Potential FarmersFollow

I've been playing EQ2 for about 6 or 8 months now. I love the broker. Can't get enough of it. I watch the prices on rares regularly. I then buy and craft to sell. I know the general pattern. I know when to buy and what price to sell at. There are usually no more than 10 rares being sold by one person at one time. sometimes people will buy a bunch up at a low price and then try to sell them at a higher price. Then you get about 20 rares all bunched up. sometimes a few more. Anyway... Last week someone posted like 40 rares for a price that is below the competitive rate... These rares hadn't been bought up at a lower price. They had been newly introduced to the broker. This is bad for people like me who work the broker because the supply of items you craft that require that item will inevitably go up, the price you sell them at will go down (This means I lose money!). People who had been buying rares at the original high price can't compete on the broker anymore without losing money. It's the classic big business vs small business scenario (Wal-Mart moving to Canada if you will). I bought up as much as I could cautiously. The next day he came up with like another 30 rares at a lower price! Within one week this guy must have sold over 100 of the same rare. If this guy is legit, bravo. Maybe he or she has been saving for a long time, or just lives and breaths to harvest. I'm all for healthy competition (Even if it's kicking my ***! so long as it's legitimately kicking my ***). But if it's one of these "harvesters from China" I keep reading about how can I find out? What do I do? Is there anyone else out there who has had a similar experience?

PS This individual is now using the broker to sell both the rare at a really low price while simultaneously crafting with that same rare and selling the crafted items at a rock bottom to slightly below rock bottom price.

Everfrost?

It was probably me :) I will always price my rares lower then everyone else, but I assure you I'm not one of those rmt's. I just so barely started (My main is only level 30) and I price things to sell because this early in the game bank and broker space is more valuable then the couple extra gold I could potentially get for an item. I guess it's the way I've always used market systems in any game. Find the lowest price, and make mine lower.

I'm not trying to make items worth less, just get them out of my inventory faster.

In relation to your post about rare harvesters (farmers), I've seen something recently that I thought was a bit disturbing. I've seen players running around a zone, approaching (and I assume targeting) a node, then running off after a second or two without harvesting the node. They do this to every node in sight, but only harvest from a few. I've noticed that when this happens, my ability to harvest rares nearly drops to zero.

My concern is that they have somehow found a way to tap into the game data stream and determine which nodes will produce a rare without having to harvest the node. They only harvest nodes that will produce a rare.

I don't even know if this is possible and perhaps I'm being overly paranoid. I don't have anything other than my own observations of what I thought was odd behavior on the part of some players, and my sense that the rares seemed a little too rare when I noticed players doing this.

Has anyone else heard of something like this going on?

That is my recollection too. Nodes are like a box of chocolates... you never know what you'll get until you hit one with a shovel or pickaxe!