Dear Blizzard,
PLEASE do something about the auction house bots.
The people flipping items for higher prices is bad enough, but when they are doing it with a bot it makes it nearly impossible for anyone else to buy reagents at a reasonable price.
One thing that would help is removing the automatic pricing that the blizzard interface uses. Make everyone have to enter an amount to be able to list an item. It would mean that the bots that are listing items under value in order to “Bait” the same pricing for themselves to snipe would be less successful. It is one very easy change to make that could help.
You could also add a delay before listings go live. When you post an auction have it delay by say 1 minute or so, thereby slowing down the ability of bots to use bait tactics.
Adding in some way for people to more easily report suspected botters would be helpful as well. It has taken me an hour of making a toon on the suspect botter’s realm in order to whisper him so I had a name to click on to be able to use the report player feature
I attempted to interact with one such person, whispered them so I had a name to be able to click to “report cheating” (since that was all that the in-game support could offer as a means of reporting a player for potential botting), only to find out that the “Report Cheating” option or button doesn’t exist and the only reportable items are inappropriate names and language.
I don’t know if the issue is being ignored because it increases wow token sales due to the massive inflation, but it is killing the professions and general economy.
16 Likes
Great, thank you for the information, I will do so.
1 Like
Simply put a small delay on buying or refreshing… i think we can all tolerate 10 seconds between buying.
What they do is post crap at bogus prices. For example cheapest herb is 50g they post an herb at 10g, and players auto post a bunch of herbs at 10g, then they buy up the stacks as quickly as possible. But if there was a 10 second delay, they couldnt do this any more as other players would buy it before them.
5 Likes
Or you could like pay attention to the price you are posting your stuff at and maybe look to see if it’s abnormally low compared to the other prices. That 3 units at 1/2 the normal price sticks out if you take a few seconds to think about it.
13 Likes
Please DO NOT DO ANYTHING ABOUT THE BOTS! bro…the boys are awesome. I’ve made 100s of thousands of gold simply undercutting everything by 1 gold. Literally entire banks full of inventory selling before I can get out of the ah. Don’t touch it. It’s been awesome!
2 Likes
Or, have Blizz set a decent price for items, and that is what they sell for. Rather negates the bidding, and instead turns it more into a global store, but it also negates bots. They can buy it, but they can’t make a profit off of it.
This is most likely not a popular method, but it would solve the issue.
I play another game sometimes where this is how the AH works. You put something it, it tells you how much it will cost, you say yes or no, and that is what someone pays.
Doesn’t keep people from selling individually, but it does wipe out the AH bots and the content is frequently available.
1 Like
This has been a issue since the start of the xpansion everyone knows of the trade cartels the game has and the lengths they will go to silence anyone that trys to undercut them or take what they perseive as their right to controll that market.
They change the price of items on a whim and will basicly force a price on whatever items they deem fit since they just have BILIONS of gold to do so.
3 Likes
Blizz needs to add a 10 minute delay before the post becomes active. If they cancel an auction then it is returned 24 hours after canceling.
I would prefer Blizz to break TSM but they won’t do that.
4 Likes
They just need to break the AH posting tools. Eliminate anything in the API that allows people to post on the AH.
7 Likes
Find the bots and stick magnets to them. They’ll be selling low and buying high in days.
1 Like
It is beyond frustrating, I stopped messing with the AH entirely because under market items are bought at before I can blink and then relisted much higher. IT is a headache.
2 Likes
That is a bad idea and people always blame bots for their AH mishaps
5 Likes
The easiest fix would be to just axe the API that interacts with the AH but we know blizz won’t do that because they get alot of subs from the bots.
4 Likes
That item is no longer available.
That item is no longer available.
7 Likes
I’ve always suspected there is an insider ‘sanctioned’ groups. Probably based on nepotism. There’s just too much real money in it for insiders not to take it.
Like paying to be a doorman or matre’di because it’s that lucrative.
3 Likes
honestly wouldn’t supprise me, worst thing is that they arn’t even trying to hide it so much nowadays they are blatently using bots, anyone that DARES to try and undercut their services openly get harassed either into hiding or stopping and if that doesn’t work they game to system to get them either banned or squelched.
1 Like
What the heck are you seeing that you think is Bots? I mean I see the bait AH posts trying to get people to post stuff on top so they can buy the stack that’s been happening since they went to the new AH. If I need goods that I see that happening to like the elemental stuff in DF. I snap up their underpriced bait till I get what I need. Just use the sniper addon with auctionator to grab stuff.
3 Likes
There are definitely ah bots. They scan the ah every second or so. If they see an item sold for less than market price they buy it and relist it. It’s almost instantaneous. What I don’t understand is how players think this is a bad thing. 1 hour mining and youve just made enough gold to not have to think about it for a month. The ore sells instantly… literally before you leave the ah it’s sold.
Yes…this does make things more expensive but all you have to do is undercut the bots by a single gold and they will pay you…you’ll never be more than 1 gold behind on any item the bots are buying. Inflation isn’t real if you are using the ah to sell things. I haven’t had an item take more than a few seconds to sell since launch. Made enough gold to last me through the entire season already and I’m making more everyday on easy mode because everything I have is guaranteed to sell. It’s free gold…I don’t understand the complaints at all.
I’ve been undercutting the bots almost every single day since launch with literally dozens of auctions per day…not a single issue. Made several hundred thousand gold with less than a handful of hours of farming. Not sure what you’re talking about to be honest.