d2jsp trading is ruined and botters are the problem

HI all,

I feel that trading economy on cdertain d2 trading sites has been ruined.

I blame a few selfish people who use bots.

Because they get so many items, and offer low prices, then people buy all their bot-found gear; often people wont consider trading with a regular trader if a cheaper item is available elsewhere.

Ive tried contacting these botters personally and respectfully but to no avail.

Im not even passing judgement on using bots really. Heck i'd honestly use a bot if I knew how and could get away with it easily. But the difference is I wouldnt use it just to amass riches for myself and only myself, while at the same time ruining the trading experience for everyone else.

I am thinking about making a public post on that site to call them out.

I want to take proactive steps to stop this from happening.

If this continues, trading will die (at least after the first 3 weeks or so of ladder), and if trading dies, the game will die.

If anyone has any other ideas or Insight into this, feel free to share here or pm me.

Thanks
Christoff

I do agree with what you're saying - I wish there were no bots messing up the economy, and I do wish that that site had separate ladder and non-ladder currencies. But these problems have existed in D2 for decades, a will continue to exist for the foreseeable future.

I used to be a stock market trader... and I can confirm that D2's trading behaves in much the same way as the Dow Jones. Whether its bots, earnings announcements, mass DClone walks or news of war, things regularly happen that mess up the market. Among these are the botters/giant companies who use their market clout to alter pricing.

Joe-average traders will complain and hold on to items/stock that have devalued, hoping that they will get the price they wanted.

Clever traders will dump their items/stock at the first sign of trouble, and then use the proceeds to get something else that they can trade... frequently selling to those Joe-average traders who still have the old price in their heads.

Clever trading isn't about changing the market - it's about surfing the market trends.

Your frustration should not necessarily be directed at d2jsp or the players using d2jsp.

Yes, the site is responsible for introducing FG and carrying it over between seasons/modes, and we know that this changes the way the economy works. For worse/better is out of the scope of this thread.

It seems your quarrel however is not with the real money trading bit, but with botting itself - and the debasing of item value that comes with a flood of botted items when seasons start.

The people letting this happen (and have been letting this happen in online play for 20 years) are Blizzard - not d2jsp. They are the ones who should be detecting and stopping botting at the program level.

If Blizzard clamped down on bots, then the botted items wouldn't start appearing on d2jsp in the first place.

On that note (Teebs) Yes this is true.

So long as the studio continues to allow loop holes to be exploited, botting will never be stopped.
In fact, they will try other means to break the system or other short cuts to move around it.

take for instance the most basic of basic - chat room filtering.
They did something in the last update to make sure some spam is filtered.
Did it work 100%? No. But did it stop some content - it did a little bit.

In the end these sites (selling the items - obviously botted) created game names with the site in there..many of them in the public game list.
it's very prevalent during the weekend...you don't even need to refresh the game list to see a couple of first load too.

How many SOJ's can be churned out within a couple of days to make multiple walks hour after hour for 5 days straight?
By solving the dupe issue, Blizz introduced another problem - Automated software instructions aka Bots to find targeted gear.

Hoping BLizzard to really stop bots is like hoping companies to stop selling skins on other games, I have no hope.

I'm an old D2 player but i'm new to battle net and online playing. I have some questions that i think fits this post.

The bots actually "play" the game? I mean, they go around killing mobs and collecting stuff?

Those players spamming the lobby are bots as well, right? Reporting them results in anything positive or is just waste of time?

luizgeo wrote: 10 months ago

I'm an old D2 player but i'm new to battle net and online playing. I have some questions that i think fits this post.

The bots actually "play" the game? I mean, they go around killing mobs and collecting stuff?

Those players spamming the lobby are bots as well, right? Reporting them results in anything positive or is just waste of time?

if you were around the time when ol'skool bnet is prevalent with

Baal Bot Runners.
The #1 choice to use is the hammerdin.
They go on a pre-programmed path en route to WSK->WSC
The more creative ones actually have text displayed one the chat.
They have auto item pick up.
obviously 8P games drop alot of loot, and always max boss loot.

Now in D2r? Obviously they have adjusted. But some bots do get stuck and if you chance upon an open game of theirs you might notice them moving from a vendor to a wp and back & forth infinitely.

That's a bot..that crashed.

hey, i do not want to sound destructive, but the initiative looks a bit odd.

Botting in D2 is not a secret for most of the community and as was mentioned previously has been in place for decades. If the idea is to identify and name and shame several prominent botters, which sounds great in general, then i do not see how it would help to deal with botting itself. IMO the only outcome would be to PR those botters further.

I also can't see how the "d2jsp economy" has been ruined because of anything. My sense is that the only way i for it to be ruined is if the community would stop or drastically decrease the inflow of real funds in it (i.e. in exchange for FG) and I do not see it happening (although the d2jsp admins do not share these stats to my knowledge, so O might be wrong). So it is not the economy that is in trouble it is certain users/traders who cant compete with botters... Apart from the moral aspects, everyone else seems to be fine with that.

p.s. blizz would do something meaningful about botting in D2 only if they have a plan to develop their own market platform for D2 (in another words - a substitute of d2jsp). Apparently that is not the case for various reasons.

What would be fun if you could identify them would be... to PK them

Necrarch wrote: 10 months ago

What would be fun if you could identify them would be... to PK them

... or invade their game right after DClone walks.

its not just a "few" botters. there hundreds if not thousands. many are professional groups.

if i remember correctly, in Season1, Blizzard did a mass ban, and the next day they got DDOS attacked and crashed the servers for a day. after that I don't remember hearing about any more Blizzard bans.

What's wrong with these bots? Is it bad when people can make runewords cheap and fast?

NightsAnonymous wrote: 10 months ago

its not just a "few" botters. there hundreds if not thousands. many are professional groups.

if i remember correctly, in Season1, Blizzard did a mass ban, and the next day they got DDOS attacked and crashed the servers for a day. after that I don't remember hearing about any more Blizzard bans.

Yep you mess the the d2 item cartel you pay this is 1000% correct and it happens on trade sites too, especially if you know who some of the actors are and block them from joining your site, I know this from personal experience.

Does anyone have some knowledge about the prevalence of bots in softcore verses hardcore ladder modes? It seems that hardcore would have much lower demand which would have an impact, though again, fewer bots could then satiate the market..

I’ve seen a bot die before from pvm and I assume there’d be some group of pkers in hardcore who’d like to go bot hunting (sounds fun actually). I don’t know if that’d do enough to change the price point enough to discourage it. I don’t play pc and have little knowledge of how many public bot games are going on at any given time. Then again, starting solo bot games would be a partial solution which still resulted in major yields, though, dying from a perfect storm in pvm would still be a possibility, though much lower risk in players1. Additionally, the smaller player base and lack of pvp would likely limit demand on the top end gear. I’m not sure what portion of bot owners yields revolve around the high end player base, though intuitively think the money is mainly in selling masses the Enigma they don’t have time to farm.

I can say from my recent experience that the hardcore economy is painfully slow and doubt many botters are bothering a month and a half into the ladder, but I started the week that d4 came around so perhaps it was much more like softcore prior to that.

flamebellow wrote: 10 months ago

What's wrong with these bots? Is it bad when people can make runewords cheap and fast?

First and foremost, botting is unfair. Even worse if the botted items are sold for real money, making the game P2W. This alone is enough to deserve a permanent ban.

Second, try to sell your hardly earned

Harlequin Crest,

Lidless Wall, Tal Rasha's Wrappings or other mid- or endgame (just not perfect BiS) items, say, two-three weeks after the ladder start. Nobody will buy them or at most you will get low offers, because everyone will be already using the best items, provided by the bots. The entire economy is ruined by the excessive supply of botted items. Knowing that your drops are worthless takes away all the excitement of finding them (which is the essence of this game).

If people want easily accessible items, they can always play and cheat on SP, harming no one (besides themselves).

trentor wrote: 10 months ago

p.s. blizz would do something meaningful about botting in D2 only if they have a plan to develop their own market platform for D2 (in another words - a substitute of d2jsp). Apparently that is not the case for various reasons.

There is an alternative: trading with items (specifically runes)! Ladder resets remove them, making seasons fair for everyone, unlike d2jsp, which gives unfair advantage to random dudes who used to run bots in legacy D2 20 years ago.

Necrarch wrote: 10 months ago

What would be fun if you could identify them would be... to PK them

Most bots use chicken: they leave the game either right away on PvP or when their life is below a set threshold (also for PvM). Nevertheless, it was still fun for me to join games with bots (ideally to follow one bot in subsequent games), scaring them away with PvP and annoying the leechers.
I wish I could PK botters in RL.

christoff010 wrote: 10 months ago

Because they get so many items, and offer low prices, then people buy all their bot-found gear; often people wont consider trading with a regular trader if a cheaper item is available elsewhere.

I get that you'd rather sell your items for a higher price, but look at it from the buyer's perspective. I don't want to pay premium to get your self-found

Harlequin Crest if I can get a botted one for half the price.

Yeah, it's so bad that thanks to the botters the items on d2jsp are dirt cheap and accessible to everyone and not just to people who play for hours on end, every day.

Despite me not having played for about a year, my "Wealth" has increased like five fold, can't be mad about that

The game economy is basically dead at this point. Everything is super cheap. I was opposed to the botters for quite a while, and jsp as well. When I tried jsp, I figured out quickly that they just have a lot more players over there to trade with than any other site. The search is jank and things get burried a lot, but since there are so many people over there, you can usually find a buyer or a seller for whatever you want. Or at least that's how it was until D4. Things may come back, but who knows at this point. On the upside, with everything so cheap now, even people who don't play very much can try out far more powerful builds for a lot less than it would have cost before, making it more accessible to those who have less free time. So I see up and downsides to the massive amount of bots.

When I was a kid play LoD, I never thought I would have a whole inventory of skillers with life and high runes and characters that can solo most content. If I didn't end up falling into jsp when I did, I would have already dropped the game a long time ago as the amount of good gear that I could find on my own was tiny and I was getting bored. Now that I have the option to play a bunch of different builds and a bunch of different characters, I can happily play more casually and not have to farm constantly just to get enough Wealth just to try things out.

I just hope that there remains enough of an economy so that I can continue to experiment with new builds going forward.

WrathofMagus wrote: 10 months ago

On the upside, with everything so cheap now, even people who don't play very much can try out far more powerful builds for a lot less than it would have cost before, making it more accessible to those who have less free time.

If I didn't end up falling into jsp when I did, I would have already dropped the game a long time ago as the amount of good gear that I could find on my own was tiny and I was getting bored. Now that I have the option to play a bunch of different builds and a bunch of different characters, I can happily play more casually and not have to farm constantly just to get enough Wealth just to try things out.

What is the point of further gameplay if you already have endgame builds with the most expensive BiS items? "Fun" killing everything with one shot? There is an easier way, not harming the other players: just play SP and cheat with hero editor. Even streamers cheat in SP to try builds before playing them online.
As D2 has no proper endgame, it is the journey that matters, not the destination.

Trang Oul wrote: 10 months ago

WrathofMagus wrote: 10 months ago

On the upside, with everything so cheap now, even people who don't play very much can try out far more powerful builds for a lot less than it would have cost before, making it more accessible to those who have less free time.

If I didn't end up falling into jsp when I did, I would have already dropped the game a long time ago as the amount of good gear that I could find on my own was tiny and I was getting bored. Now that I have the option to play a bunch of different builds and a bunch of different characters, I can happily play more casually and not have to farm constantly just to get enough Wealth just to try things out.

What is the point of further gameplay if you already have endgame builds with the most expensive BiS items? "Fun" killing everything with one shot? There is an easier way, not harming the other players: just play SP and cheat with hero editor. Even streamers cheat in SP to try builds before playing them online.
As D2 has no proper endgame, it is the journey that matters, not the destination.

THIS.

Trading is definitely part of the game. And when things break the status quo (dupes...bots...) EVENTUALLY it kills the game.
FG as a "currency" is something that no studio can anticipate to happen...but happen it did.
For me, i just ignore the noise stemming from that community.
Ingame inflation is also a reflection of this. In the past

Pul could net you 40 pgems...and that held for the longest time.

Lem - 15-20 pgems.
Now 30-40 gets you an

Ist, easily. Now why is that?

In game, when traders COMPARE the worth of their stuff , how much FG they are worth..yada yada i just back out. Leave me out of it.

When you are swimming in Jahs. Bers. What then? Get bored because there is no further motivation other than perfection.

Kill the bots. Eliminate the dupes. Get a Rust storm out..or passive anti-dupe. Because "close" bnet was the selling point in the first damn place.
Wanna get the best or everything? Do it on SP. (there is no "open bnet" in D2r unlike LOD.)

Trang Oul wrote: 10 months ago

WrathofMagus wrote: 10 months ago

On the upside, with everything so cheap now, even people who don't play very much can try out far more powerful builds for a lot less than it would have cost before, making it more accessible to those who have less free time.

If I didn't end up falling into jsp when I did, I would have already dropped the game a long time ago as the amount of good gear that I could find on my own was tiny and I was getting bored. Now that I have the option to play a bunch of different builds and a bunch of different characters, I can happily play more casually and not have to farm constantly just to get enough Wealth just to try things out.

What is the point of further gameplay if you already have endgame builds with the most expensive BiS items? "Fun" killing everything with one shot? There is an easier way, not harming the other players: just play SP and cheat with hero editor. Even streamers cheat in SP to try builds before playing them online.
As D2 has no proper endgame, it is the journey that matters, not the destination.

Why do you reckon everyone shares your point of view on what's considered fun?
I, for one, don't care about the journey at all. I haven't properly gone through the game since the D2 Classic days. I couldn't care less about questing, beating the difficulties as one is "supposed to" or progressively upgrading my items as I play. To me, fun is getting all BiS items, amassing hundreds of HRs for no particular reason and playing once in a blue moon. Does this make sense? To me it does.
In Single Player I won't be able to play with my friends, so here is one reason to be playing online.