The Gold Selling Problem

WoW Classic Mists of Pandaria Classic Discussion
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It’s been over 2 years now and bots and gold selling problems that fuel a cycle in the game. Bots / gold seller scams crash markets making it barely profitable to earn gold legitimately in the game so you have to farm harder for more hours for less gold just for your weekly respecs and raid consumes…

The 3 main scams (other than open world bots)

The AH Fisher
The gold seller places obscureish items on the AH at 50% ish of market value. Items like Mark of Sargeras, Sanguine Hibiscus, Firewing Signets various ores, metals, leathers and clothes. You put your item on the AH undercutting them and it is instantly purchased by them and resold at full market price. They are logged in 24/7 most likely because they are running TSM Sniper with an auto clicker. I have reported these guys and all the alts they sell on and after about 6-7 days blizz do ban them and you get the mail saying they are banned but they are back within 24 hours doing the same thing with new accounts…

The massively overpriced items they hope you will buy mistakenly…

They place on the AH literally every item you could think of from potions, elixirs, leathers, flasks literally every profession item you could think of at obscene prices. They all have names with lots and lots of odd chars such â, Æ, Ø and every other letter you could think of with an accent which makes them IMPOSSIBLE to report since you cannot actually write their name. You have no way of reporting them since even if you do manage to get their name, they never log in save to snatch their scammed gold and ship it off for resale elsewhere… (Maybe let us report people from the AH???)

The Importers…
I have screenshots of the volumes of herbs being imported and the scam from the gold seller explained in a discord chat… Herbs are farmed on dead servers a lvl 10 char (thats the lvl you need to migrate a char) then loads its bags and bank slots up with expensive herbs such as fel lotus, terocone, mana thistle and often primals as well and migrate to a busy server… you then see a lvl 1 char trade offering literally 150k gold worth of herbs at 75% of market value. They seem to want to sell quickly often flooding the AH with what they can’t shift on trade at 60-75% of market value, distribute the gold and are gone. The market price gets crashed, crafting cost get drastically reduced and the cycle continue.

Solutions:
You need investigate cheating reports WAY fast. 5 days+ to ban a bot is way too slow and given they come back with 24 hours, it is a minor inconvenience and occupational hazard for them.

Let us report them from the Auction House window.

Limit the level required for a player transfer and / or limit the amount of items that can be transfered. Lift the level required to migrate servers and limit the amount of trade items below lvl 65 and / or don’t allow migrations on new accounts for 3-6 months. It is ridiculous that a lvl 10 char can migrate with 150,000 gold of materials to a server and this is the worst scam use knowingly or not, Blizzard are profiteering from the problem that drives more people to need to buy gold in the first place.

Give us the WoW Token already - I don’t know if this ever did drastically affect these sorts of activities or not, but if it did in retail… just give it to us already. Most dad gamers would prefer to buy a token than have to farm so much for raid anyways…

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I didn’t see any difference with the token added, and if the bot trains from Shadowlands is any indication, it’s gotten worse, or they simply no longer fear any swift action from Actilizzard so they no longer care enough to hide it, maybe both.

Bottom line is, if Actilizzard do not care about the bots, which they clearly don’t, it’ll never get better.

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You said it yourself.

This is why botting will never die out.

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Not against the rules. Just buy their cheap ones.

Again, not against the rules. Being just slightly careful means you won’t buy their stuff.

Once more, not against the rules.

So if all these things are not against the rules, why would Blizzard ban them?

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these bots hurt no one. dont be racist

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Why would you not buy all of their items out and then restock? Or just simply you know… put it for the normal price? Someone will buy all of it out and yours then too… I do that all the time, ignoring 50% undercutters as my stuff gets bought no matter what…

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Everything is instantly against the rules when you sell the gold and all of these scams exist with the intent of obtaining large quantities of gold from the players to sell back to the players.

Whilst players can do this sort of stuff it is NOT players doing this it is a sophisticated network of people doing it for the purpose of selling the gold on. The AH scam involved an autoclicker which essentially automates them buying you out… this is definately banned. They do eventually get banned when reported but are back with a fresh account within 24 hours doing the same thing.

If you can’t see how harmful this is to the game and player base I think you are probably not old enough or mature enough to be on any sort of forum.

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Yup we have 2 of those currently Mirage-Raceway horde side, the one sells for 851g11s18c BO, the other sells for 711g11s11c all random items, all with a very low bid price.

These guys can actually be disabled quite simple by blizzard by not sorting auctions on bid price by default but on BO price.

Don’t even bid on their auctions, i’ve been following them for a while, they are exactly in time to cancel their auctions to put them back again.

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I’m not saying they aren’t bad things, just that they aren’t against the rules. You can’t know what they are doing with that gold. Also it’s not how you get the gold but what you do with it afterwards that matters with selling gold for real money.

I can see that selling gold for real money is bad, but you can’t prove they are selling it for real money. Dismissing someone in that way just because they disagree with you is quite childish too.

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Click “Lvl” in the AH to sort by buyout price

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I just use the addon Auctionator.

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No you need to click the “Buy each” column, the ilvl column does nothing more than sort on just that; itemlevel.

I’m using Auctioneer, i don’t get scammed with the help of Blizzard’s default sorting, i use my own sorting, BO price per 1.

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Disable your addons and see for yourself

Click Lvl until the arrow is pointing up, it will sort by buyout price and not bid price

Check the price of eternium ore on mirage horde

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wow token fixing everything :copium:

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lel what are u saying dude ? Didint you watch the stream ? Blizz dev said they’re banning thousands of bots everyday (wink wink).
And they re still there cause they open a new character , exactly same gear, same appereance. And they lvl them to 70 less than a day and they re botting again :smiley:

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I don’t need to know how to avoid the scams - I have not fallen victim to any of the scams myself but with the overpriced item, Just a coincidence that the names of those all have bizarre chars so you cannot write the name to report and that they persistently post every item in the game every 48 hours because nobody falls for the scam? They are putting this much effort into this because they are real players?

I also know full well you can run TSM sniper and it is not against the rules… But when you are logged in 24/7 for 7 days straight doing this you are using software (probably an autoclicker) and you have a network of chars, one that buys 2 that sell are you going to try tell me that this is not because you are shady AF?

I have had the same AH bot banned on 2 servers twice in 2 weeks. It takes 5 days for them to actually ban them is the problem and for 2 days now, that bot has not been back.

As far as transferring in huge amounts of herbs with an account with lvl 10 char - There are so many ways blizz could prevent this from happening. Limit trade consumes being transported, lift the lvl required and/or taper the amount of goods. Have a time limit for a char to be subscribed before it can migrate are just a few ideas.

If other companies can ban cheats by logging their hardware ID’s meaning that a botter needs an entire new PC (think Sentinel Software) why does it take blizzard 5+ days to take action and for the same bot to return less than 24 hours later?

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I appreciate your “Sleuthing” however the things you’re seeing aren’t bots. You’re seeing scammers and snipers, who are regular people making gold most likely. The issue with bots is as follows:

  1. Multiple bots farm a servers supply of ore/herbs. They do this and DON’T post these on the AH - this is called artificial scarcity.
  2. They get multiple bots/multiboxers to farm popular player spots and also use rogue bots to pickpocket raw gold. They sell grey items and such for more raw gold.
  3. They sell, en masse, the objects their bots farm (Think Strathholme and Slave pens) on the AH. The idea is this INCREASES supply of things that players sell, thus lowering price to the point that the AH price is the same as the Vendor price.
  4. They then use the farmed raw gold to buy all object that they want to control the supply of (Herbs, Ores) that fall under a certain price.
  5. They sell small quantities of the objects that they control the supply of for a relatively-fixed price, which is MUCH higher than is reasonable given how simply they SHOULD be to farm. N.B. You can’t farm these because bots are locking down the finite spawns of these items.
  6. They sell gold on gold sites.
  7. Players buy items on the AH, inevitably a chunk of this goes back to the gold seller, which they use to continue to control the market.

So they Control the supply of finite items. They flood the market of in-finite items players can farm. They farms lots of raw gold to devalue the gold players earn. They sell specific, finite items for higher gold costs and keep the supply low. This market control is then used to sell gold to more players which is then recycled through their bot accounts on the AH.

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And nothing what you said should affect you.

Don’t post items for ridiculously low price, that’s on you buddy if you mess that up.

Driving price down? Well either wait for it to climb back again your buy out the cheap items and sell for profit.

You people just bytch about anything.

19

While all this might be true about network bots etc, this can also be dedicated players who just love playing AH. I have two players in the guild who are doing just that, scanning few items with simple addon and buy instantly. And they chat normally in guild chat, so not bots. What they do with gold, I dont have idea.

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i troll the ah as my sole money making method, and what he describes is not normal human behavior.
and what i mean by this, u can tell if they are real bots instantly from what he describes. just find what they sell and post it really low, it will get bought out in under 5 secs if they are a bot