It makes no sense why this measure kicks in when I haven’t bought anything due to no items at the price point where I originally had opened up the tab to buy from. This is already a lazy and intrusive way to stop bots, at least make it make sense.
AH?
What about eleminating bots as a whole finally from the game?
We already know AGS is too incompetent to do that. Just take a look at their history of the things they’ve done to limit bots.
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next anti-bot measure will probably be 3 day hold on item/gold transaction to be able to claim them, 3 day waiting period per purchase of item in AH, requiring people to “deposit” gold into AH 3 days before the transaction, or all of those at the same time + 3 year hold on any Gold related activity
Well, if you think about it it does make sense. What people did was try to buy items like destruction stones for 1g like 5-6 times a second, this solves that issue. If they only had this function in place for successful purchases that wouldn’t fully solve the market bots/macros, they’d still be able to try and buy items over and over again until they succeed.
- Successful purchase = check transaction history
- Unsuccessful purchase = gold refunded and no item bought
Why does step 2 need another check if they 1. didn’t buy anything and 2. if they did, you loop back to 1. An additional check for unsuccessful purchase is pointless.
Because it’s not actually checking any transactions, it simply puts a few seconds cooldown on your client.
Old system log looked like this:
[19:00:100] Purchase attempt for 1g → Checks server for item with that price → no item, returns nothing
[19:00:200] Purchase attempt for 1g → Checks server for item with that price → no item, returns nothing
[19:00:300] Purchase attempt for 1g → Checks server for item with that price → no item, returns nothing
[19:00:400] Purchase attempt for 1g → Checks server for item with that price → no item, returns nothing
In other words, the bot tries to purchase something every 100ms, even though there are no items with that price. Keep the bot running for hours/days/weeks and there will be items put up with ridiculously low prices, not sure why or who puts them up, but people do, meanwhile there’s a bunch of unnecessary communication between client and the server, who knows how many bots are running simultaneously…
New system:
[19:00:100] Purchase attempt for 1g → Checks server for item with that price → no item, returns nothing
[19:00:200] Purchase attempt for 1g → Client is on CD, returns without talking to server
[19:00:300] Purchase attempt for 1g → Client is on CD, returns without talking to server
[19:00:400] Purchase attempt for 1g → Client is on CD, returns without talking to server
[19:00:500] Purchase attempt for 1g → Checks server for item with that price → no item, returns nothing
[19:00:600] Purchase attempt for 1g → Client is on CD, returns without talking to server
Doesn’t change the fact that its still not a solution to the bot issue. It’s like being stuck in traffic and your solution is to add more lanes.
This change doesn’t do anything to bots. They are a lot more likely to be selling things for gold rather than buy.
I’m guessing the change is intended to address AH scripts that auto buy cheap items. If this is the case, the change does nothing to them either. It basically just makes the script buy things off cd instead of spamming every second.
What the change does do is annoy legit players. Trying to buy things in multiple batches is now super painful.
Let’s mention that without this limitation, one “legit” players would be able to buy all cheap level 1 gems generated by bots within seconds.
And people should stop complaining about something not solving the issue of bots as if solving this issue was easy and not long to do… Hopefully, there are little tricks to do to reduce their impact (or dissuade the player to take profit of this) without impacting “too much” the player experience.