Great way to trick people using /barter !

[furioso]

1) Set up a barter mule

2) Offer to buy an item for some highish amount (106pp)

3) On the same mule offer to buy the same item for very low (1cp)

4) Put the low priced item in the higher bag slot (like you would stat food)

5) Traders (like me) who sort by price and don't check (therefore its my fault, I know) will run to you and click sell before they know they just lost their ass.


Fun for the whole family!

[Itek]

Ouch.

Just ouch.

Well... I guess you could /petition and report the abuse, but it may have been an accident, and the CSRs aren't the swiftest when it comes to following a problem like this...

Best bet... /bug and /feedback it. (You should NOT be able to have two buy lines of different prices for the same item. The item has a database number it should be REALLY easy to filter out this sort of scam/accident.)

[KyrosKrane]

Actually, there are valid uses for having multiple buy lines. For example, I regularly have two buy lines for, say, vials of purified mana. One buy line offers 575pp cash, the other offers 50pp cash, four rubies, and a poison vial.

Now, I'm not sure I can think of a valid reason to have two pure-cash offers at the same time. However, this is still a case of caveat emptor (or more accurately, caveat vendor -- seller beware).

I could see a person creating tiers of prices -- eg, 10 for 100pp, 10 for 90pp, 10 for 80pp, etc. That way, he would essentially pay top dollar for the first few, then a bit less for the next few, and so on. Kind of like a supply and demand thing. But that would be quite a bit of work, and as noted, not many people who come to sell stuff would realize that the pricing is tiered, or that you have to specifically select the buy line you want to use when selling.

[Ngreth Thergn]

Well... I forwarded this around. And here is the problem

The system that allows this is to allow players to do something such as:

offer 100pp for a diamond
offer 1pp and an emerald for a diamond

the system does not know the difference between there not being an item, and it just being a different price point.

Tanker mentioned that the prices should be listed when you make the "sale" so you just have to be carefull and watch it.

[furioso]

Tanker mentioned that the prices should be listed when you make the "sale" so you just have to be carefull and watch it.

I brought this up more as a warning to others. My mistake was I didn't check the price of the item before I clicked SELL. I don't think its a bug so I didn't /bug it.

Now, I'm not sure I can think of a valid reason to have two pure-cash offers at the same time.

There are a few good reasons. Say if you had a limited amount of plat. You wanted to be sure someone sold an item to you, but anything beyond the item you needed at the moment you would offer to buy for less.

i.e. If you were buying velium pieces and needed 100 of them for skilling up. So you offer to buy 100 velium pieces for 10pp each. But some time in the future you will need more velium pieces but you don't need them right now. So you offer to buy the second set of 100 for 5pp each. This would (to me) be a valid use of two cash offers for the same item.

Perhaps the person I bought from was in that situation? I highly doubt it but how can I prove someone's intent? I can't so I didn't /petition either.



Perhaps the system can be changed so if the same trader is offering the same item at two prices, only the more expensive of the two will be available with the cheaper of the two unavailable but still showing?



Call me parinoid, but I can see this as trouble. To see what I mean check the /barter prices of Ebon Crystals and Radiant Crystals. I see examples of this with those two items on my server right now.

Ah well.

[Verdandi]

*grits her teeth, fighting the very powerful urge to give Furioso the custom title "Parinoid"*

[Itek]

Hm..

I -may- have overstated the "there's no reason to have two buy lines for the same item" theory.

I can -almost- see a buyer saying "I need 8 of this item RIGHT NOW, and I'll pay 100 plat for them until I get that many, but then I need probably 40 more as a reserve and I'll pay 50 plat for the reserves after I get the first 8."

And I can -almost- see "Well I need 8 cinnamon and I'll pay 100 plat for them, but since it's foraged I'll also offer a half trade, 60 plat and a morning dew, for them as well."

As Tanker and Ngreth will point out making a priority queue is easy. Making a decision tree for multiple decision conditions is hard.

Does the seller want plat first? or morning dew? Are the 8 offered with morning dew the same 8 offered with 100 plat? (meaning after someone sells 6 for 100 plat and someone else sells two for plat/dew does the dew offer AND the high plat offer close and only the low plat offer remain?)

Nasty. Evil and rude. A coding problem with no elegant solution.

So we won't be doing that....

Guess all considered it's easier to tell people "sorry, you have to take responsibility for clicking "ok," because we can't prevent all mistakes."

[furioso]

right on on Povar

Paranoid...parinoid... WTB spell checker.

I know this isn't a trade skill item but it illustrates the point and the trader was up and I'm lazy. Right now on my server Trader Wxxxx is selling (Wxxxx's name has been X'd to protect the innocent):

Trader Wxxxx: Radiant Crystals (975) 90p 4g
Trader Wxxxx: Radiant Crystals (999) 90p 2g
Trader Wxxxx: Radiant Crystals (600) 90p 1g
Trader Wxxxx: Radiant Crystals (957) 83p 3g
Trader Wxxxx: Radiant Crystals (979) 20p
Trader Wxxxx: Radiant Crystals (999) 20p

Trader Wxxxx: Ebon Crystals (908) 109p 5g
Trader Wxxxx: Ebon Crystals (999) 75p 6g
Trader Wxxxx: Ebon Crystals (999) 65p

Also Trader Qxxxx is selling:
Trader Qxxxx: Ebon Crystals (620) 105p
Trader Qxxxx: Ebon Crystals (957) 105p


Notice only two traders have several buy prices. One of them (Qxxxx) offers the same price for Ebons so I don't suspect he's a scammer. The other one (Wxxxx) is offering to buy the same items for three different cash prices. He is offering just cash, no gems or whatnot to make the difference between his 20pp vs. 90p Xg.

Does Wxxxx expect to buy 3531 Radiant Crystals before he gets to the 20pp ones? Perhaps. No one but him can know if he’s running low on cash and stocking up for later, or if he hopes someone will click the SELL on the 20p ones.


Anyhow, I know I'll check my prices before selling anything again. It would be nice if the system would check to see if the same item was being asked for different cash only prices, then grey out all but one of them. That doesn't seem like it would be too time consuming or hard to change, but then again I'm not a programmer. I hope this doesn’t become a problem in the future as it hasn’t been one that I’ve noticed before.

Happy holidays.

[Ngreth Thergn]

Paranoid...parinoid... WTB spell checker.

click User Cp -> Edit Options
scroll down to the Miscellaneous Options.

for Message Editor Interface, choose either "Standard Editor - Extra Options" or "Enhanced Interface - WISYWIG Editing"

Then edit/create a post... in the grey area, on the top right... click the ABC check mark. This will install a plugin that will then be useful in other places you visit from he browser task bar, and integrated on these forums (just click that same button in the grey area and it will spell check.)

This may only work for IE... not sure there.

[Winenose]

One of these buyers up on AB also. Offering 11k for 1 glossy drake hide, 10k for 34 glossy drake hide and 9k for 25 glossy drake hide.

[Ixiola]

Playing devils advocate, it's always possible it was accidental. I've done a fair amount of bartering off and on for several months, and unfortunately your list doesn't sort alphabetically, but rather in the order you entered the buy request. Once you get a lot of items on your list, it may get harder to keep track of what's already there.

Several weeks ago, I decided to put my buyer back up to try to get some glossy drake hides to make symbols for a friend. I checked current offerings to decide on my price, and set my buy amount. On a whim, I then did a barter search on the item after I turned on my buyer, and discovered I had 2 buy orders for the same item at different amounts. I was actually frustruated that the tool hadn't warned me this was the case when I added the new one. I quickly deleted the old (lower) one.

I wasn't trying to scam anyone, or set up tiered buy rates or anything. It was simply an oversite due to my only turning on my buyer periodically, and me responding to the current market to ensure I could get the item quickly.

Just a thought, would it be possible to add the option to sort your buy list when you set up barter so you can weed out this happening on accident?

[KyrosKrane]

I've also had some odd problems with buy lines not recording where they should be. For example, I remember one time I tried to modify a buy line deep down in my list, but for some reason, when I hit modify, it instead overwrote the first buy line (completely different item) and created a duplicate of the one I was trying to modify. When I checked /barter, both the modified and unmodified lines were there.

[Flehmen]

I've also found that if you re-barter for something you were bought-out on that it appears not at the bottom of the list but in the order it orgionally appeared. I took a look at the files in my EQ directory and the list appears to be sorted as it appears in the barter ini/txt file....

I'll try to get a name of the file when I get home tonight.

[Xislaben]

Heh, I had a guildy complain that they just unloaded 100 radiant crystals to a guy they thought was buying at 100p/each or so, but it turned out to be 10p on a second buy line, so he was pretty mad. I went and looked and saw that the prices are indeed displayable, but not by default, and that I have to drag the corner of the buyer screen wider to see them. Several people do have multiple buy lines for a single object at different prices, and I would be willing to bet they have a buy line for a few of the item in question at the best price to attract sellers, while having a great deal at much lower prices, in order to swindle the careless.

Consequently I've always been a little annoyed that any given item could only be sold in trader mode for a single price, so much for hedging bets by position sizing for the ebb and flow of the market. Of course it’s safer in trader as not only is the price readily available within the UI, but the buyer in that case is protected by only being able to buy with however much plat he or she has on them, whereas in /buyer mode, not only can you not see the price by default, being hidden by the UI, you also cannot control the price since you have the item, and the /buyer char presumably has the plat to meet the price.

[Xislaben]

Also, annoyingly the seller slide bar only goes up to 20, so when I went to unload 200+ radiant crystals I had to sell them over, and over, and over, and over...