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The past few days the bazaar only has a couple reagent items in it.

It normally has a hundreds. Hopefully it a server problem.

If its bot programs, it is probably run by a group of people with lots of KI gold to
buy large blocks of the rare crafting items, that are "only" available in the bazaar, unless crafted.
Since bots would have instant access, read the reagent item list, then request only the rare reagents.
This works by buying rare items in quantity and selling them back one or two at a time.
You can detect them by looking at the time from the request the reagent list to the time of the buy delta.
People should not be able to request multiple "different" reagent items at the same time,
the client software make that impossible. Time delay should be in a seconds for humans,
because it takes time to display items. (usually in hundreds of ms), and mouse over the buy.
Bots could do it in < 200ms, because they just get information and act almost immediately
to request a large buy and then post a small sell. Its a profit and loss game.

At least look into the strangeness. Thank you

DragonLady1818 on Aug 24, 2020 wrote:

Many players are aware there is something going on with the Bazaar.

A couple of weeks ago, I sold 500 Cattails in a single sell. By the time I got over to the Buy page, they were gone in a split second. So yes, something is a bit strange.

Bots have to be programmed for specific purchases. I have no idea whether a single player can use multiple bots or not.

It is fairly evident something is working against most players at the bazaar. My wizards farm for most of the reagents needed but I do park them all in the Bazaar. I have watched the reagents pages lately and have seen it go from 3 pages to 0 within in one or two refreshes.

Where we used to see an average of 5 pages on a regular basis, that is no longer the case. But, it isn't only reagents. Certain TC's are also targeted and can be gone in the blink of an eye.

Something does need to be done to remove and block any possible Bots.

Makes me wonder if that is why i cant find any Grendel's Amends TCs so i can farm the materials instead of Loremaster for the TCs.

Agreed. I'm not the biggest crafter (only having recently started), but you can never find anything in the bazaar, versus a few years ago I remember that there was all kinds of things in there.

Yeah I've seen plenty of evidence to convince me it's bots, but the problem is larger than that too.

The demand for reagents is just incredibly high, even for incredibly common reagents. The problems boil down to this:

• players can buy all 500 reagents incredibly quickly
• players have the resources to buy reagents incredibly quickly
• players are buying reagents incredibly quickly

What this means is that players have enough gold, time, space, and need to buy reagents. Demand greatly exceeds supply and it's just easier to farm for gold than it is to farm for reagents in most cases. For example, I have maxed stone blocks, but I'd rather transmute them into fossils because they're rarer and better. If a max level has 900 of a particular reagent, what is the motivation for selling it?

But here lies the root of the problem:
Crafting is unbalanced. Recipes are getting harder and harder (especially the lore spells) and farming is slow and tedious. Originally a side activity, crafting is too integral now that the vast majority of players craft. The main crafting quests and recipes are difficult, and the average casual player would rather spend gold than farm. This creates a strong demand for reagents in the bazaar. But selling usually occurs in large chunks (dumping 200 reagents rather than a couple) so timing is critical. This causes the the market to be saturated, filled with bots, and shows the flaws in the bazaar system.

The best solutions to fix this: (likely need more than one)

• Increase bazaar max reagents to 999
• Limit buying more than 100 reagents in 1 minute
• Rebalance crafting recipes
• Rebalance harvesting methods
• Rebalance buying and selling prices (you can actually make gold if you strategize availability)
• Address black-market trading
• Rebalance reagent availability (e.g. lore spells requiring reagents available at higher worlds like nectar and squid ink)

There definitely needs to be some changes with bots and the bazaar system in general, but I think balancing crafting will improve the situation dramatically.