the fee not being a full loss of your revenue. We don't have that - unless the bazaar goes across all Live servers.

I like the idea of having a deposit/listing fee that you lose if you cancel the listing.

Would also be nice to move away from having to dedicate a character to the bazaar. A system where you deposit the items you want to sell, can go play the character or even log off outside of the bazaar, and have the payment parceled would be great.

Edit: I was thinking with the two ideas together... idk that a listing fee would work with the current EQ implementation where you aren't always playing the bazaar game.

This already occurs and is also fairly obvious

I wonder if this is one of those be careful what you wish for things.

I profoundly disagree with forcing people to be in offline mode for traders.

Well.. I still think the current system of a bazaar isn't going to be fixable unless they figure out a way to stop all automation.

I still think they need to implement an Auction House style system. Heck, make it a feature of the next expansion and require its purchase to LIST items in it.

When we interact with the seller npc, a window opens up with X tabs of Y slots each; every item you put in has a "listing fee" based on your buyout price and stays up until you remove it (forfeiting your deposit). You can also list them for a period with a set starting price (auction style) that costs nothing, but the price cannot be updated and the item cannot be removed from sale. (heck if they want to be real nice, they could open your bank window beside it to make life even better for sellers)

This way they can start us out with a similar number of slots (80 total, say 20/page for 4 tabs), and sell additional tabs via the DBC store. I know its not perfect, or even that well laid out here. But I don't really see any other good fixes for the problem.

Additional fees or taxes or whatever will just punish the little business guys who cannot afford an additional fee each time a price is changed. I do not make enough from my seller to ever buy a krono but that income helps with spells and such.

I never noticed this issue with my prices getting undercut (because I am a small seller) but can understand why others are having a problem.

However the people running scripts will have no problem paying that fee. It seems both sides are making a lot of plat out of the baz and I just hope in the effort to make this fair to everyone that you don't cut out the little guy.

On Luclin the bazaar has been slowly dying. Fewer traders selling fewer goods. I'm curious what servers seem to be having a problem.

For what reason? Just making that statement reads to me that you don't want your auto-updating unattended trader(s) to be effected. (I'm not saying you have one, but saying that is the way it reads).

I don't think you understand the problems this creates for the economy.

Just get rid of the baz. It's obvious a few bad apples cant help but turn it into their personal scamming playground.

I have a simple fix.. If you can't beat them, Join them.

The whole point of the botting script is to undercut the lowest price on the market. I would think botting scripts have a "low Limit" price they will not go under. If not we would be getting a lot of good deals when you identified a bot and kept undercutting them, til they hit their bottom dollar (or Platinum in this case).

So, What if EQ offered the same functionality of a botting script. You can set your initial price and your "low Limit" price. Then no one can complain about being out botted. When a random timer is met, your trader will scan the bazaar and update prices. This keeps people from instantly figuring out your bottom price. Plus then they will have to have a trader up and risk selling something for cheap for an unknown amount of time, before other traders update.

The down side is the same one bots face. Anyone can offer up the same item at a lower price then what you are selling. Then hope your price goes down and snag it for your bottom dollar. On second thought I take that back, I am not sure that is a down side because you are in control of your "low limit" price. The only thing you could complain about is yourself being dumb enough by making it too low.

Would even the playing field, I think so.

It sounds like for the people trying to buy stuff having toons competing over prices actually benefits them. So, let's at least acknowledge there's two sides to this coin.

I just sell for half if its not something with a well documented price (then I under cut 10% and they'll end up just buying my thing) Since I can't play and sell at the same time I don't worry much about it. I'd rather they spend the time to make it so we can have an auction house or let us set up a trader in any zone so I can actually sell items and play the game at the same time without being forced to run multiple accounts.

Take this idea and then lock any item listed on that trader for auction for up to (x) hours from be re-listed again.

They can log in the trader to remove their auction but they can't relist for (x) hours any exact same item.

in my opinion there are only 2 situations that will control key word being Control. the Bazaar problem better.

1. change how Trader/Buyer works: disable the ability to do search's while in Trade/Buyer. can still chat / link and all the goodies but can't do anything /bazaar related. toggling / changing prices should only be allowed 5 - 15x with in a given amount of time.(people make mistakes and should be allowed to change them) in same token if your toggling trader/buyer more then 15x in an hour just to change price so its 1pp lower then your probably part of the problem.

OR

2. revert back to EC Tunnel

I would love a way for see what peeps are searching show up in a new window.
this would allow real peeps to send a tell hey you looking for this item I can lower my price to you in a tell.

There isn't really much left to sell or buy of value anymore though, you have basically just collectibles, maybe some TS stuff and rank 2 spells for the first like month, if they become too common they flood the bazaar and become basically worthless (which mostly happens in like 2nd month of an expansion)

No. Part of what keeps the bazaar alive is availability of tradeskill mats for skilling to 300/leveling trophies and learning recipes for the Artisan's Prize. How do you do that for thousands of mats in the EC?

this only hurts people who don't have multiple accounts