Community market bots
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One thing I was also thinking is that real time monitoring of the thousands of buy and sell offers entered every hour might not be feasible without causing the servers to slow down and cause issues in other areas. Checking every bid to see if it is one more or one less than the previous amount and how soon after it was posted and how often the account repeated that same process is quite a task.
They should still look at resolving it but the fact that the market, the game and game play and app are all tied together probably adds to the complexity.
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Bottom line is that it’s a major issue that will and has driven many players away this year, some for good. The only reasons I’m still playing this year are that I love baseball and it’s my thing to relax and unwind with after a busy day. Unfortunately this year has exposed a lot of flaws and SDS has done little to nothing to improve the experience. It’s a bummer and truly shocking how far and how fast this game has fallen.
I agree that it's a major issue, but I disagree with you saying SDS has done little or nothing to improve the experience. Manu is in here every single day removing the bots, trying fixes for it, etc. I really believe that they're doing as much as they can.
The efforts have to be effective to truly earn plaudits. Failure in any form is bad. Yes, willful neglect is worse, and SDS isn't guilty of that in this singular case, but they are guilty as sin of neglect in many other important areas of their game.
But, ultimately, SDS is a professional business. With all professional endeavors, the only acceptable performance measure is success.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but as someone who's a little older and has spent quite a while in the business world, I've learned that things are rarely as simple as they appear from the outside. A lot of this community is also being fed false narratives by content creators and treating opinions, speculation, and toxicity as fact.
Based on the way you write, you seem like an intelligent person. I would expect you to look beyond the easy "SDS doesn't care" narrative and recognize that SDS isn't some "multibillion-dollar company" with unlimited access to Sony's money. From the outside, it appears they're understaffed, overworked, and genuinely trying to improve the game. At this point, no matter what they do, good or bad, someone is going to attack them for it.
And to your point about success, despite all the complaining, people are still logging in, playing the game, and spending money on stubs. That doesn't mean the game is perfect or that its problems should be ignored, but calling it a failure is a major exaggeration. It's still a very good game and, as a dad with a full-time job and limited time to turn on my Xbox, it's still one of the few games I consistently choose to play.
