AH addons. Please remove cancel scanning/posting functionality

Community WoW Community Council
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AH addons periodically come up for discussion on the forums, but I wanted to address some concerns about addon functionality based on my experience from this expansion. I apologize for the long post as I’m unsure how to condense it without leaving out info that I feel is important.

We all know that addons like TSM allow you to quickly cancel listings that have been posted in front of and repost them with just a few clicks. These features allows people with the addons to push more casual players out of the AH particularly when they sit in town for hours a day or login repeatedly.

My cluster of 4 medium pop RP servers have a number of these players. In fact, there are a couple that login every 45-50 minutes like clockwork (I’ve actually used timers a few times to test this out). These players are easy to bait in auctions (assuming you are online) because they are literally only online long enough to cancel and relist their auctions. I’ve tried messaging them (politely, no insults or anything) and never get a response.

They obviously don’t owe me a response, but when I message them that I’m going to bait their auctions that they just cancelled (like listing at 500 when the going price is 2500) and they repeatedly fall for it, either they are incredibly oblivious or perhaps botting. I’ve also noticed that when I buy the auctions from these players, they lack the crafting tag that is normally associated with a bag or piece of equipment. In my experience, this has only happened to me when the crafter is not from my server group (I could be wrong on this).

I’m actually less inclined to believe it’s botting because I’ve noticed a new trend that has started since warband banks were implemented. Now I love the bank and it’s an amazing feature, but when you throw in AH addons like TSM, it allows people to easily flood multiple servers with auctions which is really frustrating.

I know of at least 2 accounts doing this on my servers and have suspicions of several more. The two that I can confirm are because I messaged one and they admitted that is what they are doing and another made characters on all 4 servers in my server group with character names xxxxcenarioncircle, xxxxblackwaterraiders, xxxxsistersofelune, and xxxxshadowcouncil (truncated to whatever the limit is). They would list the exact same items from each character and it took them 2 days to realize that they were competing with themselves and cut down to one. No one who actually plays on our servers would make that mistake. Some clockwork listers may seem botlike because they are simply going as fast as possible to do their listings across many servers.

Crafting materials on the AH were made region wide to help stop people from cornering entire markets on servers and that was a great change. However, with warband banks and these AH addons, it’s letting people easily flood markets on multiple servers and consolidate gold and items into a single place that can be accessed from any character.

These players are making it more difficult for your average player to craft and sell items on the AH. Even I am exhausted dealing with them and I’m absolutely willing to put in a significant amount of time for this as I enjoy crafting.

TL;DR
Please remove cancel scanning and reposting features from AH addons. I’m fine with certain features like tracking income, tracking items across multiple characters, etc.

With the implementation of the warband bank, AH addons with these features allow players to flood multiple servers with auctions. This pushes out even more players who might otherwise engage with professions than when they were limited to their own servers.

Yes, it could be done without the addons but it would be far more time consuming and far less convenient. Just like how crafting materials were made region wide to combat a few players dominating markets, removing these features would be another big step in that direction.

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Yes, this is completely normal when the crafter isn’t on your server/connected servers. Happens with crafting orders too if you cross realm guild craft.

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Oh right. Now that cross realm guilds are a thing, it would make sense that would happen there as well.

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Trade Skill Master is an addon that, if we were to take into account the terms of use, does not allow the automation of processes within the game, and should be banned. For some very strange reason, its use is still allowed to this day.

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I agree. I actually downloaded it a month or two ago to experiment with it and see what it would let you do. And yeah, it feels like it gives 1 button clicks similar to ones that were broken in other addons like in the original Decursive long ago.

The original Decursive would give you a single button to click and it would automatically search for someone in your party that had a debuff you could cleanse and would do it. The only thing it required on your part was a single click and it would take care of the rest. Blizzard broke that functionality because it trivialized some mechanics.

After setting up a few parameters in TSM, you can run a cancel scan and then spam click a single button to cancel any auctions that have been undercut. Or you can run a posting scan and spam click a single button and it will automatically set prices and post those items. It will even detect and price match different stats like multicraft, ingenuity, etc if the item has those.

It’s bad enough when you have several high volume sellers using this to constantly undercut auctions on your server. It’s even worse when people are now doing this across multiple servers because of the convenience with the warband bank (I like the warband bank, please don’t break it).

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I’ve had a few more interactions with new people coming onto my servers just to flood the AH.

The most egregious one that I’ve seen lately is someone who has characters on 65 servers. I was suspicious of them, so I looked up their guild on the armory. Every single member in that guild is a level 10 vulpera rogue with the naming convention (servername)xxxx. The xxxx are the same 4 letters on each character, but I changed it because that might be considered calling someone out if it was too identifiable.

The scanning/posting features just allow people to abuse the systems and push regular players out. That functionality needs to be taken out.

Edit: I got a screenshot but blacked out the final chunk of the character names just to provide some proof. If they log on and spam a bunch of auctions on my server, what do you think they are doing on the other 64 characters?

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This only reinforces what I’ve always thought about addon scanners: they are a real cancer in the game. In this thread, I even considered mentioning Trade Skill Master, but the text was already too long. Still, I demonstrated how some of these addons can even prevent players from certain servers from being seen in Mythic+ pug queues.

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This will likely be my last post on here as I doubt more updates about finding bots/people abusing AH addons will help since it doesn’t add anything we haven’t already established.

But I did want to add this one last one as I got an in game letter about a week ago that someone I reported had been actioned for cheating. I’m pretty certain I know which character it was as I haven’t seen them post auctions since and they were doing it 8-10 times a day in general.

Now in the last day or two, there’s been a new character posting the same types of auctions that is also a level 2 warrior stationed in booty bay in the exact same spot just like the previous one. They are also in the exact same alt guild from Area 52 (not in my server group). I’m going to report them and see if I get another letter.

Anyway, I guess this has all been a long round about way of saying that I know we will never get rid of botting but that removing posting/cancelling features on AH addons would go a long way towards stopping people from abusing them.

Edit: Just adding one more addition since I was able to find and track 4 more groups of characters today like the screenshot above. A guild with 50+ characters that all have a servername naming convention and throw up various auctions on my server. I assume They do that on all the rest as well.

One thing that’s odd is that 4 or 5 of them use vulpera for all of their characters. Most make rogues, one uses mages. It could be coincidence but it’s just odd that a majority of them pick vulpera. All of them are horde though except one set of alliance characters.

Edit 2: Someone just messaged me in game to give some info that they had collected from their servers as well. We did have some crossover, but there were definitely several that each of us knew about that the other didn’t. I think that brings me up to around 10 or so groups that we can confirm because they are in the same guild. There are likely more, but they aren’t guilded and so it makes it harder to confirm.

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