Comment by cortesoft

This reminds me so much of an old World of Warcraft addon i used in 2005-6 or so… I believe it was called ‘bottom feeder’ or something.

Basically, you would leave your character logged in sitting at the auction house. It would observe auctions for a while, and generate pricing data and sales data. Then, you would enable automatic mode, and it would automatically bid/buy any item that someone put up for sale if the price was much lower than normal.

You would leave it running overnight, or whatever, then come back to go pick up all the items it bought, and then you would go back to the auction house and sell all your items you bought at the correct price.

Basically, you would see buy auctions created by people who didn’t realize what the correct price should be and sold too cheaply. Since this was an automated system, you could beat any human to take advantage of the deal.

I made a ton of in game currency doing this.

After a few months they changed the auction rules to prevent this… add-ons could no longer directly bid on items, and you had to sit there and click “buy” whenever the script found a good deal. This severely limited the amount you could make with the script.

Basically this mirrors the eBay timeline, with the same reasons I am guessing… eBay (like WoW) doesn’t want bots collecting arbitrage.