You can see this currently on desolate leather. Death Blossom
One person is listing 1 desolate leather at 1.54 and immediately buying up anything listed below their sell point ( looks like around 2.38 )
Edit:
Looks like somehow a broken ghost listing is created that allows people to buy up everything between that price and a target sell price. This was working on Desolate leather before the fix, it’s now working on Death Blossom.
With 10 million leather on the market this is artificially setting a market floor and with the speed at which everything below the sell point is bought up and the speed at which the 1 desolate leather is replaced, there is no way this is not automated. Every market sale in the whole game will buy that one desolate leather first. Yet it is always replaced.
Wait you you hear how the stock market works. This is called capitalism, if nobody buys at the price they are setting at then they will be stuck with product they can’t sell
And with 10 million units on the market leather should be dropping to a few silver. They’re still being abusive, just at a lower price with smaller margins.
And this is a game, they’re using automation and bots, and that’s cheating.
People are using trade chat to sell things now. So the entire purpose of the change was to convert solo players, casuals, shy people, and people with social anxiety into social butterflies by making it necessary to buy and sell in trade chat. /s
They are effectively setting up a monopoly on leather at least.
Auction 1 desolate leather for 5 gold so you can view the market from the auction holders perspective and keep hitting refresh. You can kind of watch the bot work in real time.
Everything below 2.38 disappears in one or two clicks, mostly people listing at 1.54
But that one desolate leather at 1.54 is always replaced and it would have to be replaced since it will always be the first to sell for every sale.
He probably should be getting it for silvers or even coppers.
And if I had to speculate they are storing everything they buy in the 2.5 million unit block at 2.50, which keeps growing. My guess is they’re slowly going to try and walk the price up and increase their spread.
People did that, I don’t think they can for long now.
That leather in particular seems to be a bug. That person is not online. And it can never seemingly be bought. I could occasionally get purchases at that price to go through, but it was never the one listed by that seller. So I’m really assuming that’s actually a bugged listing that’s not valid for purchase, but still shows up when auctions are retrieved(…which results in people posting at that price of course due to addons/default price in the UI)
There’s other strange behaviors like the units available is increasing as 100’s of thousands units are sold from below 2.45. And that block at 2.50 that had 2.5 million units a few minutes ago now has 2.8 million. It keeps growing even though there’s still a couple million units in front of it.
There also someone selling 1 leather for 10 silver every couple of minutes and not replacing it immediately. Same person. There’s definitely some shenanigans going on here.
Blizzard could fix this by putting “commodities” in a dedicated FIFO queue with automated price adjustments like the WoW Token (no undercutting, just supply/demand ratio affecting periodic price adjustments). Goblins will be unhappy but they can continue to play their AH mini-game with non-commodities.
Did they actually add auction house functionality to the phone app?
If so I’m not sure how feasible it would be for an phone dev to write something that can tap into in existing session and gain limited access to what ever exposed services they have for the AH on phones. Could explain some of the issues they’re having if this was happening and they’re hitting the service in unexpected ways.