Yes, it’s absolutely fair, because no other player is being prevented from doing the exact same thing, achieving the exact same outcome.
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Still no actual proof.
Except, again, nothing is preventing anybody from doing exactly the same thing, and achieving exactly the same result.
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There’s also a fancy new line saying no escrows, but people are still doing it.
You’d have to show me, because I can find nothing in the EULA (which covers all Blizzard games, not just WoW) that mentions the auction house, the market, or the manipulation of either.
I did find this, though:
Selling items on the Auction House for prices below their current market value (“undercutting”) is allowed, as the Auction House is viewed as a free market. A player is able to place any item up for auction for any price they wish.
Customer Support is entirely hands off when it comes to the Auction House, and will not intervene in pricing disputes.
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Escrows are not addressed in the EULA. Like, at all.
Policy update w/ boosting community ban specifically prohibits escrows.
So if you see a “bank area” guild/toon it’s an escrow and bannable now.
I’d wager a guess they were banned because they make it hard to track illicit gold/rmting. They wash/launder gold like crazy obfuscating where everything is coming from.
Antitrust laws are enforced about as often irl as they are in video games (never)
Not at all, if that’s happening and you have proof then submit it because automation is against ToS.
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It is, and isn’t at the same time. Naturally yeah, people will try to move towards monopolizing in a free market but it depends on how actually “free” the market really is. If we’re talking purely free, maintaining a monopoly is next to a logistical nightmare because anybody can do what you do at a different price and muscling them out is a significant bit harder to achieve unless you are willing to invest a lot of money to hindering them. Like if you make shirts, it’s going to be really hard to basically hire thugs to hinder their material supply, or continuously vandalize their shops so they can’t operate unless they’re really small time. But I mean like, two very prominent clothing manufacturers here, this would be next to impossible.
Now in a “free market” like in America, a monopoly is very easy to do because you just accrue wealth, buy out the bureaus and politicians and can enforce legislation to hinder your competitors. I.E Starbucks in I think Seattle lobbied hard to push a sugar tax that they were conveniently exempt from provided it was either purchased, or made in store. Granted, this isn’t a monopoly, but it’s an example of how a monopoly can much easier be enforced by legislation because your “free market” is actually rife with government intervention that is almost never going to favor you. This I think was dubbed the “Starbucks Loophole.” FFS that whole GameStop thing last year? Yeah the SEC is more concerned with investigating the subreddit, and not the stock exchanges or brokerage apps like Robinhood who all prevented people from buying GameStop stock at all “for your safety” and only allowed them to sell, which sank the price and allowed the companies caught in the squeeze to mitigate a lot of potential damage which does fall under market manipulation. Instead they’re as I said, more concerned about people meming on a subreddit that are in no way coordinated.
I guess other instances that are more like this, ISPs lobbied hard for an increase in basic regulations to startup ISPs, this made anyone trying to establish that as a business basically prohibited unless they had serious initial capital to meet the regulations.
For a literal monopoly though, the abusive to customers relationship between pharmaceutical companies and the patent office. There’s been cases in the past where people have found a type of medicine, filed for a patent. Then the patent office has either informed a bigger company of what was presented and by who so they could buy them out of it before it was signed, or in one specific instance in the distant past the patent office outright told the company the details of the patent and basically held it in limbo, that company filed the exact same patent and had it instantly rubberstamped leading to the shooting down of the initial patent because “one already existed.”
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Being a fan of writing addons myself, the OP is largely correct in terms of the technical things you CAN potentially do. Matter of fact, you can ALMOST write a fully working bot in Blizzard’s version of Lua.
The only thing truly preventing this is the fact that interacting with a given target usually has to be done manually… But that’s really as simple as right-clicking on the auctioneer.
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My only problem with all of this is the ability to automate scanning. Purchasing and cancelling auctions are restricted to input = action, but scanning is free to do what it wants. Why is scanning the special one?
Where is it against the rules?
Yeah…
I saw a major boosting community’s bank area toon reappear by org bank the other day. Looks like people think the escrow and boosting rules are fake news.
I propose an alternative solution:
Create an Engineering item called “Cherry bomb” that is placed in mailboxes. After x seconds, it detonates and dismounts all brutos within a 10 yard radius.
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hehe, those poor dancing elves won’t know what hit them…
This is a hilarious analysis because you’re insinuating there’s some kind of magical wall separating ‘legislation’ from the market. Starbucks creating a market favorable to them by buying off city councils is the literal end-stage of capitalism, not some kind of ‘corruption’ of it. If a company has the money to dictate the market, it will. That’s a feature of capitalist hierarchy.
“It’s not actually capitalism fault because the people with the most money can just shape conditions to favor their company.” See how ridiculous that sounds?
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the price of legendaries is TOO damm high!
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Or, when a market is unregulated, you accrue wealth, buy out supply networks and competitors and stifle opposition. Like what happened with Microsoft, Facebook, Standard Oil, Chiquita Banana and DeBeers Diamonds. All of them leveraged their wealth gained in their home countries to buy out their supply lines and prevent competition.
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80k for BiS gear is too high?
I wish it was 80k. Try 240k.
Are you seriously asking where botting and automation is against the rules?
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