My biggest issue with it isn’t the selling part. It’s the buying, you try to buy just a few of something while someone is doing the baiting and you get “This item is not available” over and over. You type in the amount you want, you hit buy, you get the “Item is not available” because they’ve just changed the listing again. Yea, you can watch the price when you’re listing, but how is someone supposed to be able to just walk into the Ah and buy something when you get the not available over and over because they’re constantly changing it.
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This is easy to fix. After posting an item, you should be locked from buying that item for 1 minute.
This would stop (or massively) reduce the amount of this scam. Most normal people would never be affected.
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Most of them I bet have 2 accounts, easy to pay for a second with tokens if you’re making a ton on the AH.
There’s someone who’s been listing and relisting while I’ve been sitting here in the AH, different names, but all from Gurabashi on the 5+ items I’m trying to sell/buy at the moment
AH bait posts are a jerk move, but they’re not disallowed.
Always pay attention to what you’re posting. Buy the low-cost materials and flip them. Never match price to anything with a very small stack. Always confirm the final price when you’re buying multiple of an item (bait posts also go the other way, where one item will be priced wildly higher than the rest).
If Blizzard wants to prevent people from doing bait posts, they’ll change how the AH works. In the meantime, caveat emptor.
It isn’t the changing the price when you go to buy that bugs me , it’s the flat out it’s no longer available message. Say, you’re trying to buy 10 of something, bait person has 1 up, next person in line has 8, that 1 vanishes, as far as the Ah is concerned they can’t fill that item anymore. Try again, someone lists the half price, cancels it again, item not available.
You’re right. The addons from back then were so much more egregious that blizz had to change what they could and could not do.
thats probably me, lol.
Baiting/flipping is easy gold.
I consider it AH pvp.
I snagged myself couple days ago, lol.
Selling at X gold and accidently posted too many baits and lost them all…like 700 of them lol. Took me a minute to realize and by then someone had bought them.
Wasnt a horrific loss, but a loss nonetheless. Still made a ton so Im not complaining. Just easy to make mistakes both selling and buying.
If everyone pays attention when they list no one will lose anything and they’ll get more they can sell from the lowballer.
But too many want to list everything without paying attention so they make doing this entirely possible.
Im at the point where i dont feel sorry at all.
They know this is a thing but they still list without looking.
Fool me twice…
As far as Im concerned this is no different than PvP.
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me and my cute little photo mode would like to be kept OUT of your beef with TSM, gnome!
What everyone seems to be missing here is that Blizzard explicitly enables this behavior. Their design of the Auction House user interface is what makes this type of scam possible, because when you list an item to sell, the UI automatically sets the sell price to the lowest current amount listed.
If Blizzard can’t or won’t do anything about the bots, then they should at least change the UI to no longer auto set the price for you. That would help prevent accidental listings. Be better, Blizzard.
This kind of bot/add-on manipulation of the market is annoying. It seems to be a constant occurrence with some materials too; I’m literally watching it happen with ironclaw ore right now. It goes against the spirit of the game, and it honestly boggles my mind that people seem to think this is okay.
It is by definition a scam, but as with all scams it’s the scammed person’s fault they got scammed, not the scammer’s fault.
Hey, Blizzard is good at deleting things. Just ask any of those guild vaults that turned up empty.
Actually though, don’t give them any ideas …
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you mean this WAR based game where you kill other players and can do so all day long if they stay logged in in warmode?
You mean this game where the AH is literally designed to allow price manipulation just like in real life…but isnt actually of any real effect other than some pride being lost when someone lists a bunch of stuff without paying attention?
seems to me its exactly in the ‘spirit’ of this war based game.
If there wasn’t sufficient info, I’d agree with you. But you can see that there is 1 seller at 50g (for example) and 1000 sellers at 100g and see that the 50g offer isn’t real.
the issue for me is trying to buy mats that are even slightly under the lowest price. no matter how fast i select, press buy and then confirm it’s always gone.
being able to set the buy price range on a bot, just constantly refresh the list and auto-buy is is way to keep the price fixed where you want it to be.
I guess i have to install a bot too?
I almost always go for 10 gold at least lower than the lowest price, sometime if it’s a mat/item that’s ridiculously expensive, and I have enough to cover the loss and still get a decent chunk, I’ll even do half the lowest price, just cause someone needs the mats more and I just need chump change to make occasional RP and business purchases as a GM.
Sure bots kinda hurt the bottom line a little bit, but mostly by dropping the overall price on things like Tinderboxes or Null stones that literally take hours to get. Regardless, things like Weavercloth from mining that are somewhat valuable but still farmable make up for it as a middle ground.
idk. I’m reluctant to call an imaginary transaction with no real-world value in a virtual game a scam. I’d prefer to leave that to schemes that have actual, significant, real-world impact.
In the same way we would not call taking my avatar and slaughtering thousands over the course of my WoW gameplay murder.
So my take is: AH PvP happened.
Now Bots - that’s something I think we all can agree needs to be addressed. But you would be amazed how an AH Goblin, with or w/out any addons or macros can be laser focused in their obsession to dominate a market. Most AH activity that are perceived as bots are actually just AH Goblin PvP’ers. I used to have a quote about that… but that was a number of SSDs ago.
Sorry that happened to you. I don’t mean this sarcastically, but I’d get an addon so you can enjoy posting, instead of having to focus so much of your attention on casual AH posting. There are sharks in the water as you found out.
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Heck, ya want cheap mats that badly? I’ll sell em to ya directly while I’m farming em if you can find me on my Drac farming alt somewhere in one of the 4 Dorn zones. up to 100 gold on some things less than AH price, just saves me the mileage.
Too many people want that big buck FAST, but a reliable stream of income is MUCH more preferrable long term.
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