The scanning, but they’re able to perform this on a level to which the only limit is their rig’s power. That’s the part I think is dangerous. Tsm was nerfed before because too many people were running their Sniper and it was messing with the server stability. This is doing exactly that except it’s not as widely available as Tsm’s was.
To protect the function that allows for automated scanning. Shopping, cancel scanning, and posting all require a 1 = 1 input per action. Scanning doesn’t. If scanning was protected, then everyone would be on equal footing and the only difference between productivity is how well your code can call the api.
This is what I suspect is being used and automated. When you send a blank request in the search bar of the ah, you get back everything listed. Cache that, only showing the items you want to find at the prices you want, automate the whole process, and you’ve got yourself something that no one else has access to.
function Auctionator.Search.GetEmptyResult(searchTerm, index)
– Remove “” from exact searches so it sorts properly
local cleanSearchParameter = searchTerm:gsub(“”", “”)
return {
itemKey = {
itemID = 1217, – Valid item ID, “Unknown Reward”, but unobtainable
itemLevel = index, – Differentiate between different empty results
itemSuffix = 0,
battlePetSpeciesID = 0
},
itemName = Auctionator.Search.PrettifySearchString(searchTerm),
iconTexture = 0,
name = cleanSearchParameter,
totalQuantity = 0,
minPrice = 0,
containsOwnerItem = false,
}
end
Problem is you think player housing in this game would have that level of customization, or that the engine could even support it. Those games that have expansive housing had it planned, the ones that don’t have a very barebones kind of thing that was hatcheted in.
Blizzard would have to tweak a lot of the engine to have the customization level that people are expecting from a housing system. What you’d be most likely to get is an option of very basic houses and some areas designated as being able to have certain types of furniture. Much like how customizing the garrison worked like.
XIV planned on housing from the beginning, as well as cutscenes. It’s why they flow so well, because they made sure those systems could exist and the engine could support it, albeit XIV’s jank engine relies on people installing third party mods or abusing glitches to make things “float” to give them more power customizing to make truly unique abodes but the ability to place furniture as you want for the most part and interact with it is because the engine was made with these in mind.
That said though, I can confirm the interior decoration pay. I used to make a lot before I made the grave mistake of taking an extended break of XIV to play Legion and BFA, people constantly wanted their RP bars, or personal homes expertly decorated and really liked the work I used to post on a carrd site before I deleted it to stop people spamming me on Discord to log over and spend hours doing their house when I was trying to do m+ or mythic raiding.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.