Guild Wars 2

I’m sure many of you have seen the listing for lemons in high demand.

Mind, lemons are account bound, so nobody could fill the listings, but…

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/12252

GW2 Spidy has a page for lemons. You can no longer find them in the trading post UI, but Spidy, which polls the TP without going through a normal UI, can still get prices on the lemon. Heck, people who know the correct calls to make can also buy or sell stuff on the trading post without going through the normal game UI. That’s because the trading post is run on servers independent of the main game servers.

Why do I pick Lemons?
Think back to when lemons were visible in the in-game trading post. How many were ever for sale (since they made them account bound, mind): Answer: Zero.
What were the buy orders for lemons? Answer: Many many, some asking for single lemons for more than a gold/ea.

Check that link above, if you would. How many lemons are available now?
Zero? No…. Rather more than zero for sale. 1512 as of right now, lemons are available for sale, if you can just post a buy listing. And around the middle of december, the graphs show that supply hit around 300000. For something that cannot be traded, that’s an impressive number for sale.

Also worth a peek:
http://tk.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/14zeel/this_is_hilarious_lemons/

I wager that someone accessing the trading post directly (thus bypassing the user interface and thus bypassing the validation in the user interface that prevents sale of bound items), then proceeded to sell lemons. And possibly other bound items, to get rich.

Motive: Gold? Fun?
Who? Gold Seller? Hacker? Joe-User looking for something fun?
II don’t know and don’t care who, beyond the detail that it’s not the sort of person I would enjoy playing with.

Happily, there are logs for the trading post, listing items both bought and sold. Should A-Net choose to investigate, I’m sure they can pin down which accounts were used. Regardless, this speaks to the trading post, and possible exploits therein. I’d like to know it remains trustworthy (so long as I only place orders that I actually want filled).

If there was an official comment on it already, I’ve probably missed it (I tend to keep head-down at work and at play), so would appreciate it if someone could point me at it. If there has been no such comment, I may need to settle for a ‘this is what we know and speculate’ session.
—
Futae

I’m the OP in the reddit thread. I’ve did my share of investigation and concluded that the spidy data is wrong.

Facts:
The supply of lemon and other account bound karma food (avocado) is still ZERO.
The old lemon buy orders (1g+) are still there.

Nothing has changed except the numbers gw2 is feeding spidy.