What's YOUR stance on bartering from botters/dupers?

I had a bit of an ethical predicament today.

I was looking for a sought-after item with perfect stats. On another site, I found several sellers that had something like 50 of them each. One even listed their stock level as "infinite". There's no way 50 of these could be obtained legitimately, or probably even with bots. I'm pretty sure they were duped.

I'm interested to find out how most players feel about this. I don't think there's a correct answer; it's more shades of grey, so feel free to elaborate or change your mind after reading the comments.

Also, I'm not talking about real-money transactions. That's an entirely different can of worms.

The main problem with quotes on the Internet is that people immediately believe in their authenticity.
— Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, 10 July 1923

It's funny, but exactly one hundred years have passed since the day he said this phrase that went down in history.

I understand what site you are talking about, but why do you think that the quantity of available stuff is indicated correctly? Do not forget about the Asian mentality and wild trading methods on Traderie.

GL.

I don't see any problem with it. Nor do I care if you personally dupe all the best stuff in the game. It doesn't affect me one little bit, nor do I look down on people who do it.

From my point of view, an ethical predicament would be weather someone should financially support Blizzard's business practices or not, and you already made that decision. As far as I'm concerned, you could run 1000 bots 24/7 and it's less of a moral infraction than the above mentioned.

So get get your item and have fun.

flamebellow wrote: 10 months ago

I understand what site you are talking about, but why do you think that the quantity of available stuff is indicated correctly? Do not forget about the Asian mentality and wild trading methods on Traderie.

GL.

It's entirely possible that the quantities are inflated. For what reason, I don't know because as a seller, I'd rather create the illusion of scarcity.

It's also possible that the dozens of repeated sales by the same seller for the same item are mostly fake. Perhaps it's to drive down the price of the genuine item, or to farm reputation.

So, back to the topic - would you trade for an item if you were pretty sure it was either duped or bot farmed?

CleanFun wrote: 10 months ago

(snip)

A well explained opinion. Thanks for your feedback!

For me, I am wary of dupes, only because I wouldn't want my item to poof, but otherwise I have no problem with botted/cheated items in the right context.

I'm playing a game, and I want to have fun. Sometimes fun in games to me means exploiting gold duplication in Dragon Age Origins to get a max

Dodge + magic resist character at early levels then soloing the entire game in clear violation of the developers' intended experience. Sometimes it means giving a Skyrim character an item that decreases all Thu'

Um cooldowns to 1 second and then doing a 'shouts only' playthrough with an absurd advantage.

Fun meant grinding through my first Elden Ring playthrough completely blind without any online guides or anything and suffering in ignorance. And it meant legitimately earning my first Infinity in d2r. Yet, I recently did a hardcore offline playthrough where after every boss I killed for the quest, I rolled d20s and gave myself a rune off a level-appropriate table through Hero Editor. My throw barb received a

Sur off Hell

Baal this way, which is a bit unfortunate because I clearly would have preferred something else, but oh well. Those are the rules I set for the experience I desired. Is it cheating? Oh, absolutely. But it's my fun.

So, in the right context, I have no problem letting a game's flaws benefit me. If someone wants to buy hundreds of $$ in D2R subscriptions to bot and sell me cheap runes, I have no problem with that, I just won't pay real money. If I want to intentionally avoid these flaws and tailor a certain gameplay experience, I have the freedom to do so.

Well lets take this from the start, its true that dupes have always been a part of the game, especially in the old days. I remember I had a friend back in the day who had an account with character limit reached with... 140 soj in each and every one of them. But there is a difference, people use to have dupes back then but the concept of here 100 soj for X amount of real money was a very rare concept. The problem dupes created back and then and it also happens today is inflation.

I generally do not like inflation in any concept, take it in real life, take it in any game that i play. I like having something that holds real/not inflated value. With botters/dupers and the sort

Ber's for example are flying around like candy. This holds certain benefits for people who were struggling to make an Enigma for example and this helps their gameplay, but at the same time, the item itself loses its value and its general esteem which i don't like.

Of course there is always the danger of your duped item going poof, but this is a risk most people are aware of, while some others ( and these are the more fragile ones ) they trade their legit items for duped happy they made a good trade only to find the things they traded one day going poof. I remember back in the day when we were trading runes people were saying, don't just stash them just make them into a runeword to avoid them being wiped one morning - you don't know if they are legit or duped.

Sure their existence only means that people are willing to open their wallet or w/e to buy them and im sure, most legit players browsed through their catalogues and were tempted by "a

Jah for less than a dollar? oh my oh my" even thought they resisted the temptation. Their existence means its a market that produces profit for them and as it happens with all organisations that are not non profit, they will stop existing once players stop buying right?

Now their inventory being infinite on a specific very scarce item? People already provided solid arguments so i wont repeat them ill just add one more. Infinite might mean that they might not have an infinite amount, but they do have the means to find the things you order from them, due to their network and "other" activities which brings us back to square one. In order to list it, they have it or they have the means to have it one way or another.

Bottom line is while dupes has always been a part of the game, that doesn't make them "normal", they create havoc to the market and since the mentality has shifted from i have dupes just because to i have dupes to sell them for cash it also creates a pay to win sensation which i personally find extremely annoying. Same goes with botters, traderie and the sort, anything that creates unfair advantages from one player to another i personally do not like it one bit for various reasons so buying means I'm adding more fuel to a fire that is already burning hot and i dont want that.

1) Not a fan of botters, though the item acquisition is legitimate. If Blizz allows it, who am I to judge?
Botting means your rals, hels, pgems are worth much more compared to

Jah and

Ber values. That is good. Non-perfect endgame gear and runewords are dime a dozen. If you aren't a seller and/or a hoarder, this doesn't affect you one bit in a negative way.
(Not considering the rush of adrenaline you get for finding a

Jah/

Ber which is now just "meh")

2) Duping should be 100% immediate bannable offense for cheating. Not going to sugarcoat it.


Disclaimer: Bought a

Jah for 25

Hel. This is what botting does.
An example for duping would be something like: Bought a 2/30/15

Crown of Ages for 30

Jah. It's gone now.

True especially

Hel price has skyrocketed and has a trend upwards. Nowadays you can get an

Ist for 6 while a month or two ago had a steady price of 10. The whole thing has it pros ofcource, especially for less rich people who struggle to make something good for their chars, but a lot of cons as well.

Regarding botters, well unless they use an easily detectable third party they can go unnoticed with Blizz turning an eye on then in all of their games. There have been various speculations as of why and not prepared to share them online.

Bottom line ( and my two cents ), invest in something of steady value if you want to accumulate Wealth that is not affected that much by the ups and downs of the market, or just cube HR's ( 2

Ber into a

Jah for example and keep this in a seperate tab ) to be 100% certain they wont go poof one day.

Maybe I am out of the loop, but has anyone actually had items poof in d2r due to duping? I have only heard of duping in the context of the transition between ladder seasons, and I am not sure if they fixed that bug or not. I guess it is still likely that some people took advantage of this bug and had loads of jahs sitting around, but I just assumed most of the high rune supply was due to botters. I assumed HRs from botting were safe, and that dupes from the ladder season did not have a long lifespan and had already been deleted by Bliz.

Well if blizzard wants to find a duped item its actually pretty easy. Every item in a database has its own identification code. It requires a rather easy search for those who know how to do it, to identify duplicates of that code. ( i.e. we see 7 items with the code 11a in the database ). And a few more filters to identify what is the original ( legit ) and simply wipe/purge the other 6. At least that's how its done in simple words.

Regarding the runes no1 can deny that past 2 months the HR prices have plummeted to the Ground. Thats only the past 1-2 months, not the past year. This could be due to many things and im not saying necessarily its because dupes are flooding the market, but im just saying better safe than sorry.

When 1

Ber goes for 6

Ist ( i saw that price today ) and the seller is always selling multiples staying online for a few hours, i have the right to be cautious.

I don't buy from botters. I'm a aspiring seller myself and it feels, IMO, unfair and wrong to buy stuff from them when i can buy from a straight up player.

Trying to sell stuff on a market full of bots feels like trying to compete against big corporations that does not play fair. Its not even close to a healthy competition.

When 1

Ber goes for 6

Ist ( i saw that price today ) and the seller is always selling multiples staying online for a few hours, i have the right to be cautious.
[/quote]

Wow… I thought this statement was in error as I haven’t checked the softcore market for a while, but see that

Ber was going as low as 4

Ist on softcore ladder. I’ve never seen prices anywhere near this but admittedly have only played the last 3 seasons.

The hardcore market, albeit extremely slow compared to soft, is still valuing high runes at more traditional prices. Head on over if you hate inflation and have no intention of throwing “real” currency into the market

I have yet to find out a way to identify who sells duped / botted items and who sells legit items. As long as I can't tell that one without a doubt, I can't really say that I won't buy anything from a cheater. I had this discussion last week with a fellow player, and I stated, that duping and botting have mainly one effect: inflation. Inflation comes naturally when the game ages and the player numbers decrease, but botters/dupers increase the speed of this inflation.

Does it hurt me? It doesn't really. I started collecting lower runes and selling them on traderie. For example I sold 11x

El for 1x

Ber (correction: 1x

Lo) on Traderie last week. Well, on the one hand these prices are absolutely mad and shift the worth of runes in a strange direction. on the other hand the prices for real good stuff explodes as well. I had a look for perfect equipment parts for my sorc. these madmen want like 20

Jah here, 15

Ber there... for ONE equipment part. So even if you can sell some lower runes for higher runes, it still will take you very long to reach a perfect char. and I like the fact that I can be successful without having to grind for 2000+ hours. I had several 100 hours as well, so it's nice to see some of the endgame stuff sometime. so the gap between a decent character and a perfect character is still high, regarding the prices of the perfect stuff. despite it only being the last 2-3%. And I recently managed the holy grail, mainly by trading here (thanks, folks . It still took me a good while, so I'd say, the economy is not yet totally broken.

Yes. finding a good piece of equipment or a high rune yourself loses a bit of its magic, but that's all that bothers me. And after having put at least 300-400 hours in this game so far, if

Ber won't drop, I'm fine to trade one for some lower runes... For me, perfecting my char is still nearly impossible, so there is a gap to perfection that still keeps up my interest in the game.

Now who on earth would want to buy 11

El for a

Ber? I'm obviously happy for all the people who sell seemingly obscure or little value items and helps them improve their characters but the whole situation just adds to everything I said above.

Thing has indeed shifted towards the perfect items or the perfect rolls still holding value but even with those the pay-out would also be inflated. In any case its true as game goes older and older inflation will happen anyway and personally am completely fine with it as long as its a natural one going over time.

This artificial inflation that

Ber's from 10

Ist going to 4-6

Ist ( or even 11

El lol ) overnight is not good and it has confused many traders. Some still go with the "logical" prices some buy and sell with reference to traderie and this just adds to the confusion.

No there is no way you can understand if an item you received was a dupe or just bot farmed, I might have runes of that sort in my bank all of us could, and that is perfectly ok.

And don't get me wrong I'm not a super rich player, this situation benefits me getting the items I want etc etc ( and i dont mean perfect ones ), but it just doesn't feel right. Plus i always loved the so called "perfect imperfections" but i also absolutely respect different point of views ( except those of actual botters/dupers of course ).

Sirius Delta wrote: 10 months ago

For example I sold 11x

El for 1x

Ber on Traderie last week.

Gotta make a correction here, it was not a

Ber actually, but a

Lo. Still, that price is a bit off. I also sold 10x

Eld for 1x

Vex and 5x

Hel for 1x

Ist. And those are usual trade rates there, I always look at the recent trades and make an average price for my stuff, no extortion in comparison to other traders. I sure take my advantage here, but it would feel wrong not to do it.

Same goes for other items. I offer both on Traderie and here, but I check prices for each site separate. So I sell most stuff cheaper here than on Traderie. Weird, but it works. But as I said on another thread already: Nothing beats the community here. I prefer trading here in any case.