Baz price scripts are getting out of hand

Eventually you will have to come to a point where either he doesnt want to sell for any cheaper or you dont. Thats where you find the fair price. Up to then it was overpriced.

The problem is:

1. Because the bazaar is so cumbersome to use, there is an opportunity cost for selling in the bazaar that would normally be baked into the price of the item you buy. A proficient botter has a much lower opportunity cost because the bot does the heavy lifting. So when they depress prices, the prices become too lower for it to be worth selling for a human trader.

2. The bots actually increase the opportunity cost for human traders because instead of being able to competitively price your goods based on what the market currently has, you have to enter in a bidding war that might just result in the same bot (or another one) buying both of your goods for a price so low that it wasn't even worth selling the damn thing, much less intentionally farming it.

I still think they should remove online-trader mode. They should’ve removed it once they introduced offline traders. Make the only way for you to go into trader mode is by clicking the offline button. This will prevent these relatively simple trader scripts from manipulating prices live as new prices come into the Bazaar. Most normal players won’t be impacted.

What determines overpriced? Most people who set traders up don't really care what 99% of their stuff sells for. Just move it to make money to spend. "Fair price" doesn't really apply to the bazaar, and I'm not sure where people get that idea. Its available for X amount, either you want to spend that or you don't. Sellers that use very high prices are tending to take advantage of people's desire to accomplish something quickly. Not offering a fair exchange in time and effort. The undercutting bots don't tend to hurt the high prices sellers, its the traders in the middle ground who aren't trying to take advantage of anyone that just want to make some spending plat that are effected the most.

When I ran my mule on E'Marr/Nameless I always undercut drastically other traders prices with NO resulting change (ie increase/decrease) over a 90 day cycle. Yes, my items sold but I did it to see if there was any " impact on the economy ". Might just Fletch some good arrows and Research up some spells and see what happens now. I have never liked the extremely overinflated economy. I really just like passing on my gear " AT MY COST " with a small profit margin and the new folks coming onboard gets lotsa feelz .

Clan Fizlwiff of Errolisi Marr

Like I said, overpriced is when there are people that are willing to sell for less. Thats in a buyers market. In a sellers market the fair price is the highest price that people are still willing to pay.

You may like to think that doesnt apply to the bazaar but the proof is the very fact people complain about undercutters. And other people complain that prices are too high!

Speaking of business... Best Buy became known as the "show room for amazon". The reason being is that people would go to Best Buy, check out a product and then order it cheaper from Amazon. Most people would say that "Best Buy charges too much and Amazon sells it for what it's worth." The problem is that Best Buy includes their information provided by their staff, the ability to see and touch the product on display and a physical customer service representative to complain to or return the item too.

So Best Buy sells the item for the value of the item AND the value of the services being provided. Amazon sells the item for the same price but provides no services, and does not include the cost of services in their prices, which is okay because Best Buy has already absorbed the costs for them. The customer gets more for less by basically "stealing the services Best Buy provided them."



People seem to think that a rare collectible is not worth say 1 mil plat or that it is over priced or price gouging.

The problem with that argument is that when an item is intentionally farmed for it's trade value when no other (real) value is obtained in the process. An example of this is the axe that drops from the giants in the fort of scorched woods. The mobs con light blue and blue, have very high HP, the drop rate is very low and so is the XP. The $10 cost ($20 krono worth 2.2mil) of buying the item is a vastly superior use of time and/or money than camping the item, which values your time when sold at 1mil at about $2/hour given the krono exchange rate.

So many players would rather just buy a Krono, blow half of that to finish off a collectible set and go XP in TBL. It is a good investment of their time and money when all they want to do is check a box, so the find the item very fairly priced compared to the alternative of farming it themselves.

The bots end up with the items because people just passing through or doing hunter ultimately just turf the item off to barter because, as mentioned, the bazaar is cumbersome and not worth their time to mess with. They might see the item is listed for 1 mil, but knowing the hassle of a bid war with a bot, just ditch the item quickly to the barter, so the person always running an automated barter will always have more items to sell on their automated trader.

The item then ends up on the trader at 1mil, and sells, because the item is appropriately priced. The bot only needs to sell two of these items per month to stay gold, which is not hard to do.

There wouldn't be an issue with this, except that it is done completely automated. 10 bags with 10 slots is 100 items. To check each item and adjust the value to be competitive is a very burdensome process. Add the time to make the sale of the rare item after farming it and your time becomes even less valuable.

Now, if everyone was on a level playing field I could agree completely with the value argument. However, people who are not automating the sales are including the time it takes to manage the sale in their price. The prices of automated sellers is always going to be lower than the cost of the human player.

On the note of selling items to a barter. The scripts for trader are affecting the barter system too. Say an item can be unloaded quickly for 10k to a barter or 50k on trader.

The Krono exchange rate being $18 to 2.2milPP means that the difference in price from a 10k sale to a 50k sale carries a value of approximately $0.40.

Many people are going to just dump a super rare item to barter because they just don't find the price to be worth their time.

Ultimately the barter flips to trader and the item shoots up to 1mil where it belongs.

The outcome is the item STILL sells at the appropriate value of 1mil. The player buying the item saves nothing. The person selling the item is out a potential 990k platinum and the automated script covered half of its expenses for the month.

Of course, very very few collectibles are going to carry that kind of value, so this is a pretty extreme example, intentionally so. It illustrates the point however of "unfair business practices" and monopolies.

Ultimately in the end "it is what it is" and I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. I'm just countering the point of "if you sold it at it's fair value" since that's not at all accurate to the situation.

So well put

both this and the last post explain it so well. Vumad, a /mic drop please

Vumad theres some truth to your point, but bestbuy may not be the best example of exemplary customer service worth paying for.

Ummm... don't see your point here. People without scripts can buy stuff on barter for less and then sell for more. The advantage to the initial seller is not having to put a trader up or hawk it in general chat. But you don't need botting software to be doing this as a buyer and seller.

I never said you needed a bot to do it.

I said you needed a bot to be competitive. Read post 167 again.

Hmm I have done very well on Bristlebane without a bot in the bazaar. I have made more than 50 million plat in the last few years. Could I have done better with a bot? I shall have to consider it.

This is why I often sell my stuff for half of what other people are selling I just want it gone. You only get 100 slots on a trader to sell. I of course don't sell at half if there's a barter paying more but even then ill undercut the stupid barter for selling also if the barter won't let me sell full stacks.

WHY WHY LORD does the barter only take 4 at a time when they're buying 999 WHY (group currency is tradeable on /barter and people were buying ifrit coins at 250plat per. While I was adventuring i keept my barter window open and slowly sold coins for hours because barter is so bad. Currency also stacks upto 1k per stack let us sell more at a time to the people who are trying to buy our stuff.


As for the automated bot situation, update the bazaar get rid of the 2 million cap and then also add a feature to set a min and a max price. People who say the bots are easy to detect only see the dumb bots that update in 30 second intervals its a lot harder to catch someone who updates once an hour.

As to some of the other suggestions here and why they won't work

1. Make it so you can only trade offline? They can leave a FTP account logged in to monitor prices then have their trader login update then go back to offline mode
2. Make it so the trader can't update while on the trading platform? They will just walk off the trading platform update then go back on the platform

On FV muhbis's were selling at like 500k each in the bazaar the somewhat recently and I sold 10 to barter at like 430k each, to save myself the hassle of setting up my bazaar bot. My main problem is I can't sell stuff in the bazaar while I'm playing.

Making it all offline begs the question of why even have the Baz zone. For many the baz is the window and paying for a parcel. Why not have the sell feature just be a consignment window where the game charges a fee. Percentage or whatever. Maybe set a cap on how many items you can offer and a monthly cap on how much revenue you can bring in. Start as a basic service available to FTP and then pay to up your capacity. Start off at like a 5 item limit and maybe 50k plat a month sales. Having to pay to use the baz feature IMHO is bs. Every player should have the ability to offload their crap outside of spamming chat channels. Especially if scripts have ruined the experience of being online in the baz.

The evolution of the Baz makes sense as to how we got here, but its time to move on. It needs to be fixed so that it can't be compromised by the lazy and the unscrupulous. Not having a bunch of offline automatons in a lag producing zone might just be the trick.

FTP baz is a bad idea because the people can abuse it even more. At least anyone using it now is supporting EQ via DBG in someway.

I don't see how offline only trader and auction house are any different from each other, except that auction house doesn't lock down the account.

The simplest method to implement an auction house within the current system could be to assign one trader to each account and then lock that character to the zone. I don't know if it would be possible within the current code to make it so the player can select a character as their trader, which can't leave the zone but stays available to sell while another character is in use on the same account.

I agree on having an auction house, but there is really no reason to even have a trader involved. Just implement a new NPC that connects you to an auction house. All the details beyond that are minor compared to the benefit it'd bring to EQ.

Do ya'll really think the devs are going to take the time to completely remake / revamp the bazaar from the ground up to make it into an "auction house" or whatever? Just asking, since it seems to come up over and over again... and I think it's by far the least likely path they'll take.