if it wasnt for people like this, ingots would cost even more
And, how much does your intoxicant of choice cost?
Scripters DRIVE UP the prices.
Always have; always will.
One of the major issues I've seen, as have everyone else in my guild of miners, is that the scripters don't operate in a vacuum.
Besides their scripts out mining, they have someone go shopping on the shards they sell on, BUY all the colored ingots priced less than theirs, then resell at the higher price (thanks to those illegal sites that can scan the shards for items). Until the large-scale scripter had his house burnt, ingot prices had nearly TRIPLED on my shard. After they were gone, the prices returned to where they were.
One of my guildmates kept having his stock bought out. He noticed it was the same person, every time, buying it ALL. Eventually, he saw that person going into a vendor house of a scripter.
So, the next time he stocked his vendor, he waited and watched. When the person started buying him out, he recalled to that vendor house, went inside, hid and waited. The "customer" arrived, then proceeded to add the commodity deeds he'd bought to that house's vendors, at about a 100-150% markup, depending on the ingot type. Then, another character arrived, one that had been spotted in the wilds as being a script miner, and started adding even more deeds.
While this WASN'T the same scripter that got canned, it was someone who was more than willing to charge almost as much, and was willing to keep the buyers dependent on either their vendor or the the uber-scripters. Their inventory AND prices dropped like a rock after the big scripter got nailed, probably out of fear that they'd be next (despite being a single, maybe two or three, shard operation).
With one scripter gone, and the other scaled back, the number of ingot shops has quadrupled in the last 2 months, and even the scripters that remain have gotten their prices more competitive (though still higher), and stopped stocking obviously scripted amounts, depending on supply & demand to sell their higher-priced stock (the other shops tend to sell out, even when not being bought out by a single player). One still runs the risk of someone buying you out for resale, but if the prices stay within about 10% of each other, they usually don't bother.
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