The problem with players abusing and manipulating addons like TTC

jasonhunter

I know this is probably nothing new, but I is still disturbing to me. I just saw players selling the same item, a blueprint valued at average 40k, at 5 different guildstores for 15k.
What they do is they list it at a ridiculously low price, cancel it and upload it to TTC. They tempt some desperate people into selling their same item cheaper so it can be grabbed and sold at a higher price.
I see it happening with so many items and it is a disgusting practice and it illegitimizes an otherwise useful addon to determine market prices.

I have a problem with that. Is there a way to stop this? Should it be stopped?
The ingame economy is bad already, and stuff like this just makes it worse.

Thank you for your consideration.

wolfie1.0.

jasonhunter wrote: »

I know this is probably nothing new, but I is still disturbing to me. I just saw players selling the same item, a blueprint valued at average 40k, at 5 different guildstores for 15k.
What they do is they list it at a ridiculously low price, cancel it and upload it to TTC. They tempt some desperate people into selling their same item cheaper so it can be grabbed and sold at a higher price.
I see it happening with so many items and it is a disgusting practice and it illegitimizes an otherwise useful addon to determine market prices.

I have a problem with that. Is there a way to stop this? Should it be stopped?
The ingame economy is bad already, and stuff like this just makes it worse.

Thank you for your consideration.

Options are to either ban the addon or education that Trading addons are not the end all be all on pricing. They are tools not ultimate sources of knowledge. You have to learn and teach people the limitations of said tools and how to interpret the info provided.

WiseSky

That much trouble over 25K??

I use Master Merchant its the way to go

wolfie1.0.

WiseSky wrote: »

That much trouble over 25K??

I use Master Merchant its the way to go

Even MM had its limits

Kessra

By offering their items for low, taking a snapshot to manipulate prices and fool others into adapting their prices so they can buy them out cheaper, they already risk that their items are bought and thus loose gold in that process. I also do not think that the majority of players uses MM or TTC regularly. Most of them will get told by friends or guild mates what an item could be worth and most people for sure wont run from trader to trader to compare whether that suggestion is true or not.

Just look at prices i.e. for powerful assault frost staffs at TTC and you will see a price difference of almost 2.5 million per item, currently ranging from 2.4 million to 5 million. If you compare prices long enough you will also see that prices are going up rather quickly, especially considering that such an item is only useful to tanks that are interested in end-game PvE trials, and there are better alternatives available already.

Whether ZOS needs to intervene with such interface modifications or not, I tend to say no as these tools just use the API offered by the game and do not do anything other. Similar to raid-parses where you take your combatlog and upload it via some tool to a Web page and then can analyze the performance of the raid, the same mechanic can be used (more or less) to compare prices offered for certain items in different trading guilds. In the end somebody toke the time and effort to visit most of these guild traders and uploaded his snapshot to that page. That certain people always try to take advantage of certain limitations is unfortunately a typical human thing. Just look how many people lost lots of money at the stock exchange while some with a bit more information won plenty of that money. I don't think that banning such addons will ultimately remove such things from the game, but only lead to other mechanisms profit-oriented players will use to get richer.

Kwoung

Honestly, the fact that some player is going through that much effort trying to scam folks out of a few extra gold... let him, he will probably end up burnt in the process anyways. The market is volatile, TTC prices are generally WAY off the mark, if for no other reason than they aren't real in the first place, they are based on the bottom 30% of the items listed, not all items. While this is fine for high turnover items, on rarer expensive items, TTC is already lowballing you and feeding the flippers if you list anywhere close to TTC suggestions on what it is worth.

Oh, and the fact he is actually listing items at all is dumb of him, because he is risking someone buying it before he can unlist it. You can simply edit the file that gets uploaded to TTC before it gets uploaded and put whatever you want in there.

Jeremy

jasonhunter wrote: »

I know this is probably nothing new, but I is still disturbing to me. I just saw players selling the same item, a blueprint valued at average 40k, at 5 different guildstores for 15k.
What they do is they list it at a ridiculously low price, cancel it and upload it to TTC. They tempt some desperate people into selling their same item cheaper so it can be grabbed and sold at a higher price.
I see it happening with so many items and it is a disgusting practice and it illegitimizes an otherwise useful addon to determine market prices.

I have a problem with that. Is there a way to stop this? Should it be stopped?
The ingame economy is bad already, and stuff like this just makes it worse.

Thank you for your consideration.

Yeah it's a problem.

But it's the best thing we got currently. So I just try to put up with all the many abuses and manipulative practices. Because at least I can find the item I'm looking for.

hafgood

If TTC is a problem, come and join us on consoles. We are in the fortunate position of not having add ons. For us TTC is not a problem.

mickeyx

If it wasn't for TTC I would never be able to complete any of my motif collection. Only because a tiny fraction of playerbase are abusing an add-on doesn't mean addon needs to be banned. Its still very valuable tool for many players especially new players.

The other day a new fresh lvl 50 was looking to buy briarheart and was disappointed that he had to grind the set in Wrothgar which isnt much active nowdays. And no Armor was available In his guild stores. I told him to look for Armor price on ttc. And he found entire set for affordable price and was happy to play further his class. So nope it's the players that's the problem not TTC

Larcomar

Does this happen? Probably. Buying, I've certainly seen sellers list something v low on TTC then when you go over a little later it's mysteriously double the price. But they might just have decided to reprice it. I certainly wouldn't jump to ZOS policing it. You could say this is just smart business. Even if you don't, caveat emptor. Zos has enough to do without policing every aspect of the game.

More generally, if people are using TTC to set prices, well, they're taking a shortcut and they need to realise that that's going to cost them. My understanding is that TTC a) only has list - not sold - prices and b) it only lists the bottom 1/3. It's a guide at best, and not a very good one.

The best approach I've found if you've got something good to sell is a) look on the TTC website, flick to page 3 or 4, and look for where there's a big wodge of those items listed at a similar price. That's the closest thing to the real pric, not the super cheap hits that come on the first coule of pages. b) if it's really valuable, go look at the traders in a hub like Rawl Ka, see what it's on for, and how many days it's been up for. That gives you a pretty good idea of what people are asking and if it's selling. I usually stick stuff on a little under that.

bmnoble

jasonhunter wrote: »

I know this is probably nothing new, but I is still disturbing to me. I just saw players selling the same item, a blueprint valued at average 40k, at 5 different guildstores for 15k.
What they do is they list it at a ridiculously low price, cancel it and upload it to TTC. They tempt some desperate people into selling their same item cheaper so it can be grabbed and sold at a higher price.
I see it happening with so many items and it is a disgusting practice and it illegitimizes an otherwise useful addon to determine market prices.

I have a problem with that. Is there a way to stop this? Should it be stopped?
The ingame economy is bad already, and stuff like this just makes it worse.

Thank you for your consideration.

Seems like a lot of time and effort for such a low profit margin, not to mention someone could be looking at just the right time to buy the item before they can cancel it.

No guarantee they will get there first to the potentially cheaper listing by other players either and if they do I would question the popularity of the item in the first place.

Nor is their a guarantee that other players will lower their prices if there is only a handful of listings, it comes down to the judgement of the seller, TTC's price info is a guide your free to ignore it for stuff with a small number of listings.

At the end of the day the seller needs to make the decision about what they are going to sell the item for, if there are only a handful of listings, there is no reason other than the items being unpopular and sitting a long time, to lower your price, the cheap ones will sell fast but there is still only a limited supply available buyers who want it badly enough will have to take what is available or risk missing out, it would be different if there were hundreds or thousands of listings, that is when the undercutting drives the price into the ground.

If there were so few of the item available that you could influence the price so easily via TTC, wouldn't it be faster to buy out all the listings and re list them raising the price quite a bit? It would be one thing if they were all at over 100K or something but 15 - 40K is still lower mid range as far as furniture plan prices go, would not take much for a rich player to buy them all out easily enough at that price range.


Its a minor annoyance I get more annoyed by players trying to trick players in zone chat to buy stuff far lower than its perceived market value.

Same solution to both problems sellers learning how to price things it takes time and experience, some people are just happy for a quick sale others will learn to hold out to get as much as they can or hold out too long and end up selling cheap anyway.

For me at least TTC's price guides are of second priority to its real value in allowing you to locate what your looking for, got no time to check every single trader one by one to find what I am after, got no issue paying a little more if the item I am searching for is actually at the destination.

Danikat

I agree that the solution here is to understand that TTC is giving advice on recommended prices based on estimates, not telling you that is exactly what you should sell your items for. If the price seems too low or too high you should either check other sources or use your own judgement to decide what it's worth.

This problem isn't unique to TTC, faking sales to manipulate prices is older than video games (although more commonly used to make things seem more valuable than they are), the old MMO version is a 2-person scam where someone is selling or buying something in chat, another person comes along and makes a big fuss about how their price is too high/low and and persuades them to change it, all conducted publicly in the hope that other people will see it and take the opportunity to jump on this 'great deal' only to find out later they've lost gold or got stuck with something they can't sell at a profit like they thought.

As other people have said doing it through TTC is riskier because there's no guarantee their items won't sell at the lower price or that they will be the one to buy other lower listings.

With some things, where there's quite a few cheap listings, I suspect a lot of it is genuine, it's people like me who aren't interested in maximising their profit, they just want it out of their inventory without out-right deleting it. I often list things at the bottom end of the recommended prices (using a mix of TTC and ATT) precisely because I know they'll sell quickly. I don't care if they're selling to a flipper who will make more profit later on, I care that it's not taking up my inventory space and I've gotten something for it.

Jaimeh

I don't know if that's the intention, but I have found on several occassions a recently listed item on the TTC website with X price, then went to the trader and found it (from the same seller) listed with a higher price, so I thought that either they mistakenly listed it for the X price, and had to re-list it, or deliberately listed on X price, to attract a customer who would then be like 'ah, whatever, I came to the trader anyway, I might as well buy it' But yeah it begs the question if it was also done to drive prices down, never thought of that. But it's probably isolated incidents, not a wide-spread practice (hopefully).

Redguards_Revenge

jasonhunter wrote: »

I know this is probably nothing new, but I is still disturbing to me. I just saw players selling the same item, a blueprint valued at average 40k, at 5 different guildstores for 15k.
What they do is they list it at a ridiculously low price, cancel it and upload it to TTC. They tempt some desperate people into selling their same item cheaper so it can be grabbed and sold at a higher price.
I see it happening with so many items and it is a disgusting practice and it illegitimizes an otherwise useful addon to determine market prices.

I have a problem with that. Is there a way to stop this? Should it be stopped?
The ingame economy is bad already, and stuff like this just makes it worse.

Thank you for your consideration.

Bro, I have said this 2-3 years ago on this forum. I told them TTC + Master Merchant = Death of the game economy. Whales and people who are at the top and invested a crap load into the game won't see it that way. They will all deny it because they sit comfortably at the top. This will in turn, turn away new players. Then the mid ranged players will start to quit. Then you'll have one elite player born every 6 months. This is because they need people to replace the whales or players who invested so much time into the game once they retire. This happens in all MMOs. It's almost time for that moment where newer players don't play through the whole thing leave the game. They may stay for the story, but, everything else will be dead. It's the beginning of the end...when this becomes noticeable, This is ESO over it's peak. It's all downhill from here. There will be peaks while going downhill but they will not be higher than the higest peak we just passed up.

perfiction

Some people are using eBay in 'bad'/morally wrong way (example - GPU scalpers with their crazy prices), does it mean that we should ban eBay completely?

TTC is just a site with listings. Why do you want to blame the tool (really useful tool tbh) for people misusing it?

davidtk

perfiction wrote: »

Some people are using eBay in 'bad'/morally wrong way (example - GPU scalpers with their crazy prices), does it mean that we should ban eBay completely?

TTC is just a site with listings. Why do you want to blame the tool (really useful tool tbh) for people misusing it?

Because it is quick and simple. Just blame that addon, ban addon.

N3CR01

I tend to ignore TTC as it usually recommends I list at half the price that MM shows it sells for.

Elsonso

It is interesting to me that the person selling the item at the "ridiculously low price" listed in TTC is characterized as "desperate".

Nevertheless, people can sell at the guild traders for whatever they want, and presumably what they feel their item is worth. If they are happy with that price, and it sells at that price, then it seems to me that everyone is happy. If it does not sell, then clearly the buyers were not happy. If it sells immediately, then maybe the buyer was a little too happy.

It is quick coin to significantly undersell an item because it will sell quickly. That is what this TTC practice is encouraging. Quick coin. In some games, people can make more coin selling to the people fighting to sell at high prices by undercutting them so that they buy it and resell it, rather than trying to sell at the higher prices.

Master Merchant is a better tool to identify what people are buying, and for how much, at the guild stores that are available to sell at. It lists selling price, not asking price. The only time I ever use TTC is when I am selling something that has not recently sold in any of my guild traders, and then only to get a rough price range. Before selling, I check the guild store to make sure that I am not being a jerk with my choice of selling price.

(Edit: I do not do any selling on console, as ZOS has not provided any assistance, tools, or QoL to aid players)

Coatmagic

While I don't agree with the whole bait and switch thing, people are free to work out averages for themselves or look on the site and see the obvious just as you did.

You also have to remember that buying and selling is 'the game' to some, just as trials or housing or roleplaying is to others.

jasonhunter

Hey everyone, thank you all for your great contributions in this thread!

WiseSky wrote: »

That much trouble over 25K??

I use Master Merchant its the way to go

That is just one example, there are many other ones at way higher values.

But I myself acknowledge of course that it is way more practical with this addon, and that is why, as the title of this thread suggests, the problem lies primarily with the players, not the addon.

And as others have also said, it is up to ZOS to determine wether they can live with it or if they handle it as an 'exploit' of some sort.

mickeyx

Redguards_Revenge wrote: »

jasonhunter wrote: »

I know this is probably nothing new, but I is still disturbing to me. I just saw players selling the same item, a blueprint valued at average 40k, at 5 different guildstores for 15k.
What they do is they list it at a ridiculously low price, cancel it and upload it to TTC. They tempt some desperate people into selling their same item cheaper so it can be grabbed and sold at a higher price.
I see it happening with so many items and it is a disgusting practice and it illegitimizes an otherwise useful addon to determine market prices.

I have a problem with that. Is there a way to stop this? Should it be stopped?
The ingame economy is bad already, and stuff like this just makes it worse.

Thank you for your consideration.

Bro, I have said this 2-3 years ago on this forum. I told them TTC + Master Merchant = Death of the game economy. Whales and people who are at the top and invested a crap load into the game won't see it that way. They will all deny it because they sit comfortably at the top. This will in turn, turn away new players. Then the mid ranged players will start to quit. Then you'll have one elite player born every 6 months. This is because they need people to replace the whales or players who invested so much time into the game once they retire. This happens in all MMOs. It's almost time for that moment where newer players don't play through the whole thing leave the game. They may stay for the story, but, everything else will be dead. It's the beginning of the end...when this becomes noticeable, This is ESO over it's peak. It's all downhill from here. There will be peaks while going downhill but they will not be higher than the higest peak we just passed up.

lol i have 300 k to my name and not even a top player and love using TTC for everything i need. So does most of my guild full of casual players. Any more gross assumptions? if anything TTC helps new players get gear like briarheart and mother sorrow at affordable prices.

And for casual people like me who want to fill up their sticker book at a reasonable rate. TTC is a god send addon.

Elsonso

jasonhunter wrote: »

Hey everyone, thank you all for your great contributions in this thread!

WiseSky wrote: »

That much trouble over 25K??

I use Master Merchant its the way to go

That is just one example, there are many other ones at way higher values.

But I myself acknowledge of course that it is way more practical with this addon, and that is why, as the title of this thread suggests, the problem lies primarily with the players, not the addon.

And as others have also said, it is up to ZOS to determine wether they can live with it or if they handle it as an 'exploit' of some sort.

I doubt that ZOS is going to get involved. This is the player economy and these things tend to sort themselves out over time. Besides, if lots of people start selling items at "ridiculously low prices", a lot of buyers are not going to complain.

Danikat

Jaimeh wrote: »

I don't know if that's the intention, but I have found on several occassions a recently listed item on the TTC website with X price, then went to the trader and found it (from the same seller) listed with a higher price, so I thought that either they mistakenly listed it for the X price, and had to re-list it, or deliberately listed on X price, to attract a customer who would then be like 'ah, whatever, I came to the trader anyway, I might as well buy it' But yeah it begs the question if it was also done to drive prices down, never thought of that. But it's probably isolated incidents, not a wide-spread practice (hopefully).

It's also possible it's different players in the same guild. TTC does list the sellers name on the site, but I know I rarely look at it and I doubt many other people do either. I'm not in a trading guild but a social guild which often has a trader and interest varies massively. Some people never use the trader, some like me just use it to offload whatever they have and don't want and some are pretty into trading (I think for a few people it's an overflow for their normal guild store).

As a result I often see wildly different prices for the same item just on the 1 store, but they stay up long enough that I'm fairly sure it's not someone creating fake listings. It's just that some items are listed by people who want a quick sale and some by people who want maximum profit...and some I can only assume are listed by people who don't do any type of price checking and are being wildly optimistic about what their items are worth because they list fairly common items for hundreds of thousands of gold.

On the other hand there is one trader (no I won't name them) I don't even bother checking any more because I always see 10+ recent listings of the same motif at good but not stupidly cheap prices and when I've gone there those are all mysteriously gone but there's 10+ of the same motif at 10 times the price. It's happened often enough with the same guild that I don't think it's a coincidence, but for me the solution is simply to avoid that guild, not the addon. (They're also in a popular trading spot so I doubt they're reliant on TTC to sell their listings.)

mickeyx wrote: »

Redguards_Revenge wrote: »

jasonhunter wrote: »

I know this is probably nothing new, but I is still disturbing to me. I just saw players selling the same item, a blueprint valued at average 40k, at 5 different guildstores for 15k.
What they do is they list it at a ridiculously low price, cancel it and upload it to TTC. They tempt some desperate people into selling their same item cheaper so it can be grabbed and sold at a higher price.
I see it happening with so many items and it is a disgusting practice and it illegitimizes an otherwise useful addon to determine market prices.

I have a problem with that. Is there a way to stop this? Should it be stopped?
The ingame economy is bad already, and stuff like this just makes it worse.

Thank you for your consideration.

Bro, I have said this 2-3 years ago on this forum. I told them TTC + Master Merchant = Death of the game economy. Whales and people who are at the top and invested a crap load into the game won't see it that way. They will all deny it because they sit comfortably at the top. This will in turn, turn away new players. Then the mid ranged players will start to quit. Then you'll have one elite player born every 6 months. This is because they need people to replace the whales or players who invested so much time into the game once they retire. This happens in all MMOs. It's almost time for that moment where newer players don't play through the whole thing leave the game. They may stay for the story, but, everything else will be dead. It's the beginning of the end...when this becomes noticeable, This is ESO over it's peak. It's all downhill from here. There will be peaks while going downhill but they will not be higher than the higest peak we just passed up.

lol i have 300 k to my name and not even a top player and love using TTC for everything i need. So does most of my guild full of casual players. Any more gross assumptions? if anything TTC helps new players get gear like briarheart and mother sorrow at affordable prices.

And for casual people like me who want to fill up their sticker book at a reasonable rate. TTC is a god send addon.

I'd take it one further - I use TTC because I'm a casual player who doesn't do that much trading. Before trade addons like TTC and Master Merchant got well known people used to tell me to 'just' check all the traders in a town or a few from several different towns to get price estimates for each item as if that was no trouble at all and a totally normal way to spend your free time, but I could not be bothered with that so I just never used traders at all, I only bought or sold from NPCs.

If TTC went away I'd go back to not buying anything from traders except my own guild because it wouldn't be worth the hassle of going around towns hoping to find what I want by pure chance, and then hoping it's not stupidly over priced if I ever do find it. Whereas the dedicated traders would probably continue and simply go back to manually checking prices, because for them it's worth the time to do that.

Raideen

Agree OP. I see the same people listing the same items like Chromium Plating for 39 gold each, in big market areas (with serious dues paid to the guild trader). I find it extremely hard to believe this is a "naive" person listing.

I think they do so to drive traffic to their kiosk as hordes of players come in to find that super cheap item (which never exists).

cyberjanet

TTC actually monitors its site and bans people it thinks are manipulating it. And when I say ban, you can't access the site and nobody on the same IP address can use it either.

kargen27

Redguards_Revenge wrote: »

jasonhunter wrote: »

I know this is probably nothing new, but I is still disturbing to me. I just saw players selling the same item, a blueprint valued at average 40k, at 5 different guildstores for 15k.
What they do is they list it at a ridiculously low price, cancel it and upload it to TTC. They tempt some desperate people into selling their same item cheaper so it can be grabbed and sold at a higher price.
I see it happening with so many items and it is a disgusting practice and it illegitimizes an otherwise useful addon to determine market prices.

I have a problem with that. Is there a way to stop this? Should it be stopped?
The ingame economy is bad already, and stuff like this just makes it worse.

Thank you for your consideration.

Bro, I have said this 2-3 years ago on this forum. I told them TTC + Master Merchant = Death of the game economy. Whales and people who are at the top and invested a crap load into the game won't see it that way. They will all deny it because they sit comfortably at the top. This will in turn, turn away new players. Then the mid ranged players will start to quit. Then you'll have one elite player born every 6 months. This is because they need people to replace the whales or players who invested so much time into the game once they retire. This happens in all MMOs. It's almost time for that moment where newer players don't play through the whole thing leave the game. They may stay for the story, but, everything else will be dead. It's the beginning of the end...when this becomes noticeable, This is ESO over it's peak. It's all downhill from here. There will be peaks while going downhill but they will not be higher than the higest peak we just passed up.

Good thing your prognostications have been wrong. The economy is fine. It flows well with supply and demand. There is a significant part of the game population that considers trading end game and enjoy the current system. Players that don't do a lot of trading can get everything they need and most of what they want at almost any level. Inflation hasn't run away so much as to be troubling to new players.
If/when players do decide to leave the game the economy isn't going to be the reason why. For most it is just a background thing that is handy when needed.

Arrodisia

Even if this was the case, which I somewhat doubt. Players gamble to win, not lose and the potential to lose in that scenario is much higher than standard flipping with no guaranteed higher gain than a standard flip. If anything, most traders will just buy them all at any half decent price which in itself creates a demand. Once the other items are gone the price can be reset a bit higher.

Blue prints and motifs tend to drop quite quickly nowadays. Since we have dailies and events available in which we get them as rewards on multiple characters per day for some players. items that have been proven to drop a bit more rarely are the ones with the higher prices.

Plus, never underestimate the lack of some player's selling knowledge. Some players are 100% casual and don't use addons at all, which means some of them tend to list either very low or very high. There's no middle ground because they don't realise one exists.
A lot of times an inexperienced player is desperate for sales in their new guild and doesn't realise they can sell that item for a bit more.

I'm not saying every transaction is necessarily squeaky clean but I wouldn't automatically assume malice here either. As you can see, there are other explanations for such behaviour.

With the scenario the op gives us there's an easy answer. If players list the item at the price they want it to be and ignore TTC. it will still sell if it isn't massively overpriced. Eventually the people who were doing it would see the trick didn't work since the items are still there for sale at mid ranged and higher prices.

The current economy is still quite good and competitive.

Kessra

cyberjanet wrote: »

And when I say ban, you can't access the site and nobody on the same IP address can use it either.

Which isn't a big problem if you know how the Internet actually works. Spoofing IP addresses is fairly simple if you know how. You even get taught this as undergraduate student at university if you take computer science courses.

matterandstuff

So do your homework and look through the actual ranked sale prices on the TTC website (especially for your level of guild trader location) if you want to make the most money. Easy.

Personally, I could give a damn if people want to buy my stuff because it's cheap and then try to re-sell it. They can assume the risk that it doesn't sell. I'm not particularly patient, I don't want items that sit there for weeks, and if I put something up for sale I want it sold ASAP. I'm never the lowest because I'm with a reasonable trading guild with reasonable spots, but I price cheaply (often with the combined assistance of TTC and Arkadius), sell quickly, and so far have been making an absolute killing.

AJones43865

I think most of the time it's the opposite type of listing taking place to manipulate prices. People list low value items for millions to drive up the average price, thus getting more from their sales of the same item if people list at the average.