A while ago we got 2 mesures aimed at making the market/auction house work when these were unusable. These 2 mesures are indeed the famous 10s delay between purchases and the 20 limit on listings each day for your whole roster. Both of these mesures only harm real players and not bots, and here’s why:
Let’s start with the 10s delay. There are multiple items that are usually bought in bulk like ability stones, honing items which include armor/weapon stones, leapstones, shard pouches, solars or trade skills items like fish to craft fusion mats. Whenever a REAL player wants to buy any of the above items there are multiple scenarios that can happen:
1) There are multiple price tags for the same item, so the game gives you a fraction of the items that you want to buy.
2) You need more items than what you can buy at once. This happens a lot with armor stones and trade skill accessories. You can only buy 9990 armor stones or 900 fish at a time.
3) You want to buy something but someone else is faster, so the price has rose up and you ended up with a null purchase. So you get this:
And when you retry you have to wait 10 seconds or else:
What happens in every single one of these scenarios? You are forced to wait 10 seconds and then try again, even in the case where you haven’t bought anything. You are now stuck in this time wasting loop until you can get the desired amount that in the past would have taken you 5 seconds.
Regarding the 20 limit on listings, who does it affect more? Of course it affects more bigger rosters since the limit is roster-wide. Who happens to have big rosters? Real players. If you have a standard 6 character roster, you can do your dailies, say you get 2 good tripods + 1 ability stone on each character, which isn’t weird at all. You now have used 90% of your daily listings. If you decide to list anything else like unsold items from other days, gems that you might not need anymore, honing materials that you have on excess or simply some books that you dropped, well u simply can’t. And if something doesn’t sell for any reason like getting undercut in price, it will carry on to the next day, in which you will have even less listings for new things.
Here is a picture of one of my characters’ gear storage for reference. This are all lvl 5 tripods of useful skills that I simply cannot list due to the 20 item limit.
As we can see, both of these measures harm real players, meanwhile, do they actually affect bots?
The 10 second delay does not affect bots at all. Bots don’t buy anything from the market since obviously bots are made to obtain gold, and wasting it on things like honing materials would reduce their profit margin. As for the auction-house, bots only buy cheap gems, however, they don’t buy them directly, they instead use the bid option. You can bid up to 100 items on each character (which real player would ever need such a big limit?), and of course, there is no time delay between bids.
Regarding the 20 item listing, it also doesn’t affect bots at all. Bots aren’t high level to access better chaos dungeons, so they mainly list weapon/armor stones (2 listings), alongside gems. Ever since the limit was introduced they just started fusing gems. Here are a couple of screenshots of the gems in the auction house.
As we can see, for all Tier 3 gems, 1472 pages out of 1831 are sorceress gems (around 80% of the gems), the most popular class for botting.
If we filter out lvl 5 or above gems, which are used/sold/bought by real players, we even have a more extreme scenario.
686 pages of lvl 1/2 sorceress gems. 666 pages of lvl 3/4 sorceress gems.
If we don’t filter by class, we get 700 pages of lvl 1/2 gems and 719 pages of lvl 3/4 gems.
This means that on the auction house, 95% of the gems of level 4 or below are sorceress gems, which clearly shows that the 20 item limit is useless against bots, which means it only harms real players.
All in all, amazon or smilegate, please remove these 2 useless measures that are only harming real players and think of something better to combat bots.
