It’s quite profitable IMO. It’s trivial to /follow and pick herbs across multiple clients, even with having to do each action per client.
There’s also the benefit of having one toon sit in trade chat selling your wares while playing the game in the other client.
I have a solution. Make everything no drop. Eliminate the AH and that entire playstyle. Make people earn their own stuff.
It’s funny when it comes to making gold, everyone goes after “multi=boxer”. I bet the issue is more account sharing than “multi-boxing”, especially since you claim he is online 24x7. People have to sleep.
Saw this on another MMORPG where 1 person mutliboxing locked down 2 spawn points for over a month (that I personally saw. Other players complained on the forums. In the end the company did nothing because they would test the “player” to see if they responded in time and the GMs responded on the forums saying they tried multiple times and the person was never afk…
Everytime I see someone make this claim, my immediate thought is “So it’s not ok for someone else to be on “24x7” with no sleep, but it’s ok for you to somehow be online 24x7 with no sleep to make sure someone else is on 24x7?”
I’d like to see this as well because his misunderstandings and inability to write decent addons has lead to him attacking my points on two websites. Sygon also sells TSM groups on Patreon for money, so I already consider him to be one of those kinds of goblins.
It would be great if we had someone who a) has experience with the auction house api and b) can write a small addon that shows what I’m describing. So far only a handful of people who have replied here have had any idea of what I’m trying to describe. The unhinged people who repeat the same “all or nothing” mentality are driving away those who actually have experience with this. There’s an area in between a full-fledged bot that buys, sells, shops, and opens its own mail and someone who has figured out how to loop a shopping scanner and then wait for items to show up, manually buying them and restarting the scan.
Fortunately, you don’t get to dictate who posts in your threads.
Excuse me your lordship, while I put in quite literally hundreds upon hundreds of hours since Legion into making my TradeSkillMaster work the very best way possible. And you’ll futher excuse me, your high and mightiest, that I charge a mere $1 a month for anyone to access my work that has taken that much time.
Oh, I forgot to bow to you before I point out that except for my exact TSM groups and operations, I explained how I do things for free on Reddit over seven lengthy articles in the woweconomy subreddit. Also, I made a YouTube video explaining how to extract items on Wowhead to import them into TSM. That video is also free.
1.5 million downloads of my addons since 2009 says you are wrong, but keep making personal attacks if doing so makes you feel better.
Not once did I ever make personal attacks on your points. What I actually did was say that your points are silly, because they aren’t based on facts, truths, or reality. Never did I say anything about you personally. You cannot make the same claim, sadly. (Also, looking at you, Pawzer).
Weird, it looks like right here you’re running the gambit of me being too ignorant to understand the search functions and what can be automated through the api.
I asked you to tell me what I’m “making up” here and on wowinterface, neither have been replied to and you continue to call me crazy. If you can’t figure out what the word “scans” means when it comes to shopping on the ah, then why reply? Skipping over the discussion and jumping right into “you can’t do this, you’re crazy” shows how little you know about the ah api. It’s ok to be ignorant, but don’t take out your frustration on me.
Here’s a short list of claims vs what can be done:
Anything else?
Never claimed they did. You can click on your screen anywhere and not be logged out.
This discussion is about THE AUTOMATED PROCESS OF LOOKING UP OF ITEMS AND THE HANDLING OF THOSE FINDS INTO A FORMAT TO THEN BUY FROM, NOTHING ELSE.
Never claimed that, please link to me where that’s said.
Read above.
With no addons running other than an ah scanner, I can run 20 something accounts while scanning for items. You’re ignorant to how hardware works and how powerful a semi-decent gaming computer is.
You’re misunderstanding the topic at hand, re-read.
The rest of your bullet points have nothing to do with the discussion since I never said that any of that was against the rules or spirit of the game. I’m sorry you’re having this much trouble.
To be fair to you, Foxbanker, you did not mention multiboxing. It was brought up by other people. I was answering the points brought up throughout the whole thread.
As for the quote, that isn’t automated. First, create a list of items in a table or array. Then hook one of the auction house Lua events. I’m not sure which one in particular, possibly AUCTION_HOUSE_BROWSE_RESULTS_ADDED because it returns useful information. Compare the results to the table of items, and if an item is found to be a match, and with the user’s desired price, display the result. Otherwise keep going until the event is unhooked or the auction house window is closed, or something else like logging out or even a UI reload.
That is actually pretty simple. That isn’t automated, nor is it automatic.
If that is good, and FPS is still playable, I don’t mind being wrong or ignorant, and don’t mind gaining knowledge. On my 5-6 year old first generation Ryzen, playing 4-6 WoW instances would be unplayable for me. For you, if you can make it work, that’s kind of awesome.
See, that’s much more civilized than the other responses, I can work with that.
From a non-programmer’s observation, the event continuing to run sounds like automation. If it’s not, what else would it be called? Shopping features, specifically ones used to look for items, in the majority of ah addons only send one request. That request can be for hundreds of items or just a handful, but the search for more items ends when the results are returned. Typically the addon looks for items in the group, those items are returned, the scan has completed and you’re free to pick from the results. But if the request brings you the items then goes back to look for more, I would define that automation if it’s able to search, hand off the results to a table, then begin to search again until what you’ve say occurs.
Because that kind of repetitive search isn’t offered on most ah addons, I’m under the impression that it’s either not allowed, is too hard to program, or has too many chances of api calls overlapping and bricking the addon. Any of these could be the case, but I can’t answer that since I don’t make addons.
However, while all of this may be technically allowed, I think it’s creating a dangerous area for actual botters. If you’re able to run a process that’s able to keep giving you new results within a couple of seconds across that many accounts, then this can easily be abused and I think it should be reevaluated.
Same seems to happen IRL so why not? Over half the wealth in the U.S. is in the hands of one family.
Whatever the event is, and I guessed at the event above based on a quick glance throught the API, it isn’t continuously running, or in coding vernacular, fired. Events in Lua are fired because of or as a result to something happening. Events do not endlessly run in a loop waiting for something to happen. At least, in general, for most events. The combat log events do run continuously for as long as the player is logged into the game, even in safe or rested areas.
The auction house events are like most other events: they trigger, or fire, when something happens that affects the auction house. That means an addon hooking the event could have quite a lot of downtime where nothing happens, then a half-second of activity. In that half-second, that’s where the addon would compare the newly auctioned item to the table of user-defined items and prices.
In AnS and TSM’s cases, when running a sniper scan, all that is being done is hooking the event and waiting it to fire, compare items to results, rinse, repeat. If no new item is listed, the event being hooked never fires. It isn’t a loop, and isn’t automatically waiting for an item to be listed. It is a moment in time, a moment when a new listing is placed, the event fires, done.
Hooked events are not run constantly, and when they fire, it is once. An addon which has hooked an event is “listening” for when the firing occurs, and otherwise is doing pretty much nothing.
This is the bottom line of it. Even before this person existed (making the assumption the OP’s report is correct – I haven’t checked their info) the AH was basically unusable by the average person. For a very long time now, anything the average person attempts to list/sell is immediately undercut by piles of the same thing so they can’t sell anything. The people constantly relisting have plenty more than enough gold to eat a few relisting fees until they drive off the average player who isn’t going to keep throwing gold at relisting their one item only to have it never sell. When I’ve been more persistent than most trying to sell things in the past, I’ve even been harassed via in-game mail by these deep pocket AH jockeys, particularly over older crafting mats which aren’t being listed by everyone.
The recent changes made to the AH method of listing haven’t slowed down these big-time AH jockeys in the slightest.
It’s absolutely obvious they’re botting. They’re 100% NOT sitting there watching it all with their own eyes and just buying/selling normally. The buyouts happen too fast, too consistently. They should be prosecuted just like other botters, but Blizzard is never going to do it. If that is by choice or by inability to prove what’s happening, I don’t know, but the AH will remain unusable until they do something about it.
It has nothing to do with them making a profit or with them buying/selling. It has to do with how they’re doing it. Leaving an automated program running somewhere which is doing it for them while they’re doing other things and which is acting thousands of times faster than any normal human interaction with the AH is capable of acting… that is the part not allowed. The point is, if you’ve programmed a way to cheat, you’re still cheating.
Here’s Lua events “translated” into driving a car. Most events, including the auction house, work this way.
Open the door. Sit down. Close the door. Attach the seatbelt. Start the engine. Each of these is a singular event that fires once, and none of them fire again while you are driving.
The combat log is like actually driving from A to B. The combat log has micro-events, and they fire once per activity, just like other, regular events. However, the overall combat log event is running constantly.
Accelerate. Brake. Change lanes. Turn on the signal light. Turn off the signal light. Stop. Go.
In WoW, the micro events of the combat log might look like this:
Cast a spell. Cast a spell. Lose control. Move (not a combat log event, movements have their own events). Dodge. Parry. Notice that I said “Cast a spell” twice. Each time is the same micro event, but it is fired twice, once per spell.
They’re very open about their profits in a well known discord server. I don’t think they’d be that up front about having over 500m gold and posting their TSM screenshots each time they hit gold cap on a different server if they were cheating. I could be wrong and they could have the largest balls ever recorded by man, but I doubt that. If you’d like to check on their progress in game, I’d be more than happy to send you the proof I have so far, just so you can verify my claims.
This is where my understanding runs out.
So if the engine is the search algorithm for your addon, it’s able to continue to run as long as everything preceding it is locked in?
Open the door. Sit down. Close the door. Attach the seatbelt.
Open the ah.
Start the engine.
Starting your scan.
Each of these is a singular event that fires once, and none of them fire again while you are driving.
Your scan runs until you either stop it, close the ah, or close the game?
So the api calls are just a way to interface with Blizzard’s system and extract information from their database. But the way you handle that information is what separates the speed and complexity of your addon from others. If that’s the case, then Lua is very simple and the hard part is trying to organize the information Blizzard is giving you. Unless I’m misunderstanding something.
I’m too tired to figure out where the engine of the car fits with my analogy. Otherwise yes, that observation is correct, keeping in mind it isn’t doing anything unless and until an event fires. Once the event fires, do the compare, then the scan runs constantly in “idle” mode, waiting for the event to fire again.
No, that’s correct, and you didn’t misunderstand.
The scan itself is “idle” even when running; it is waiting for an event, but the player has to have the auction house window open, which is why it appears to be running all the time. The scan really is doing a whole lot of nothing, other than a visual indication.
Like other activities at the auction house, you cannot snipe, post, shop, at the same time. That’s why you cannot post or shop while sniping, or any other combination.
If you, or anyone else have questions, I’ll be back tomorrow.
I know I said I was off to bed, but I thought of something. I haven’t used AnS, so this is looking at TradeSkillMaster.
So the AH is not the core of the game. OP has so much hate over something so trivial like:
Who cares? Also, it is so easy to make enough gold to buy a token for a free monthly subscription by playing less than 1 hour a day. Honestly, I have no issues with making gold, buying my 291 ilvl legendries on multiple characters, and honestly anything I need actually.
There are bigger issues that needs Blizzard’s attention to get fixed. This is not one of them.
I swear, it always seems to come back around to this.
If people are constantly finding “cheap deals” on the AH, that means people aren’t making profit, which’d include OP and everybody else.
Gold making methods became extremely popular in BFA due to the Brutosaur, and people kept at it afterwards.
OP is also wrong, because I’ve used the TSM feature a couple times and helped some friends nab some stuff for their collections, and I am still flipping stuff - albiet not as often, since I’m sort of bored of that sort of thing.