I have evidence beyond all reasonable doubt that the auction house (at least, of my server) is littered with automated bots.
-I RECKON- such bots utilise scripts with set algorithms that can “snipe” certain buyout prices. That is to say that, upon making a listing that with a buyout price that is “too low”, the bot will immediately buy out your listings. I /who’d a certain suspect literally seconds (not to brag guys but it was more like miliseconds i am a pro gamer) after such an instance to see that they had immediately logged out (still got the name, ofc).
I must assume that I am not alone in noticing the fractions of seconds it takes from, listing highly sought after trade goods, to someone purchasing them. I was hoping to open a discussion on this because I wanted to talk about A) what people think about it (does it really matter? do you care?) and B) what is being done about it?
I have wondered the same thing since i sold herb stuff some days ago, i put the price 5 gold, I thought… Accidently I put the price to 50 silver instead, and just instantly a bankchar bought it. I cannot prove anything but well, i did a real bad affair ;-).
I encountered one myself and while in the friends list you can see when it goes afk. I can confirm that the fraction of a second buyouts happen even when the character is afk.
I actually made a ticket, because it’s impossible to report due to layering, but nothing has been done.
Yeah, this is true. I didn’t mean to imply that the name itself is incriminating, but rather their ability to instantly purchase tens of auctions within seconds of their listing.
I’m all about the economical aspect of the game and I use both TSM and Auctionator myself, but it needs to be said that AH addons are too powerful and change too much the way the game is played.
UI improvements that help posting/buying/bidding/cancelling are fine, but scanning is already a grey area for me.
its not cheating. its addons out of controll
TSM (TradeSkillMaster) is probably what you have encountered.
they have a snipe function set up to list items with low prices as soon as they are posted. all they do is press snipe button to get the buy.
i don’t think afk means nothing. you can just type /afk and i think you can still use ah. not sure tho.
they should have way stricter rules when it comes to the AH.
but many play the game just for the economy part of it and don’t care that they screw over the randon wow player
You can test this easily. Get a few stsck of a cheap herb. Lets say peace bloom which has a vendor price of 10copper. Put it up for 5 copper and see how fast it is bought. Repest that a few times and you will see if there is an automated system at work. Maybe try different items.
