Guild Wars 2

Can we please get some clarification regarding whether the “Error Attempting to Sell” message which continually pops up when you attempt to sell multiple items in a short time frame is an intended feature, or whether it is a bug.

I understand that there needs to be some protective strategies in place to prevent overloading the server, but if it is working as intended, then it is an exceptionally intrusive method.

This error appears after selling as few as 7 stacks of an item.

Having to wait 20-30 seconds before you can start posting again is a major impediment to working the Trading post.

Would love to see and official response

Its been mentioned that it is working as intended.

It keeps the server from being run over with orders and listings like it did when the game first started. (Anyone else remember wondering if the BLTP was gonna be up that day and being psyched to sell your copper?)

If the system is working as intended – then it is extremely draconian.

Systems like this should either be so that normal users are unaware that it is present. Or when they become aware, then the system needs to be improved

If it’s working as intended, it should not be red text stating an error. It should be a message telling people that they are trying to sell stuff too fast, and how long they should wait to ensure they message doesn’t happen the next time they hit sell. Or maybe just delay how long the order takes to go through to slow people down without getting them to keep mashing the sell button.

I regularly get it when I’m selling stuff after a fractals run.

I’ve always thought the message is pretty wonky. People often ask what’s going on.

I don’t mind the selling limit per minute if they feel it’s needed for TP functionality. There should be a more descriptive message than ERROR though.

“Too many sales in a short period, please wait a moment and try again” would do the trick. It wouldn’t explain the exact limit but at least you’d get the gist of what was going on.

I’ve wondered if maybe it was added to gum up bots. It’s pretty irregular, and would make it more difficult to automate the buying and selling process.

I found you can easily get around this error by closing and reopening the TP or by retyping in the copper value of the item before hitting sell.

I don’t see how it could be working as intended, since it is an error, which by definition is something that is not working as intended.

Man i agree with this this error drives me NUTS. Come on really, give a better explanation on the error at least…

Tarvok.4206:

I’ve wondered if maybe it was added to gum up bots. It’s pretty irregular, and would make it more difficult to automate the buying and selling process.

How does it make anything more difficult for the bots ?

All it does is make the bot have to hit sell again when the error happens. In fact, if the bot is simple enough, it wouldn’t even notice the error because it’s only looking for the ok button, not the text above the button.

If anything, it encourages bots because a bot lets you go AFK while the bot handles the menial task of hitting the sell button till the item sells.

Bots are there to remove menial tasks. Adding more menial tasks, like this error does, only encourages more people to start botting. So if this was intended as an anti-bot measure, then whoever proposed it clearly doesn’t understand why people bot.

True, but I’ve found that just hitting “okay” and then “sell” over and over again doesn’t actually work. You have to wait a little bit, and the amount of time you have to wait is irregular. I’ve tried it, counting three seconds sometimes works. Counting five seconds sometimes works. What works best, in my experience, is to just plain stop for a few minutes and start up again. So it feels like the program is tracking how many transactions you do and, at a certain point, starts throwing that error at you. If you wait a bit, the counter drops until it’s cleared, and then you can proceed normally again.

I run into this every time I post on the TP. Granted I hoard items until I have about 4-5 pages worth of items to sell. Always chocked it up to a way to stop spamming the TP, although it gets very annoying because posting that many items takes a long time itself without having to wait for the spam protection.

While I find it extremely annoying, it’s understandable since the TP is game wide not server based. I’m sure they could find a way around this but that would require development time, much more beneficial things they could do with their time than optimizing the TP.. as painful as that is for me to say.

Tarvok.4206:

True, but I’ve found that just hitting “okay” and then “sell” over and over again doesn’t actually work. You have to wait a little bit, and the amount of time you have to wait is irregular. I’ve tried it, counting three seconds sometimes works. Counting five seconds sometimes works. What works best, in my experience, is to just plain stop for a few minutes and start up again. So it feels like the program is tracking how many transactions you do and, at a certain point, starts throwing that error at you. If you wait a bit, the counter drops until it’s cleared, and then you can proceed normally again.

What about if you kept clicking sell for those 5 minutes ?

I don’t have the patience to do that. But a bot would.

Not that making the bot wait before hitting sell again after seeing the error is going to be difficult for the bot writers.

I would love some official clarification from Arenanet as to whether this is they way the TP is supposed to work.

I play MMO’s partly for the economic aspect, and this repeated error message is enough to make me move on.

If it is truly just an error, that will be resolved on day – great I will persevere, but if this is how it is supposed to be….

Minion of Vey.4398:

I’ve always thought the message is pretty wonky. People often ask what’s going on.

I don’t mind the selling limit per minute if they feel it’s needed for TP functionality. There should be a more descriptive message than ERROR though.

“Too many sales in a short period, please wait a moment and try again” would do the trick. It wouldn’t explain the exact limit but at least you’d get the gist of what was going on.

This. The main issue is the deceptive error message. That is one line of code to fix…come on.

Also, in regard to this…

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

How does it make anything more difficult for the bots ?

All it does is make the bot have to hit sell again when the error happens. In fact, if the bot is simple enough, it wouldn’t even notice the error because it’s only looking for the ok button, not the text above the button.

If anything, it encourages bots because a bot lets you go AFK while the bot handles the menial task of hitting the sell button till the item sells.

…I’ve found that if you repeatedly hit the sell button for a single item after getting the error, it will repeat no matter how many times you try. The only thing that seems to fix it is to either close the window and reopen or wait a certain amount of time after trying to sell a different item. So if my experience is indicative of the true behavior of the error, it would indeed stop bots that were programmed to hit sell repeatedly. However, I imagine it wouldn’t be too difficult to figure out how to recognize the error response from the server and script the bot to close out, wait ten sec, reopen and try again.

Imo the benefit of stopping the two players in the world who would actually use a bot to auction things (srsly who does that?) is massively outweighed by the constant hassle it presents to ALL players. It is a small thing to the individual, yes, but take the total sum of time wasted for every player having to deal with closing/reopening and waiting and it adds up to a huge obstacle for game flow. For this reason I don’t think it was intended to be a bot-stopper, even though it works as one. It could have to do with the server load of TP activity and how the threading is handled (or not handled). But my theory is that it is simply an unavoidable way of dealing with a natural flaw of the system. For instance:

Hypothetically, think about if you have 4 orders total for copper ore for 5 copper each. I try to sell my 4 copper ore to the highest buyer a millisecond after someone else on another server tries to sell their 4 copper ore to the highest buyer. The system is designed to give us both the money instantly, but the TP ‘client’ doesn’t exactly dynamically update in realtime. So it would make sense that if there is a discrepancy between client-side projected profit and actual available profit (or lack thereof) in the time between you opening the sell tab and actually clicking the sell button, the only way to handle that would be to decline the transaction. The alternative would be to either undercut your profits (which wouldn’t be fair to you) or just give you the difference as fake injected profits (which would steadily inflate the market, big time).

This is evidenced pretty well by the fact that if you manually enter the copper value, it always works, which makes sense because if you designate your own price, the system is not risking lying to you.

It also explains why Anet continues to leave it as an error message instead of ‘you have to wait before selling more stuff,’ because the latter would be giving the player a false representation of the system.

Anyway, just a theory. If it is correct, I’m sad to say there is no workaround…we will simply have to deal with it forever. It’s not a technical problem, it’s a design algorithm problem. Whoever could come up with a solution would prob get lots of moneys

…I’ve found that if you repeatedly hit the sell button for a single item after getting the error, it will repeat no matter how many times you try.

Keep hitting it. The sale will eventually go through.

However, I imagine it wouldn’t be too difficult to figure out how to recognize the error response from the server and script the bot to close out, wait ten sec, reopen and try again.

Exactly. Which is why that, if this is an anti-bot measure, it’s a very stupid one. It doesn’t just fail to work. It actually encourages botting because telling the bot to get your sell order listed is much more convenient than having to keep hitting the sell button or close the window and wait.

Anyway, just a theory. If it is correct, I’m sad to say there is no workaround…we will simply have to deal with it forever. It’s not a technical problem, it’s a design algorithm problem. Whoever could come up with a solution would prob get lots of moneys

One problem with your theory: It only could happen when selling to an existing buy order. When someone makes a sell order expecting a buyer to show up later, the problem can not occur. Especially when this sell order undercuts existing sell orders.

There is also a very simple way to avoid your problem:
– When someone tries to sell anything, a sell order is made. Even if buy orders exist at that price.
– Every so often a process checks the price of the lowest sell order and highest buy order. If the sell order is higher, it does nothing.
– If the sell order is equal or less than the buy order, the process matches sell orders with buy order until the sell price is higher than the buy price.
If someone tries to sell to a buy order that no longer exists when they hit sell, all that happens is that they need to wait for a buyer to show up.

My theory is that the TP is simply overloaded, so ANET has to throttle users. Which gives two solutions:
– Throw better hardware at the problem.
– Optimise it better. For example we know there are people who place multiple orders for a single item because they want to buy/sell more than 250 at a time. Each order requires separate processing. Increase the maximum quantity and those power traders would make less orders for the same quantity, meaning they need less processing. The only downside is a possible increase in the amount of storage space for each order, but even that’s not guaranteed when you look at all the data attached to an order (instead of just looking at how much space the quantity takes up).

You ever try buying something off the TP but not having enough gold on-hand at that moment? Talk about a funky, nondescript error message…now THAT needs looking at.

Why even assume that things would be bugged?

They seem to work just as intended. Solely playing the TP and having an income only limited by the current wealth you are willing to invest was NEVER intended in the first place. A limit on playing the TP was required, same as with the limit on mob loot.

It still may require some fine tweaking, such as allowing players to sell their whole inventory at once but in return locking them out from the TP for 10-20 minutes instead of locking them for 5-10 seconds after each item so regular users are less likely to hit the limits, and the limits maybe would require to be lowered even further, but it’s already functional. I would even call the limits to loose, it still lacks a daily limit, based on the volume of sales.

Bots are hit much harder by those limitations than you could even imagine. First of all, there are two types of bots affected by this limitations:
Type 1 are regular farming bots. They usually have a functionality which allows them to sell any item at the TP, if it gets them more than selling it to a vendor. This is usually not optimized at all so those bots will place a sell order for every single item they loot.
Type 2 are bots which are actually playing the TP (or users who mimic bots by using external tools for the calculations and just executing the buy / sell orders “manually” as a fulltime job). Those bots are hit even harder as they are now unable to constantly snipe cheap sell orders or to overbid unwanted buy orders. There were some bots which had an performance which solely relied on aggressive polling to catch every single sell order which was placed under average without ever placing buy orders on their own.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Error-Selling-in-Auction-House/first#post668652

According to the dev reply here it seems to be a bug.

Kaon.7192:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Error-Selling-in-Auction-House/first#post668652

According to the dev reply here it seems to be a bug.

Actually: No. The dev asked only what the precise error message was, but he didn’t stated that it was a bug. Stop spreading wrong statements.

I think it’s reasonable to infer that if this behavior was by design, the dev wouldn’t have had to ask what the error message was, as the steps described in the preceding posts were fairly specific. Thereby it is reasonable to infer that this was unintended behavior, i.e. a bug.

Any problems with that logic?

Also, this: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Trading-Post-6-Stack-Sell-Cap/first#post808444

John Smith.4610:

Lol, no. The limits are for technical reasons.

Which would be (among others) protection against bots. And only the number of sell orders is restricted because these were placed automatically by farm bots, the number of buy orders is not restricted.

You see, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. You also can’t assume that every dev in GW2 understands all the restrictions, they all have their expertise. And the expert for the TP is John Smith.

I’m sorry, you lost me at protection against bots is a technical restriction.

Which would be (among others) protection against bots. And only the number of sell orders is restricted because these were placed automatically by farm bots, the number of buy orders is not restricted.

It could actually be that buy orders are also restricted. After all, it takes longer to place a buy order than a sell order, so it’d be harder to hit the restriction. If there were “Match Highest Bidder” and “Buy Full Stack” buttons in the buying interface, I have no doubt that people would get “Error attempting to buy.”

Bump…
If there is a limit can it be implemented in a more stable fashion? Let me give an example…
Currently I can post items as fast as I please, up to about 5-7 items, then I can’t post anymore for an unknown time.
Instead, why don’t they implement an unlimited number of postings, but make a 2-3 second gap between each posting.
What this would accomplish is obvious, no one person could post a flooding number of posting at extreme rates however when posting large quantities of items you could still get into a rhythm.
I think it is human nature to become more custom to rhythmic posting methods than the current “all” than “nothing” style the trading post currently uses. It just becomes frustrating to be blocked and not told how long it may be before you can post again.

Landsavage.6153:

Bump…
If there is a limit can it be implemented in a more stable fashion? Let me give an example…
Currently I can post items as fast as I please, up to about 5-7 items, then I can’t post anymore for an unknown time.
Instead, why don’t they implement an unlimited number of postings, but make a 2-3 second gap between each posting.
What this would accomplish is obvious, no one person could post a flooding number of posting at extreme rates however when posting large quantities of items you could still get into a rhythm.
I think it is human nature to become more custom to rhythmic posting methods than the current “all” than “nothing” style the trading post currently uses. It just becomes frustrating to be blocked and not told how long it may be before you can post again.

That would be horrible for most casual TP usage scenarios:

Say you just did a fractal and got 3 rares and a lodestone out of it. In the current implementation you can sell all of them in succession without triggering the sell posting ceiling. But in your suggested implementation they will have to wait out the 10 or so seconds between each posting.

It should be pretty obvious which offers the better user experience.

That said, I can understand the core of your complaint. The cooldown on sell orders past the first 6 should really be adjusted lower so that we can post a bit more rhythmically even after the 6th item.

Bump once again.

I can understand the principle behind the “error”, but this isn’t the way to solve the bot problem. Bots have and take all day to sell items… a simple error message followed by a waiting period won’t help anything. What it will do is frustrate people like me who trade items by the hundreds. This in addition to a clunky TP interface has me thinking that Anet doesn’t want us trading in high volumes at all.