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Changes to Auction House to Combat Goldsellers
samaka
Member Posts: 568 Arc User
Why not change the Auction House to become a blind format? By removing all names from the AH you could prevent the goldsellers from having a way to transfer their Astral Diamonds.
Sure, it would require an overhaul of the Auction House due to the removal of names along with a reformatting of how the auctions are displayed. In this format there is often just a single entry for each possible auction type, with the individual player listings under this heading, a player can only purchase the cheapest auction available, and has no idea who actually put the auction up. This also has the effect of reducing the amount of scrolling through the auction house due to only needing one entry per auction type.
Wouldn't this Auction House style be preferable to the constant changes to "thwart" goldsellers that aren't really working and are just making the game more frustrating for your actual players?
Many other games do a blind Auction House, maybe it's time to take a page from their playbook and implement one here as well? Once implemented you could simply revert all other changes made to thwart goldsellers as they would no longer have a way to actually sell their wares.
Sure, it would require an overhaul of the Auction House due to the removal of names along with a reformatting of how the auctions are displayed. In this format there is often just a single entry for each possible auction type, with the individual player listings under this heading, a player can only purchase the cheapest auction available, and has no idea who actually put the auction up. This also has the effect of reducing the amount of scrolling through the auction house due to only needing one entry per auction type.
Wouldn't this Auction House style be preferable to the constant changes to "thwart" goldsellers that aren't really working and are just making the game more frustrating for your actual players?
Many other games do a blind Auction House, maybe it's time to take a page from their playbook and implement one here as well? Once implemented you could simply revert all other changes made to thwart goldsellers as they would no longer have a way to actually sell their wares.
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On the ZAX you also do not see whose AD you buy with ZEN, you just get what you demand if you are the lowest bidder.
You can add items at a higher price as well and they sell once there are no lower priced items available and the demand is matched.
I often post some trash item, that friend of mine will buy and then we trade actual item. I don't want any1 else to buy it at reduced price... it's often non profit trade.
As member of large guild there is often a need of items from Wondorous Bazar that as lvl12 VIP user I have access at reduced cost and I often buy items like companions or SMoPs for friends.
Unless we have a way to trade AD in-game with other guild members I will not support this idea.
The only time they even come to the periphery of my mind, is when the company reacts to them , by removing things I myself use for convenience and/or increase the cost of gaming progression, beyond what I see is reasonable.
Also, its high time we get another QOL update, those are more popular then most mod releases honestly.
how about shared bank AD account?
Reduce the # of RP items (gawd people, having maxed bags do nothing for inventory anymore.. always full.. always, I ignore most of the r5s that drop in the game, because I simply dont have room for anything else.
Your game is getting too old and loot tables vectored to keep stuff neatly. ITs one thing to have a slight % of stuff we need over our inventory space, but you guys have it like 50% more then we can handle, plus its super annoying.. come on, think of your player-base for once and not just yourself.
The alternative is more restrictions ad nauseam until everyone just gets tired of it not making any impact on the gold sellers at all, but rather turning into continual inconveniences for the actual players of the game!
These new restrictions, for example, are not going to help new player retention at all. When I first started my partner and I couldn't even friend each other until we hit level 15... even though every single time we turned in quests it asked us if we wanted to become friends, but click the button and all you get is an error. Now, if you're a new player you apparently aren't even allowed to talk to anyone... I really can't see that helping new player retention at all.
We need to make this game not profitable for the gold sellers, the only way to do that is not by making the game seriously inconvenient for regular players, but by making it impossible to turn a profit for the gold sellers. Changing the Auction House is the only way to do that as it completely removes the ability for them to sell their products... which is what will make them leave the game, not all the arbitrary restrictions they can just bot around anyways.
Unfortunately, with the rampant problem of gold sellers in MMOs some things need to change. Obviously, as I created this thread, I think removing the ability to control who you buy from on the AH would pretty much shut out the gold sellers from this game. There is no other avenue they can use to sell their diamonds other than the AH, remove that and they are gone.
Yes, it could potentially affect friends trying to sell each other things, however, that can be easily solved. Have your friend buy something off the AH with the value you want to sell them something for, trade your items, then sell whatever they gave you. Sure, it's an extra step or two... but in my opinion, it would be very much worth getting rid of the gold sellers!
Of course, transferring the rewards to challenging content that cannot be botted (dungeons) has been made impossible since the greedy dungeon key requirement. That was shooting yourselves in the foot and leaving highways of easy access to resources to hordes of bots and sweatshop workers alike. They can farm sharandar but they certainly can't farm epic tos. It's about time to stop punishing players for what bots do. Few of us really care about them.
It's also time to stop making such threads. They are the direct cause of the gateway being down indefinitely. By showing cryptic that a few people care, it's encouraging them in thinking they're going to get support for the extremely negative changes they make. Hopefully we make it clear they won't get any support. Quite the opposite.
Hell No.
Dead🔪Can you honestly say that implementing a blind AH, while reversing all the previous restrictions, would be worse for the players of the game?
- Canceled Auctions take 5-15 minutes to have the item returned to you. By in-game email.
This would reduce high frequency trading, still be usable. And the delay could be blamed on Valindra/Tiamat/etc.
You could even recruit players to do this, though I don't know how that works anymore (I remember one gaming company was sued because volunteers weren't paid).
1 person logged in to PE could ban a thousand accounts a day. Would they come back? Sure. They would be restricted to the new rules, and they would have to spend the time creating the accounts and leveling the toons. I don't care how many people are trying to do it, a few dedicated people banning accounts WOULD be able to outrun any number of botters trying to get in eventually.
2-3 minimum wage employees working 8 hours a day, would cost them about 60k a year. Pretty sure they make that on key sales alone.
But, they wont do it and will continue removing pieces of the game to prevent botting, which is like fixing a damaged road by closing it.
Hire 10 people for a week. Give them GMs, let them sit in Enclave/Sharandar and other bot-friendly instances. Ban by IPs and @handles all bots on chat and all bot behavior. Repeat every month.
Monitor AH sales. Why do you allow selling 100+ stacks of RP by one person every week? That's bot user for sure.
Why company like this allows usage of 2nd party programs running along game client? Develop program that detects usage of Bot programs (there are out there, just google it). Ban all accounts that use it.
Profit.
Why they don't do it? Because bots in this game are like terrorists in real life. Excuse to implement new nerfs and restrictions.
Another thing is, they actually might have an interest in bot activity. It shows high numbers in player activity for their owners and marketing companies.
If they would really want to kill bot activity they will put RP items on Wondorous Bazar with prices similar that could be found on AH last week/month. No profit for bot user will be severe hit.
And second thing they could move all valuable items (RAD, RPs) behind actual gameplay (dungeons, skirmishes, campaign quests). Now you can earn more if you do stupid Leadership tasks on multiple characters than actually play the game...
The same is for VIP Enchanted Keys. VIP is cheaper than keys from ZEN, that is why bots will buy multiaccount VIP and farm rewards. It should be limited. You could put Enchanted Key reward behind actual gameplay barier as well (it might be campaign quests, dungeons, skirmishes, whatever).
In-game mail spam that's what I meant.Dead🔪They don't allow us to directly trade AD with each other, I don't know why they allow us to indirectly trade AD via the auction house, to be honest. I do believe that converting the AH to a blind format would far outweigh being able to buy an auction sold by a specific person, especially as there is an alternative method to essentially trade with friends anyways.
Also, this suggestion isn't to make the inconvenience of random tells or game mails go away... it is to get rid of gold spammers permanently. Remove their ability to use the AH and you remove any incentive they have to farm things in this game, period.
So no, this shouldn't, and hopefully, won't happen. What would work however is what @oldbaldyone suggested, but PWE is apparently too cheap to hire 3 minimum wage employees to monitor zone chat in PE and other hot locations for 8h a day each.
True, but when i get spam mail offering rp etc for cheap $ i can't help but wonder who gets that cash.
However, the gold sellers could still sell items for cash, just only via direct trade instead of via the AH. However, they couldn't directly sell Astral Diamonds, which I am sure is a pretty significant chunk of their business model.
Truly a tinfoil moment, yes?
return back to previous chats, and another answer for AH would be put capped amount of items so they cant flooded while thier bags are nearly full and regulated prices.
then we wont see any more "overpriced" mark up items often.
it would slow down thier selling ability since real players often dont have that many items to sell.
LotRO and DDO did that years ago, with no more than 3 or 5 items, but i hadnt play those for a decade, both games made me depressed so bad that forced me to play eq2.
And as for the whole 'maybe cryptic have their own bots'... really? o_o No. I agree with Zerg, serious tinfoil hat moment there.