Baz price scripts are getting out of hand

Nobody really wants the devs to nerf the bazaar. And I’m perfectly fine with people using third party programs, so long as they don’t directly interfere with others enjoyment of the game. However, a few bad apples are abusing these programs something needs to done. I rather try something that may help impede or redirect the bad behavior first,

Set your prices via the tools they give us. Perfectly fine with 3rd party programs? They directly interfere. You set your trader up, after spending an hour fixing it, and their magic program makes sure you will never sell anything.

We don't need the bazaar nerfed, we just need the cheaters banned. (And this goes for people letting their computer play for them in xp zones too)

lol lets put one of those pop up to click on items pictures (click Cars) to make changes to prices. lol

It's called a "captcha" ... it's been mentioned in this thread a dozen times ... and it's STILL a bad idea. There is nothing more annoying than those things... NOTHING. "Click on the cars" .... well, the corner of car x is actually a bit in the frame of the next box, so click that box too? NOPE... YOU'RE WRONG!! Oh, I guess you didn't mean click on the boxes with cars.... you meant click on the boxes with mostly cars.

F that.

Lol yeah, traffic lights... Well it says lights, so they mustn't mean the pole too, ill just select the lights. Bam, wrong answer. Then the next time they ask for traffic lights it's, Ohh yeah, I remember this, they want the traffic pole holding the lights too... wrong answer. Sonofa!!

EXACTLY!

Screw that.

After thinking about it some more I'm pretty sure this is the right choice, but possibly too expensive to implement.

What it does is alleviate a major pain point in EQ (trading goods). That pain point is currently being alleviated by a small group of people (who are running bazaar scripts) to the detriment of fair bazaar users who are suffering through the current system and aren't getting the benefit of prices that are high due to the high time-cost of transaction.

Right now you might spend 1 hour farming goods that take you 5 hours of actual playtime to sell, purely because of the raw variety involved. This means that when you do sell an item, you get a good amount of plat for it. But if the market is depressed because bazaar-bots are undercutting everyone, you expend a lot of time for little reward.


So yeah, put up an auction house so I can focus on playing EQ and not trying to compete with bots in the bazaar.

Or farm stuff that doesn't already have a readily available supply in the bazaar. Go do a collection in an obscure zone that no one uses anymore but is still relevant to the evolving gear or something.

collection wise if you're able to farm this you could make huge $$$

http://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=8193

So many runs of that to get all the stuff I needed. I think I paid 500k for the last one.

Otherwise I make enough plat to last the year (not krono for subs, just plat for random expenses) from one week of hard playing and immediate liquidation on expansion release. I think I'm literally moving into a new home when EQ comes out this year though :|

You know where you have to stand to sell at. Make it an ANTI spot to set/change prices. So set your price and then move to the spot to sell and move off the spot to change to a new price.

Excellent! I really like this idea. It doesn't hurt the small guy. Seems fair to everyone and does not require drastic changes. But if those script runners want to change prices they will have to move.

I would not mind moving to a specified area to set my prices then going to the platforms to sell.

Forget captchas, they will only hurt regular players, as it would take a week or so before someone releases a plugin that can solve them.
Whatever route this takes, whether it be captchas or having to move spots, it can be scripted and will not hurt the scripters at all.
Offline mode only? Sure, but that too only hurts the casual manual trader, a bot doesn’t care if it has to log in every two hours to adjust prices.

Also, lets say we remove all bazaar bots, all of a sudden you will see prices go UP, this kills the market. For everyone. The most healthy bazaar is on FV and guess what... it also has the most bots.

Don’t mess with this at all, and if you have to, just implement an ingame system for setting a minimum you are willing to sell at where it lowers automatically and problem goes away since everyone is playing on the same field at that point, including the bots...

What does this solve? Any system that can automate the setting of prices is going to be able to move the character.

If Captchas were so easy to get by why are they used so frequently? Not sure I understand that one.

Probably because of ignorance? I don’t know, people think they can’t be bypassed automatically?

https://lmgtfy.com/?q=picture captcha solver

There are multiple github projects for solving captchas of all sorts and plenty of whitepapers on the subject, i implemented a captcha solver for the evony game which admittedly was text based but the picture captchas has been solved as well already by bots.

There are even companies that solve captchas manually for you at a rate of 1cent per captcha and return the correct answer using php. It will not slow down a bot, even with a low success rate it’s proven that bots solve captchas with a higher success rate than a human... even if you can only solve 50% of them and i think the picture captcha solvers are at like at 72% or better now it’s good enough to automate...

Bypassing a eq captcha sounds exactly like a challenge multiple people would spend their time on because, well it’s a fun puzzle to solve code wise.

Also, implementing it in the eq client, because of the complexity it will most likely be a text based challenge like, type in your character name to move on... kinda like what they do for deleting a char cause the code is already there... but I don’t know how much time they have to work on this and it wont be worth it. It will only aggravate normal players. Bots wont care one bit. Which will actually make more people use the auto solver... win for the third party tool in question I guess.

It might be a challenge but I also don't think the picture ones are getting bypassed with any frequency.

Agreed that the biggest challenge would be to implement it to Everquest but they might be able to launch it to an external window feed in response there and feed back to the game. Probably be a delay in that I am no expert in the matter.

How about daybreak devs allow us.. the players decide if we want to play with people who run 3rd party programs ?

How nice would THAT.. be ?

If the dev's can program some one's name to change color's .. when its the toon's Bday (creation day) every year.. an they can change the toons name to red letters (when keyed for PVP 100% of the time, when not on a PVP server , book hand in to PoD)

They with out a question can come up with something that does similar to the name of people who are actively running 3rd party programs such as M Q .. an other programs like this.

I know they can easily track those players .. So why not allow the player base .. to decide if we wish to associate with those players by changing their names in some such way to let US the player base know this person IS RUNNING a program to make themselves better players ?

How bout that ?

That would force them to make an official statement of acceptance.

It'd be nice to have a definitive list of the types of actions which are ok.

We know AFK play = not ok because they've actually banned for it (doesn't matter if its a keyboard macro or autohotkey software or something that is like macaroni)
We know warping = not ok because they uhh sometimes ban for it

We know some third party is OK, some people like tucoh share aspects of how they run their stuff, we are pretty sure GINA and GAMPARSE are fine.

We know they don't want people playing multiple accounts on one computer via vm boxes on truebox but it doesn't seem like they enforce that.

Otherwise I think they like to be quiet because they don't want to alienate one side or the other.