But… how would they track this? They can’t go by IP, because then you’re locking out family members who play together. I have multiple guildies who play with their signficant others, siblings, etc. who live in the same house.
And I’m almost positive they aren’t allowed to check if you’re running multiple instances of the game. I could be wrong though, this is one area of the law I’m not entirely sure about, as it doesn’t really come up lol. I could swear I remember reading that doing something like this violates privacy laws in multiple places.
I’m going to ignore my thoughts on TSM in this post, because for me, the add-on is borderline botting, and I’m still not sure why it’s allowed. I’ve listed something for less than intended before, and it was snatched up before I could even open the cancel tab. And it wasn’t a commonly searched item like trade goods. It was like a random battle pet.
That said, I’m well aware these will not be popular thoughts.
For me, personally, a big thing I think should be happen is limit how often you can cancel auctions of the same item. By this I mean, make it so you can’t cancel the same item on the auction house twice within a 10/15/30 minute period or so.
Cancelling it once is understandable, you got undercut while you’re checking the AH. But the only people I’ve ever known to constantly list and cancel the same item are people trying to manipulate the market.
Likewise, make it so you can’t list an item for less than a list price you already have on the auction house, to prevent people using that as a loophole to bypass this. (And I’m sure you learned in the Discord, a big way people manipulate prices is by artifically making something look like a bargain. Place multiple items on the auction house at different tiers of prices. No one looks at names of the sellers anymore because Blizzard made it hard to find, so it goes unnoticed now.)
It would also be handy to make it so items purchased on the auction house cannot be placed back on the auction house for an indeterminate amount of time. (12 hours? I dunno.) Flipping is fine, but I’m trying to imagine why 99% of the time you’d want to re-list something you just bought. The majority of the time? It’s from auction house manipulators.
And the rest of the time? I’d wager 90+% of those people won’t care if they have to wait like 12 hours to fix their mistake, or they can take to trade chat.
One other thing I think would be handy, would be delaying auctions being listed to other players by 30-60 seconds. That way if you accidentally make a mistake and list that 100,000 BoE for 1,000g. You can fix it without being swiped before you have a chance to cancel. Now, I would suggest if you cancel an item in this 30-60 second window, it doesn’t get the “can’t list an item you just cancelled for X minutes” I mentioned above.
You might say that’s counter productive, but it isn’t. The listed items were never seen by other players, so any attempt to manipulate the market by that posting wouldn’t have happened yet.
There’s a line between respecting how other people play the game, and believing a dozen people shouldn’t control the economy of a game played by millions.
I have a friend I met in 9.0 during the content drought (I leveled like 7 toons from 10-50 through BGs alone, and talked to people I regularly saw in Stormwind or the bgs. I made like a dozen or two dozen friends during that 2-3 month period) who pretty much runs the base legendary item business on Proudmoore now. That’s all he focuses on. He doesn’t overcharge and he doesn’t try to manipulate. And even then, he’s talked to me about how he gets verbally attacked and insulted by the people who manipulate the AH, because he “moved in on their business” to the point I remember one night talking to him for about 6 hours while he was ranting because they got multiple people to log in and were actively undercutting him every single time he’d post an item within seconds.
Again, there’s a line between respecting other people playing the game and understanding that what they’re doing has crossed into toxic behavior that makes the game unfun for other people.
As for the topic of legendary base items in general, if you look at the material cost - they actually cost more than the base item themselves. This is because the legendary crafters aren’t the AH manipulators. They’re crafters who just enjoy crafting.
But they’ve been undercut by the AH manipulators who believe they control the entire economy to the point they’re forced to farm the materials in order to avoid selling them at a loss.
A good example of toxic manipulation was what happened yesterday. There was a quest for Tenebrous Ribs in Zereth Mortis. 30 of them. It should have only cost a max of 100g. No. These manipulators knew ahead of time, bought all of the Ribs, and posted them at ridiculous prices.
These are images from the WoW Achievement Discord that they were documenting while the mass buyout was happening.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/260539358891868161/797128231684931594/unknown.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/260539358891868161/797128278145630258/unknown.png
Then this was the aftermath:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/260539358891868161/797158497468809256/unknown.png
The first one was unclickable because they didn’t actually exist anymore. You were forced to pay 57g per rib. On some servers they were up to 1000g per rib. The AH broke essentially because of these manipulators. I don’t remember which discord it was in, (I’m currently only in a few WoW discords), but someone was talking about how their friend made over a 1,000,000g in those few hours just exploiting this.
This is honestly disgusting and shouldn’t be allowed. A LOT of games have mass manipulation of the economy as a perma bannable offense. I’m genuinely not sure why Blizzard doesn’t.
For those who are doing the Zereth Mortis Quests and don’t want to be blindsided over the next few days, I made a thread in General Discussion letting everyone know what the next items are:
Don’t get caught by the manipulators. Share this with your friends. Share it with General Chat. Just help stop the exploiters.
If someone is willing to Share a Tazavesh lockout with me, (I’ve been searching), I intend to buy a thousand Melons and place them on the AH periodically throughout the day that quest comes up for the vendor price, as well as offering them for free in general chat.