ill actually hang out at the auction house looking for items that i need and if something is on a ‘short’ timer with 1c and buy out is 100g, ill just keep refreshing the page and when i ‘feel lucky’ i bid to see if i can win that item for 1c, usually someone is doing the same and its a penny bid off.
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Sniping might be morally grey but it is NOT botting.
People really need to educate themselves, the way people snipe things is by TSM AH addon which can scan the last page of the AH. It has existed in retail for many years and is not against the rules or botting. If it was, Blizz would have broken it long, long ago.
People throw the term bot around way too easily these days.
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Stay on topic or go away. The post is about empathy and whether or not it’s morally acceptable to exploit obvious mistakes.
Not interested in nerds explaining the delicate nuance of how the exploitation is accomplished.
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You made the mistake by not checking your price before posting. It’s not obvious to other players, however. There are tons of things someone could think from “oh that person doesn’t know the value of it” to “oh these must not have been selling so it’s cheap” or even “someone just wants to get rid of something quick”. There’s no exploitation, you learned a valuable lesson. Don’t get pissy with people who are commenting on your thread.
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It is incredibly morally acceptable to capitalize on peoples mistakes. Thats just nature. Should the snake let the frog go instead of eat him if he makes a mistake? No. Does it suck? Yes. Is it fair? Also yes. It was your mistake, own it and let it go.
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From a past conversation on the Customer Support forum:
The sticking point for a lot of people seems to be how quickly those addons can find the deal and pop up that button for the player to press. We think of it as “the second after clicking the button”. It feels FAST.
In order to be botting, though, it would have to somehow emulate the player action of clicking the button. The only real way to know if any auction addon out there does that is to try them and see how they work. If one actually does buy without prompting, absolutely YES, report that. If not, you’re just running into the fact there are potentially hundreds of people all waiting at any moment in time for their addon to find deals they’ve asked it to look for and clicking [Buyout] ASAP when one is found.
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I don’t have a problem with legitimate auction sniping, which a lot of people do. Obviously setting up an ah snipe not is not legitimate though.
It’s problems like these that the og agro infernals could actually help curb if they worked like they originally did. I highly doubt most ah snipe bots have movement scripts to get themselves out of danger
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So, I used to be pretty convinced that there were AH bots. That was before I understood how TSM Sniper works.
My sticking point was, how in all the kabillion auctions can an addon that has human interaction find something that was posted for a low price a second after it goes up when it takes so long to scan the entire AH?
It turns out, TSM doesn’t scan the entire AH when it’s in “Sniper” mode. It only scans the most recently posted items, which is a much smaller and more targeted scan. That kind of scan can return an instant result, run constantly and put an item that was just posted in front of ten people just sitting there waiting for the latest AH posts waiting to pounce on mistakes. All the person scanning needs to do at that point is press a button and buy the item, no botting involved.
Now, you might be able to make an argument that the ability to scan only the most recent items on the auction house should be shut down to prevent that, and that would be more of a suggestion for the developers type of argument. But as it stands, it’s 100% possible to do with zero automation.
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Not in wow but in swtor, i got a lightsaber for like 100,000 credits when it normally sells for 1 million. Someone was missing a 0.
It wasn’t using software, it was dumb luck
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Poo… I guess after the forum maintenance I lost my old Bomon since I moved to a new realm and all my 117 posts are now gone from my personal posts. sigh
I’ve personally never used or seen the addon but based on the responses here…
I feel like the sniper TSM addon is a real edge case when it comes to botting. It’s damn close all the user has to do is click a button to buy it. While i feels tools to help the user sort the auction house better is fine I don’t think automating a popup when someone lists something super cheap is acceptable.
it creates a large disparity between people browsing the auction house normally ( or even with an addon that helps sort) and those using an this type of “sniper” addon
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They don’t care about multiboxers, which flagrantly display their cheating out in the open for everyone to see. Even if you report them, nothing is done. Knowing this, why would you expect them to care about auction bots?
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nothin wrong with sniping but these addons that just constantly scan for snipes make it a bit too easy…
Yeah, a human has to re-click the button to scan, right? So a constantly scanning add-on is botting that part.
I DO think a 2 minute grace period before an auction is listed isn’t problematic though. Gives people a final chance to cancel an improperly posted item.
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You messed up, somebody saw an opportunity. Tbh, if it was a bot, your lame attempt at pleading for empathy would be even more misplaced: it was on auto, and therefore Timmy didn’t think “Ah ha! Some poor unfortunate was clumsy, and now I shall exploit them unfairly!”.
Yawn. A fraction of the small number of players that actually post on the forums convinced themselves the game was, and is, about sharing is caring. Different people have different ways they see the game, and most of them don’t play it in that empathy driven way you seem to think is a foundation of the game.
Taking advantage of somebody else’s screwup IS part of the game, dude.
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I have done this many times over the years. Item is immediately relisted at its proper amount.
Double check before listing.
Just stumbling across it.
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i’m not trying to counter the general argument here. obvious there is some borderline automation going on with the sniping addons.
I just wanted to make the comment that the disparity is a choice —> everyone can use the addons if they choose too. taking a moral high ground stand on it and not using one because you think they shouldn’t work/exist when blue post says it’s np is just folks putting themself at the disadvantage.
i personally don’t use any auction house addons. i play the game, i don’t sit and watch for things to buy.
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it’s morally acceptable, in many games, and in real life. Demanding empathy from others in order to escape the consequences of your own actions, however, is just being passive aggressive.
In fact, as empathy is, at it’s most basic, putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. Everybody in this topic who says it was “your mistake, too bad” already knows they would accept their own mistake if somebody else did it to them. They tried on how it would feel, decided it wouldn’t upset them much, and carried on. They used empathy - they just didn’t come up with your answer.
Happier?
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That’s the whales with TSM addon that automatically scans the auction house 24/7.
It is a cheating and scummy addon for scummy people. Not sure how it made it’s way into classic considering that Addon brought the AH down to its knee in retail with insane amounts of lag
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Found a whale