Odd things on GTN now -possible exploit?

[jstankaroslo]

Hi,

I was wondering if this is also happening on other servers.

On Progenitor some people sell suspiciously large amounts of mats.

Right now there are 5 bunches per 100 units of Corusca Gem listed, on a short sale (one ends in 9m, another in 18m, others in 2h). The price is moderate for this stuff.

It is 500 Corusca Gems -other than buy off the GTN I don't see a way to acquire that much of them. Maybe Jawa Scraps?

Yesterday I bought a lot of other purple mats listed for low prices in large quantities -(neuranium, laminasteel etc) -rare stuff suddenly present on the GTN in bunches of 50 or 100 per pack.

 

Now I 'play' the GTN on regular basis and never seen so many purple mats sold.

 

I don't claim its an exploit, but is so unusual that I think its worth checking out.

Edited January 4, 2017 by jstankaroslo

[lokimogor]

Especially the older purple mats thats not much of a surprise to see that volume. For players likely myself with 30ish maxed gathering skill toons, gathering a multi hundred of a purple mat is a matter of a hour or two of toon hopping and mission sending out

[dr_mike]

Been that way back in the 3.0 days. I believe they fixed 1 (maybe 2) exploits back then. Not sure about now.

 

Wait until you see the 45 stacks of a thousand each of the Completed Bounty Contracts.

Edited January 4, 2017 by dr_mike

[jstankaroslo]

Been that way back in the 3.0 days. I believe they fixed 1 (maybe 2) exploits back then. Not sure about now.

 

Wait until you see the 45 stacks of a thousand each of the Completed Bounty Contracts.

 

Yeah, I remember also similar things happened when 4.0 hit.

Was it Theeko or someone else who smelled "something fishy" back then? (and was right)

[Andryah]

It's actually pretty easy now days to make efficient materials mission runs with companions. If you are going to make a business out of it... you spin up 8 companions to influence rank 50 (which now days is simply credits and some time since you can buy infinite rank 5 gifts for reasonable prices).. and then set companions up to run missions.

 

The reason this works efficiently now to crit for purple mats is because your companions have good crit rates AND can run missions to completion faster as well (75% time efficiency for crew skill tasks and 25% critical rate for crew skill tasks) if you raise them to 50 AND... you do not need purple mission tokens to farm purple mats... so production is literally as fast as you can launch and harvest missions.

 

Now.. do that across half a dozen characters on you account and then log in each character every 7-10 minutes or so and collect the materials and launch the missions over again and you are in business. It would be mind numbing in my view.. but some players are into this sort of thing. We did smaller and more focused versions of this, in a more distributed manner, the first week of 5.0 to stack up mats needed for all the 228 purple crafted items we needed to re-equip the entire guild. Now imagine some person doing this with multiple accounts, OR a team of friends working together to effectively dominate the market to some degree.. and reap a lot of credits in the process.

 

Of course the downside here is as more people set up materials machines.... it will dump a lot of materials on the market and will cause price cutting. However, that is also good for crafters and buyers of crafted items as well.

 

If you are looking with an eye to some sort of dupe exploit... I would be paying attention to things much more rare and desired then materials for crafting.

Edited January 4, 2017 by Andryah

[Bullmark]

If they are older mats, it's not unusual, they can be traded for with jawa junk. And conquest players have hundreds of those. Might be someone recently transferred to your server, and now has a market for their mats.

 

Now if these were level 10 mats, it'd be suspicious since they are not available for jawa junk yet. But a player with multiple influence 50 companions can still amass a huge amount of mats of any level.

Edited January 5, 2017 by Bullmark

[Theeko]

Yeah I wouldn't consider 500 gems to be an exploit the rather big exploit was the dupe before with the BH certs people listing limitless stacks of them every few hours Edited January 5, 2017 by Theeko

[PatT]

I have been playing since launch. I have stacks of over 1000 of some mats. Many. I know others who have even more. Just from running missions and picking them up.

 

It's not odd, esp if you've had 5 years to collect.

[dr_mike]

I have been playing since launch. I have stacks of over 1000 of some mats.

 

So do most crafters but I doubt anyone here has or had 45k in bounty contracts or similar numbers of purple mats.

 

Also a friendly reminder that this isn;t the only swtor forum. Exploits and other goodies are talked about elsewhere and some of us keep an eye on that sort of stuff along with the 0 day notices to help protect my hosting clients.

[Khaleg]

It's actually pretty easy now days to make efficient materials mission runs with companions. If you are going to make a business out of it... you spin up 8 companions to influence rank 50 (which now days is simply credits and some time since you can buy infinite rank 5 gifts for reasonable prices).. and then set companions up to run missions.

 

The reason this works efficiently now to crit for purple mats is because your companions have good crit rates AND can run missions to completion faster as well (75% time efficiency for crew skill tasks and 25% critical rate for crew skill tasks) if you raise them to 50 AND... you do not need purple mission tokens to farm purple mats... so production is literally as fast as you can launch and harvest missions.

 

Now.. do that across half a dozen characters on you account and then log in each character every 7-10 minutes or so and collect the materials and launch the missions over again and you are in business. It would be mind numbing in my view.. but some players are into this sort of thing. We did smaller and more focused versions of this, in a more distributed manner, the first week of 5.0 to stack up mats needed for all the 228 purple crafted items we needed to re-equip the entire guild. Now imagine some person doing this with multiple accounts, OR a team of friends working together to effectively dominate the market to some degree.. and reap a lot of credits in the process.

 

Of course the downside here is as more people set up materials machines.... it will dump a lot of materials on the market and will cause price cutting. However, that is also good for crafters and buyers of crafted items as well.

 

If you are looking with an eye to some sort of dupe exploit... I would be paying attention to things much more rare and desired then materials for crafting.

 

Exactly, there is literally nothing mysterious or suspicious about this.

[wildtera]

There kinda is an "exploit", although not the kind of exploit as like a dupe. People are exploiting the terribly designed gathering missions system with mouse macros. The system really needs an overhaul so you can't easily do this. It should be overhauled anyways now that we got tons of companions. If you see someone posting tons of mats every day, 99.9% chance it is someone macro botting them on 1 or multiple toons/accounts.

[Rollbacks]

I bought an Augmented 230 Eternal Commander Alacrity implant off GTN. It even came with a +98 Alacrity augment already installed.

 

Thought I was tripping for a minute until I put it back on the GTN and sold it to someone else