It won’t, I don’t blindly buy stuff off the AH. I make gold buying, reselling, and farming. I’m no so thick as to just blindly click “buy”
I check prices, check my profits, check current trends in buying. None of this is hard at all. If I do however click and buy the wrong thing, you can rest assured I won’t make any posts about getting accidentally scammed.
But they’re literally no different other than the amount, and yet their positioning can be “jumbled” in no different than the would-be scammer. Whether it is 1c, 1s, 1g, or 1,000g, if the complaint is rooted in “Well I hit the sort button, and it sorted based on something I don’t actually care about, but I bought the first thing on the list as the lowest and it wasn’t actually the lowest” then the money amount is irrelevant.
The easy solution is to just add another sort option (or change the current one), but that doesn’t make it a scam.
No need to be a petty little thing.
So when the market changes because people stop farming certain materials, thus driving price up - should they stop it?
Don’t forget that the market price for many items changes daily. When the expansion was getting ready to release, should Blizzard have blocked all the auctions for gems/ore/etc in prep for JC to level up? Prices skyrocketed after all, grossly over valued and it calmed down a good bit just in the short time since TBC released. But if Blizzard destroyed the market then people wouldn’t have bothered selling or would have only used LFG, thus opening people to actual scams.
Nobody “tricked” them. The price was literally listed there for everyone to see. They didn’t come up and get the OP’s friend to sign a contract, or promise them something like 5 potions an hour for the rest of their life, or convince them that only their potions can heal the “HP -they- don’t want you to know about.”
The seller had zero interaction or even knowledge that the buyer existed as a living object until that sale went through by the buyers accord. The seller just said: “I’d sure appreciate it if someone bought this item, I’ll put it with the others and make sure to mark it clearly.” That’s all.
Are you seriously arguing 1s difference in buy out is no different than 1000g?
But they did. It might be a simple trick you personally wouldn’t fall for but the buyer was tricked.
Get an AH addon, and you will never have this problem again.
I use tsm, highly recommended.
But again, blizz could easily prevent this.
If tsm can show me how far off traditional server price something is, blizz can put a confirm on the purchases that are x percent off.
I think people are getting caught up on different definitions here.
Is it scummy, to list an item with a buyout like that? Yeah. You’re essentially hoping someone hasty doesn’t notice until it’s too late, and then taking advantage of them.
Is it a scam? Not in the classic sense of the word. There’s no fraud or lying here; you’ve clearly marked a buyout price. The buyer is getting ripped off, but they weren’t lied to.
Comparing it to a phishing scam is closer to the truth, but at the same time phishing scams have many tools in place to look more legitimate than this practice, and the small differences are much harder to notice. Here, the person is banking on you rapidly buying and not paying almost any attention at all.
Blizz should probably add a “are you sure” button to the AH for purchases about a certain threshold.
if it did i’m not going to the forums and complain how stupid I was.
You are so smart.
S-M-R-T
I’m seriously arguing that whether the difference is 1s or 1000g, our current sorting option jumbles and “misorders” them all the same. If knowing this people still haphazardly click on items for purchase, we’re at the point of “I chose the wrong quest reward” levels of carelessness that no one is to blame but themselves.
It’s unfortunate your guildy fell victim to this AH posting scheme. There is currently 1 player doing this on the server I am on and they are running multiple thousand auctions a week. I mentioned it in general chat this morning for others to be alert when buying and got ripped into by several players. That’s when I remembered this is Wow and Blizzard has supported and promoted the “exploit early, exploit often” mindset to the player
base for many years.
Sorry that’s not a scam. Just don’t be stupid when buying auctions.
You mean like the one that’s already in the game and has been forever? Not even for any kind of threshold, literally every auction you buyout (unless you’re using special addons) will confirm that you’re sure you want to buy it.
But the difference is that blizzard doesn’t actively try to trick you into taking thr wrong quest reward plus this could very easily be fixed by simply allowing sorting by buyout amount. Which would not only completely neuter this kind of scam but actually be more useful in general for everyone.
The intent doesn’t really matter when the result is indistinguishable and there are no checks in place for justifying a bid and buyout price. Whether someone accidentally put too many zeros or not enough, or did so purposefully, the result is an unsorted list that allows a hasty and careless person to dramatically overspend or under spend what is the usual market value for that day for that item.
I’m fine with this change, I’ve said so before. I just don’t treat the absence of this sorting option as an opportunity to scam.
The result isn’t indistinguishable though, someone paying hundreds or thousands of gold for an item they thought was very cheap and is only caused by someone explicitly acting with malicious intent is quite different than an oopsie.
You don’t just accidently add a couple extra zeros onto an item that is only being posted for a couple gold.
People have failed to address another aspect of this dishonest behavior.
If you place a bid on the ridiculously over priced item, the seller will cancel the auction prior to its expiration and relist the item for the same price.
Call it what you will, the bottom line is that this is a case of someone trying to unjustly enrich themselves at the expense of another.
You are trying to use the games mechanics in a way that could be considered abusive to another player.
Nobody pays absolute attention to their surroundings at all time under every circumstance, and these people depend on this facet of human behavior to gain an advantage that they aren’t legitimately entitled to.
You can put the entire onus on the buyer and completely ignore the fact that but for the INTENTIONAL actions of the seller, this wouldn’t be an issue.
And they’ll lose their deposit. It’s a risk. There’s some dude in Retail who has ridiculously high prices on virtually everything in the AH - like 400,000g for a potion - probably to catch folks the same way that this did - I’ve never even considered reporting it as a scam or dishonest. The price is clearly marked. There are two layers of confirmation you have to click to make the purchase.
This isn’t a scam.
It’s a PEBKAC issue (or PICNIC if you’re former military).
A few things.
First, I didn’t call it a scam, I said it was dishonest, and it is, PERIOD.
Second, the fact that they aren’t willing to accept the bid price that THEY set means that their goal isn’t to sell the item, their goal is to get the ridiculous buyout price at the expense of someone else.
Third, this isn’t retail. I don’t care if the same thing happens in retail.
This is dishonest and done for the sole purpose of exploiting human behavior to their advantage. You can gloss it over with talk of confirmations and visible buyout prices, but you can’t escape the fact that this is designed solely to take advantage of people that may not be paying the utmost attention at all times.
I am still trying to figure out who is scummier, the dishonest seller or the people that attempt to justify this behavior.