Oh, definitely. The cancel scan has been used for years and I know there are a number of goldmakers that take it to the extreme. I can only speak for myself and my own use of the AH and addons.
Until LIFO I rarely cancelled my auctions. My feeling was it would sell even if someone undercut me by 1c. How quick I got my gold didn’t matter. Most of the time I still ended up selling what I wanted. Now I feel more pressure to go through my auctions and cancel and repost. If there are 6 other people posting at the same price I’m hoping that mine will sell in the next hour or 2. If it doesn’t I’m going to end up below someone else and have little chance of someone buying it.
Again, I can only say how the LIFO system has changed the way I think about canceling and reposting. I’m sure for many that haven’t noticed or cared.
Those people are not the problem I think. Sure they may generate a fair amount of request, but after they post it it will sit their until they need to do it again. This seems to be more geared toward the AH squatters that sit there and run cancel scans every 5-15 mins and constantly cancel and re-post items to make sure they are on the top.
I guess I figure they’re probably the same type of person, their whole wow time is spent in front of that ah buying, selling, canceling canceling canceling
Haha, great, that’ll do even less than the hamhanded attempt to break the small group of 24/7 cancelscanners did!
When I first heard about the change yesterday, I played around with the AH a bit and while I noticed a bit of delay, I kept cancelling 1 enchant and reposting it and the guy that basically runs the enchanting economy on the server by cancelposting was still undercutting me in under 30s, so if it slowed him down any, it wasn’t enough to matter.
Not all who use TSM are AH squatters, if I see a group of items that are currently under market value for my server, I will snap them up and flip them for money. Sure I would generate a fair amount of requests doing so, but then I will sit on them and repost every 48 hours until they are gone. Rarely I may cancel and repost if something drastic happens (like if some random item becomes super valuable for some reason)
The best adjustment in all honesty would be to redesign the entire AH from the ground up. Unpopular and probably costly yes but this would be the best solution.
That said if we are to continue with the band aid fixes: don’t throttle the entire thing. Its the equivalent of trying to kill a spider and bringing out explosives. Sure you killed the spider but you also just blew up your house. I dont claim to be an expert in any of this, but I have and still propose only throttling the cancellation of auctions. That way people who make mistakes can still cancel those mistakes and arnt punished but it will hinder those who are pulling the mass cancel scanning that you seem to be targeting. That said there are ways to get around this issue such as keeping some of your inventory in your bag and only running post scans. However to combat this perhaps a limit could be placed on the amount a single item can be post on the AH by a single person set high enough such that regular players arnt effected say 10k. If someone is posting 10k of a certain item they are most likely falling into the group of people you are targeting. That said there are probably problems with this that I’m not seeing so anyone feel free to point them out. As I said Im not an expert nor have I ever claimed to be.
I see where you’re going with this, but I think arbitrary limits on ANYTHING are probably a bad solution here.
The reason cancelscanning exists is because it’s the most profitable way to work - low inventory can still be an effective monopoly.
Make cancelling unprofitable (or practically eliminate it entirely) and you’ll break that entire cycle. There are many ways this could be done, and ways to do it that won’t overly harm the “average” player - whoever that is.
If blizzard would talk to the creators of TSM and such, who already wanted to open lines of dialog so they could help, they could probably get them to do something about cancel scanning.
Instead they tried to pull this and hope no one would notice lol.
Just make a grace period for cancelling. Cancelling auctions has its purpose. Everyone can relate to posting something by mistake or posting it at the wrong price. If you are lucky enough to notice you should be able to cancel. Give a grace period of 30secs and after that the post is on the ah for full duration.
If it was just the AH changes in a vacuum, I might be alright with it. I agree that cancel scanning has gotten ridiculous and it hurts regular players who are trying to sell small quantities of items, and that preventing it makes sense for a number of reasons.
What I can’t agree with is how heavy-handed and misguided a lot of recent changes have been. This is similar to the changes on classic that they claim are to address botting-rather than actually addressing the issue, they’re slapping on a “fix” that doesn’t actually do anything and has incredibly easy work arounds for bots, and in this case, there are still easy work arounds for cancel scanners/snipers…just get a second account and run it in the background
They keep claiming this changes are to only target the few percentage of players that take advantage of it, to benefit casual players, but all it’s really doing is hitting players right in the middle of that. People who sit in the AH cancel scanning and reposting are just going to keep doing it on their secondary accounts, just at a reduced speed, while the people in the middle who post relatively frequently but not excessively can no longer compete with them. If anything this is going to make the divide worse, and give complete control of markets to the massive-scale sellers, letting them dictate the prices even more. People playing on a single accounts either have to choose to spend a lot more of their play time posting items, or just bow out.
I only post about 100 items every 24 hours currently, but this change made it take at least five times as long to post them. Right now with no real meaningful content available posting and restocking items is most of what I do, so I’m closing up shop and letting my subscription lapse because of whats happening with these “fixes”. Again, if it was just this change I’d probably be keeping my subscription through Shadowlands, but it’s clear the people making these changes either don’t understand their own game, or are actively pushing for people abusing the system to make multiple accounts and increase subscription numbers to continue abusing it, so I’d rather not support it right now.
Today was better than yesterday but still painful.
138 items in my bags to re-post using TSM, in order to do it efficiently. The first part of posting is the scan of 138 items. The first 98 or so went pretty quickly but then noticeably slowed down, so the 100th scan was at the 45s mark. It seemed the scanning sped up briefly around the 1 minute mark but it quickly slowed. It took 2 minutes to scan all 138 items. The first 98 items took about 40s and the last 40 took 80s.
Posting was painful, taking 4:30 (270s) to post while spamming a macro. Only the first 7-9 didn’t seem to be slowed.
Those are the specifics from my medium pop server. (On which, by the way, I usually only experience lag when I’m in one of the assault zones on the day they reset.) I usually re-post expired auctions once or twice a day and have about 400-500 crafted items that I keep up with. I just want to post them, craft replacements, and get on to other things in the game!
Specific recommendations, in order:
Delay/slow cancel actions or mails only – but not the cancel scans. I think it is important to let items be canceled quickly in small numbers because sometimes people make mistakes while posting – like leaving a zero off – so I’m more in favor of making canceled auctions take 5 minutes to an hour to arrive.
Don’t throttle posting auctions at all! We’ve already done the scan with whatever delays it has, now let us get them up there so we can be done. A delay on scans means I’m tabbed out somewhere but a delay on posting means I spin my mouse wheel/post macro for 5-10x longer than I used to. That causes active, foreground aggravation and frustration. Let’s cut that out, ok?
If you insist on a limit to scans, make the limit be higher than possible bag space so we can post our auctions quickly. Maybe 150? I’d rather there not be a limit on scans for shopping purposes but at least let us post our auctions in a timely manner.
A lot of us suspect that the small minority who do a ton of AH calls fall into 2 groups, snipers and those who constantly cancel and re-post. TSM already disabled sniping so please focus on the frequent mass cancelling. The rest of us are just trying to serve our markets and feel like collateral damage.
No more than it makes you right for not understanding this. What made wow great is that there were many ways to play the game. That was slowly eroded over the years and is why Classic was so popular. But they’re ruining even that.