Please remove obsolete items, people getting conned

minotaur2857

There has just been an incident which has played out in chat where somebody got conned into buying a dread quillon fragment which seems to be an obsolete item that claims to be extremely useful in crafting for a large amount of money.

@nitocris83 this sort of thing is causing slanging matches in chat and a lot of bad feeling. Can we remove things like this (there's a malabog's version too), too many scammers about.

pitshade

The Dread and Formorian fragments were used to craft the BiS mainhands in mods 1 and 2. I would hate to see them deleted (for nostalgia's sake) but something should be done. These scams have been going on for some time now.

emilemo

Well well. People will always be free to sell snake oil. Nobody to blame but ourselves if we buy it. Personally I wouldnt spend even 1AD for a crafting component without knowing exactly where and for what Im going to use it.

reg1981

I just can't wrap my head around someone buying these items without knowing what they are for... I had someone try and take me for a ride with a Malabog one last week. I tend to do my homework on this HAMSTER and knew right away it was a scam!

asterotg

To be honest, there does not have go be bad intent, if ppl sell this stuff. A friend asked me, if I own some fragments. He told me, that they are very expensive atm. I assumed, some ppl might use them, to build weapons for the skin, tbh I did not care and posted them in the AH for sale. Nobody bought them, but I would not feel inclined, to reimburse a buyer, if he claimed fraud.

I would not scam a fellow player, but if someone wants to buy a useless item, it is his fault, not mine.

micky1p00

They manage because it's a 2 account / people scam. They don't try to directly sell those. They create artificial value by spamming trade, for example "WTT t.lightning for malabog raser" a person that will see that will check the AH and see that the riser sold by someone else for lets say half mil / or a mil lower than lightning, and will think they can make a good trade. They will buy the resier and all happy try to PM the trader for the trade. Obviously the trader will never trade the t.lightning.

This two part is what makes it a scam instead of just selling junk for inflated price.

samaka

Actually, no, you can't sell "snake oil", terrible analogy... that is why things like the FDA were created, to prevent people from scamming other people!

reg1981

asterotg said:

To be honest, there does not have go be bad intent, if ppl sell this stuff. A friend asked me, if I own some fragments. He told me, that they are very expensive atm. I assumed, some ppl might use them, to build weapons for the skin, tbh I did not care and posted them in the AH for sale. Nobody bought them, but I would not feel inclined, to reimburse a buyer, if he claimed fraud.

I would not scam a fellow player, but if someone wants to buy a useless item, it is his fault, not mine.

I'm ok with the way you posted yours. The person trying to nab me was trying to trade for items as micky1p00 has outlined...

Even if the tooltips could have an update to note that they are from "Mod xx" or something to date these items!

micky1p00

The easy solution is just remove the items listings from AH. Not specifically the sales, but the items as a whole. The items remain, and can be traded, they can also be listed on the AH, but no one can find them. I think it was at lockbox key changes, when they disabled those from being found, but the listings were there.

samaka

Good idea, about removing the items, or adding a note to the tooltip... while there, why not just prevent all grey-titled "junk" items from being listed on the AH at all?

Do we really need hundreds of "Bag of Holes" on the AH, or other junk items that are only good for selling to a vendor?

cdnbison

> @samaka#2511 said:
> Actually, no, you can't sell "snake oil", terrible analogy... that is why things like the FDA were created, to prevent people from scamming other people!

And yet homeopathic "cures" are a multi-billion dollar industry...

samaka

While the FDA may not have stepped up to regulate homeopathic "medicine" apparently the FTC has!

While homeopathic cures are most assuredly "snake oil" never underestimate the power of the placebo effect.

nitocris83

Removing items isn't the best solution from a pure back-end perspective but I like the idea of denoting something is from X Module or other tooltip indicator. I'll bring up the topic of older items to the team.

beckylunatic

samaka#2511 said:

Do we really need hundreds of "Bag of Holes" on the AH, or other junk items that are only good for selling to a vendor?

Bag of Holes is technically an item included in the game as a joke, but that has supported a different player racket since forever.

@nitocris83 The Bag of Holes has irked me since the beginning of the game, and a tooltip update would probably 95% solve it (some people don't read even the clearest tooltips or instructions, and that's where my sympathies die). Yeah, part of the joke is that if you equip the Bag of Holes (it goes in a normal bag slot), it shows one inventory space, but anything you put in it drops into your other bags. Haha, how droll. But they post to the AH as a bag and have no warning to an unsuspecting buyer that this is not legitimately some kind of discounted bag. The name is not sufficient tipoff... you cannot expect all players to have the language or extrapolative skills or lore knowledge to piece this together. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the joke is based on a relatively sophisticated concept which probably doesn't even translate that great into languages other than English, and expecting people to think on that level when they have an overflowing inventory and not much money is unfair. Making the tooltip more obvious that a Bag of Holes cannot be expected to hold items at all would serve as fair warning. If this seems obvious to people reading this post, I congratulate you on your high level of literacy and reasoning skills. We should all be so blessed.

http://neverwinter.gamepedia.com/Bag_of_Holes (which I just edited to correct some misinfo)

My alternative suggestion would be to make the items generated by the Robes of Useless Items all bind on pickup. This doesn't interfere with their use as low-value vendor trash or mild trolling ("I just found a bent fork on the ground, wtf?"), as they could be vendored or discarded, but would prevent the AH bag racket completely.

pitshade

I don't know if this is still true, but in Beta, the bag of holes was one of the trash drops (possibly same list as robe?) that could be found in skill nodes of a player opened too many. If so, those items should be covered as well.

micky1p00

I would like that putting something in that bag would have dropped it on the ground as a regular item drop. There is no way to do this now.
With that I could have 'bread crumb' something.. Or just troll for fun..

minotaur2857

micky1p00 said:

They manage because it's a 2 account / people scam. They don't try to directly sell those. They create artificial value by spamming trade, for example "WTT t.lightning for malabog raser" a person that will see that will check the AH and see that the riser sold by someone else for lets say half mil / or a mil lower than lightning, and will think they can make a good trade. They will buy the resier and all happy try to PM the trader for the trade. Obviously the trader will never trade the t.lightning.

This two part is what makes it a scam instead of just selling junk for inflated price.

Exactly - this is what happened in this case

I wasn't in any way involved, just saw the fallout in chat

beckylunatic

pitshade said:

I don't know if this is still true, but in Beta, the bag of holes was one of the trash drops (possibly same list as robe?) that could be found in skill nodes of a player opened too many. If so, those items should be covered as well.

This can still happen, though the changes to skill node content to private means you can't leave those for some other hapless person to burn kits on.

Item from Robe and item from node would require two different item IDs in the first place to exhibit different binding behavior. I suspect each only uses one item ID with a couple of different delivery mechanics, though I could be wrong. (If they stack, they're the same, and I could actually attempt to test this if anyone really wants to know.)

samaka

My original point still stands... lots of "trash" items (grey title) on the AH, including the Bag of Holes. Why not just disallow trash items from being posted in the first place?

beckylunatic

Banning an entire item quality doesn't sound like a good design principle. There's no accounting for reasons for wanting to buy grey items; some of them are gear which people including myself prefer as transmutes.

samaka

beckylunatic said:

Banning an entire item quality doesn't sound like a good design principle. There's no accounting for reasons for wanting to buy grey items; some of them are gear which people including myself prefer as transmutes.

Ahh I didn't realise there actually was grey gear... I retract my idea then.

Perhaps adding to the tooltips would be a better solution over all!

beckylunatic

Yeah, I don't think grey gear drops after Blacklake, but it does exist. If you want your boots tooltip to say nothing but "Boots", it's the way to go.

samaka

Well, even if they did ban grey items from the AH in general, they could add an exception for gear!

Sadly, in every single MMO I've played there are scammers. Every. Single. One. Sucks, but it seems there will always be scammers out there looking to make a buck on the misery of others!

greywynd

Some people use the other items to exchange AD for gold.

samaka

greywynd said:

Some people use the other items to exchange AD for gold.

Which you could still do regardless if the grey items were banned from the AH!

beckylunatic

greywynd said:

Some people use the other items to exchange AD for gold.

I think this is a misconception. The game classes grey misc items as "junk" and white misc as "treasure". Grey items only sell for a few coppers each and wouldn't be an efficient way of converting AD to gold (which does require the AH, since players can't buy items with AD without using it). Players who need gold more than AD do often buy treasure-class items to vendor, but the higher value the better, generally.

I don't think it would be easy to bar items by quality and then code in exceptions. That sounds incredibly complicated and prone to error, and like it would involve a ton of ongoing maintenance every time new items are added (new class = new gear, for example). Updating a couple of problematic tooltips is a one-and-done job.

samaka

Why would it be hard? The AH already has categories, as do items. So banning all trash items from the AH, with the exception of the Equipment category, should be trivial to implement. I am a coder, so I do have some notion of what would be involved!

beckylunatic

Hah. Mostly just the assumption that NW's code tends to be kind of messy in the first place. There is an ongoing effort to clean up AH categories, but it's still imperfect and I'm disinclined to trust it, particularly stuff in the Misc category.

samaka

I will give you that, Becky. No sure I'd want to go tinkering around inside NWO's codebase!

hustin1

Why not just reinstate the crafting tasks and let them drop again? The weapons are only level 60 anyway.

namelesshero347

The game is four years old, and has 11 mods tacked on. If the code isn't a mess, it is at least very complex. Cleanup tasks like removing unused stuff sounds easy. But unless it is absolutely necessary, like say to free up some enumerations, no one wants to be the hero and do it. Very little upside - you probably won't even be recognized or thanked for doing it. And potentially lots of downside - you will surely be blamed if the change breaks something.