Guild Wars 2

POI, episode 6
http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/b/565458903
@38:28

“Is the sell limit still enforced?”
“Yes. The sell limit is still enforced … so that bots do not take over our game unfortunately”

RAWR! are you kidding me? I thought this was finally admitted to be a hard-to-find bug??? I hope it is at least improved, because as it currently is implemented, it encourages bots because bots can post hundreds of times as many listings as a normal player. I’m just going to assume you haven’t read my previous reasons why this could not possibly be the reason this error is there:
A bot would be programed to list 5 things, wait 30 seconds, list 5 things, wait, etc. 14,400 listings per day, minimum. A human would list 5 things, get an error, swear, log off. let’s say the human is really determined and they might list 200 things in a day. bot lists 50-1,000 times as many things.
If I were able to make a bot, I would, just so I wouldn’t have to deal with this “anti-bot” measure. An anti-bot attempt should not be making me feel that way.

an example of a useful sell limit (as in humans never notice it and bots hate it):
no more than 1 listing every 2 seconds and no more than 500 listings per day. better yet: if they go over 300-1000 in a day (change this number so it’s unpredictable), they are flagged for review and banned as a bot (without any block while they are listing)

as an aside: Did you see the background? clifford was walking around. It’s not just zoomed it, cause there was also a regular cat. can we have this tonic? probably an account-bound rare drop from a special event, like finding the kitten room then solving a puzzle in it.

The “error attempting to sell” message is the default error message, so although the limiter is intended, there could have been various other server side errors that could have been a bug. Despite what he said, the limiter is not really meant to counter bots specifically, it’s meant to counter spam and give everyone fair access. Other parts of their website also has this feature enabled. Back when the leaderboards came out for example, I noticed that they also generated the same server error if you spammed it with requests while not logged in.

Unless they require captchas or ban the use of the trading post API, it’s impossible to determine who is a bot. A player using a trading post app could easily buy, sell and browse items at a much faster rate compared to someone only using the default in-game interface. Spamming buy orders for example can be as easy as opening a webpage and holding F5 (1 order per refresh). Some people also only play the trading post all day, so I wouldn’t doubt if there are legitimate in-game players who deal with upwards of a thousand listings per day.

Before the limiter was in place, a problem arose where people were buying and selling items in quantities of hundreds of thousands, which is stressful on the server. You can still do this for buying items however, just not for selling. Limiting the sell API to 1 request per 1-5 seconds would have been better at hiding it for normal use, but maybe it wasn’t enough. The trading post was far more used and overloaded back then. The current limiter is something like 10 requests +1 every X seconds, where X seems to vary from 5-30 seconds over time.