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…
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