Armored scale botting?
I can think of a few reasons that arent bots
1. resetting has become popular in fractals – Basically groups will go back to the lab if they dislike the first or even second fractal they get. Aquatic is one of the most liked fractals, and the krait drop lots of armored and normal scales.
2. Players have moved on – Part of the t6 spike was that they were used in ascended gear. However with the increased prices people willing to pay that price are less and less common. Also players who wanted agony resistance (half the reason to create the backpacks in the first place) have probably obtained their rings (despite the horrible rng) and now no longer need the backpack in the short term, and are fine to wait until they have 1800 fractal tokens
3. This one is much more minimal, but if certain WvW matches are very close between the green and blue teams, you can see near constant take-overs of the hylek camp in EBG, or the quaggans in the borderlands, part of these takeovers including killing lots of krait. As the WvW matches have begun to be more balanced, more teams are having tug of war battles over these neutral camps, thus bringing more armored scales into the market.
But yeah, it’s probably bots of some kind, I wouldnt be surprised if someone has created a bot designed to farm the aquatic fractal, its one of the easiest, and safest places to farm the scales.
I just posted on another thread that bots are in the water off the coast of southsun cove, about 5 of them have been at it all week. Ive spent some time there getting a few amoured scale for my knights gear so i could imagine 5 bots teleporting from mob to mob 24/7 would rake in a large number of scale in a day. Armored scale were 20s+ last week so id say these guys have been dumping a ton on tp.