And that sound you here is everyone hitting the search key over and over.

Nice, thanks for the info. Are you buying one at a time to show the gaming of the system?

When I was watching a stream someone in chat said they bought a perfect star gem for 9 million and got like all but 100K or so back from it. So they were thinking someone must have put it up accidentally for super cheap or they were trying to reduce the cost of gems.

I noticed this too. I would imagine the majority of this is done by bots. The need to auto refresh constantly in order to check the buying/selling price as well as buying in small amounts to take advantage of the reduced average means that the margin for profit will be very small and it won't be lucrative for someone doing this manually. A sophisticated 24-7 bot could probably make millions over time while the owner does nothing.

In some ways, it is similar to crafting gems: it is technically profitable to craft RS gems from FS, but the sheer time requirement to keep clicking craft makes absolutely no sense to someone doing it manually. A bot clicking every 3 seconds (or whatever) could earn you millions while you live your life.

Until Blizzard really hammers down on bots (in the real world, you break the law, you go to jail/pay fines), it's just not worth the risk/time "playing" the market, IMO. I think especially at this point in the game, where everyone playing is pretty savvy about their gear and what their items are worth, it's difficult to find deals or use arbitrage anymore. Additionally, the prevalence of gold/AH bots nearly guarantees that buying gold will result in a loss over time and trying to make money using "assembly line" techniques is akin to opening a coffee shop next to Starbucks.

Sorry this turned into a rant, but it's extremely frustrating when I see things like this. It just reminds me that 99% of the money being generated in this game is done by bots while only 1% is generated by legitimate players farming Act III endlessly for hours/days/weeks trashing thousands of rares, hoping for something worth anything so they can upgrade a single item. Another Ivory Tower/Frostburn Gauntlets/Dawn? Yeah, expect to see about a thousand more of those before you find that one great item. Which will be sold on the AH for botting gold, which was probably earned about 100x quicker.

hmmmmm this is why i wish we can monitor AH from the web! so i can do it while im at work

Posted by shniggies at 12/07/2012 01:47 PM

hmmmmm this is why i wish we can monitor AH from the web! so i can do it while im at work

Check out LogMeIn and watch your mind get blown.

or install it at work :)

So I noticed some funny business going on with brimstones then saw this topic. Saw it drop down to 10k per stone... So how would dropping the average work if you're selling your brimstones for the minimum value? You'd need to wait for people to list them at the average value before you can buy it right?

How would you beat someone who just happened to be buying brimstones at that time? Or is it where they lower the average so much any value between average and max price is still a gain? Though wouldn't you have had to sell 10 brimstones to lower it in the first place?

@Shihiko For one thing, it's suspected that they try to buy their gems back (also suspected bots may exist for this purpose). But the point of it all is that if they put up 20 cheap brimstones, then they might be able to buy say 100 for a much cheaper price.

Posted by NightCrawler9 at 12/07/2012 05:36 PM

Posted by shniggies at 12/07/2012 01:47 PM

hmmmmm this is why i wish we can monitor AH from the web! so i can do it while im at work

Check out LogMeIn and watch your mind get blown.

thanks... i actually use a program called teamviewer at work, and so installed this on my laptop at home as well... but its so dam slow... however, this is the method i used to buy my chant's force for 35m :)

@sabin Oh, so basically by listing it the next lowest price that appears to be your items... but since you can't buy back your own items it will try to find anyone else who is listing it for the price or anyone who happens to press the average going price at the time of sale. Timing must be tough...

@Shihiko yeah, the seemingly difficult timing is why people suspect bots are involved. Also, like Anuiran said this is most common during the least popular hours to play, so that would help making it easier to buy back their own gems with another account or something.

Couldn't you make the case that people should be examining their sell prices more closely? You have to really, really not be paying attention to put up your Brimstone at 100 gold. That said ...

I set up an ROI spreadsheet on gem crafting about a week ago when the market volatility looked ripe for profitable crafting and hence, I've been tracking gem prices very closely today. I've been able to grind Perfect Star Topazes at about 5% ROI most of the day. The price stabilized around 6.5 MM and I never saw it fluctuate more than 30k or so for hours. After an Act 1 run, I go back to check the AH and the average last 10 trades on Perfect Star Topaz is 5.5 MM!

Now a few hours later and it's back up to about 6.3 MM. The strange thing is that 5.5 MM is about 85% of 6.5 MM so if someone was trying to set up the market, they did a poor job of it. The Perfect Star gem market is pretty low velocity so it's possible the sellers simply didn't take the bait. Perhaps there's no conspiracy and a single seller just wanted to drop their Perfect Star Topazes in a hurry.

Overall, it seems like manipulating mat prices is a pretty dumb way to try to earn gold. Gold Find bots seem like they'd have a better return than a Mat Price Manipulator bot.

Posted by Shihiko at 12/08/2012 08:42 AM

Sc. Saw it drop down to 10k per stone... So how would dropping the average work if you're selling your brimstones for the minimum value? You'd need to wait
How would you beat someone who just happened to be buying brimstones at that time? Or is it where they lower the average so much any value between average and max price is still a gain? Though wouldn't you have had to sell 10 brimstones to lower it in the first place?

I would guess the people selling have another account buying them., so they only lose the 15% ah fee.

Apparently a friend on my list manipulated the prices enough to make a huge profit out of one of the items. I had a look at the Price Tracker and there is a noticeable price change where they did it.

I'm not sure the exact method of how it works but seems sketchy. You also need a lot of capital to do it...

Yer i have noticed today that i was buy brimstones. some times at 200g and then i brought one for 20g lol and then seconds later back up to 26k was very weird..

I don't even know how Blizzard would fix it without some kind of Draconian measure like putting a floor on the price to never be below 30% yesterday's average price. That would pretty much cut all profits out of it entirely, but people might scream bloody murder about them interfering in the marketplace.

I, for one, would be all for a 30% price floor on yesterday's price just to stop this from happening. It's gotten so annoying I've stopped selling Flawless Square Emeralds and Fiery Brimstones entirely - the favored targets for well over a month now. Someone recently did it with Star Rubies and I can't imagine how much Gold they made or how much Gold they needed in the first place to profit from it.