Guild Wars 2

There’s a number of items, namely salvage bags that’re flooding in by the truckload right now; I’ve been buying these bags for a while now, and they used to cost twice their current value and you’d only get like 4 or 5 every 20 minutes.

Now they’re pouring in by the truckload, like a stack every 20 minutes, and the value of the relevant items has nosedived hard are are continuing to dive.

Are the new fractal instances dropping large amounts of bags, or have the bots returned? – at this rate of influx the T5, T6 and core and lodestone values will be back down to the prices they were a few weeks ago before the bot bannings. (Not that I’m complaining, crazy amounts of supply favour the crafty and the crafter. But I’d rather not be unwittingly funding bot farmers)

there is a great number of bags that drop on fractals per person, and if i were to judge from my friendlist i’d say that you can think each and every person is there and farming em

bag drops have increased a lot. Use to farm a low lvl area for low lvl mats when needed got a bad maybe every 5-6 kills now get it at least 1-2 kills. though bots do seem to be back there not as noticable any more.

What level are these items. The gold farmers didn’t always use bots, maybe they are using their traditional methods again, the price of gold went up and now back down.

http://www.guildwarstrade.com/blackmarket

A Guildie of mine observed what seemed to be bot like behavior on the TP. He was attempting to flip some items from a few weeks back and found that he was selling them for 4 silver by the truckload. But as soon as he raised it to just 4s1c he had no purchases. He looked at current orders for the item at 4 silver and found a measly 7. But once he switched it back to 4 silver he had over 100 sell within a minute.

A new bot?

ShunsuiKouKyoraku.9106:

A Guildie of mine observed what seemed to be bot like behavior on the TP. He was attempting to flip some items from a few weeks back and found that he was selling them for 4 silver by the truckload. But as soon as he raised it to just 4s1c he had no purchases. He looked at current orders for the item at 4 silver and found a measly 7. But once he switched it back to 4 silver he had over 100 sell within a minute.

A new bot?

I wouldn’t go as far to say this is a bot but, it very well could be. I have had it happen to me several times with lower cost items but, I just chalked it up to players. Remember the trading post is game wide and there are countless players accessing it all around the world, so it might just be coincidence.

It actually looks to me like people are “cashing out” on a lot of different items right now. Perhaps they decided that the market has reached the peak it can bare and it’s time to get out.

Either way, everything seems to be crashing hard right now. Not a good time to be holding stuff.

There are still bots around. I recently encountered a small group of them in the skritt tunnel in Ebonhawke.

Wandering around Metrica and a few other lowbie zones there seems to be a new wave of bot farmers (though I’ve seen a few in 70-80 zones as well).

Unlike the completely in-your-face packs of ranger/bears, the new bots in the wild seem to be a bit more sly, and they seem to be focused on node farming, esp. using thieves.

Hard to tell if they’re teleport hacking or just making liberal use of stealth going from node to node. Many of them seem to be using the same code though – they do a little forward roll away from the node right before disappearing. It was actually kind of amusing at first until I picked up on how many there are.

My girlfriend noticed a couple of warrior bots in Metrica killing Skritt – explains the spike in the volume of Skritt bags. Reported them, dunno if they are still around.

voyager.4982:

Wandering around Metrica and a few other lowbie zones there seems to be a new wave of bot farmers (though I’ve seen a few in 70-80 zones as well).

hm, it would make sense for them to focus on lowlevel zones. i mean, aren’t those practically empty by now? i imagine the risk of getting reported is way lower in those low- and mid level zones.

Yesterday I’ve been farming low level zones and there was noone around. Today I came to farm a bit and all low level maps are full, mostly sword/shield guardians and scepter/fire elementalists around. About elems I’d say this class became somehow trendy, as is too squishy and slow to be good at farming. But guardians are suspicious, with their sustain abilities…

It feels like they’re back to some extent. I place some pretty large buy orders for certain crafting mats, and in the last two days there have been multiple cases of me placing an order for 1000 of something (fine blue mats, eg: large claw, not base materials) and having it filled within 30 seconds in four lots of 250. That seems unusual if it’s just people farming regularly.

IMO Bots never left to begin with. While yes, Anet has banned thousands of bots recently and will continue to do so, the only thing that has happened to them now is they have gone underground, figuratively AND literally.

One can easily search the internet and find any number of hacking programs that allow the user to exploit the game in any number of ways, including teleport hacks.

I’m of the opinion that this is the case with many bots now. On top of running a bot program that runs a specific route based upon coordinates these programs now include (or originally included) teleport hacks that are being used exclusively.

Before when we were all able to observe hundreds of bots on a weekly basis, they were easy to spot and easy to report. One can only assume that with a large majority of the player-base actively reporting them, they were easy to find and easy to get rid of by Anet.

Since then, bot-farmers have smartened up and gone stealth. Now they teleport from location to location, appearing only briefly to farm a resource node or kill something if necessary, to instantly teleport away when they are finished.

We all can see these bots but only briefly. Their appearance is fleeting, thus keeping them hidden and making it far harder for us to report unless we expect the event and can quickly report them in the brief moments they are actually visible.

Beyond that, any of the bots that are actively running coordinate routes and still actively visible are doing so in far away places that aren’t frequented by players that often, such as the Skritt tunnel at Ebonhawke.

Bots are still around, make no mistake. They are just being more sneaky then before.

Unspecified.9142:

It actually looks to me like people are “cashing out” on a lot of different items right now. Perhaps they decided that the market has reached the peak it can bare and it’s time to get out.

Either way, everything seems to be crashing hard right now. Not a good time to be holding stuff.

Maybe this is the other side of the gems spike. People are dumping their stocks to get gold for gems for makeover kits.

Siliconhobbit.4361:

Since then, bot-farmers have smartened up and gone stealth. Now they teleport from location to location, appearing only briefly to farm a resource node or kill something if necessary, to instantly teleport away when they are finished.

We all can see these bots but only briefly. Their appearance is fleeting, thus keeping them hidden and making it far harder for us to report unless we expect the event and can quickly report them in the brief moments they are actually visible.

I saw one this morning in the Norn starting zone at a resource node. It seems he casted stealth immediately before or after teleporting to collect this node with minimal visibility, only saw him for a split second and he was gone. Literally impossible to report when you don’t have a log of other player actions around you in your own combat log.

lol, ninja farmers.

This is really obvious right now. The entire economy is tanking again and the instances of me putting up big buy orders, only to have them filled with huge blocks of 250 eight times in a row, continue to go up. Apparently whatever Anet did was a temporary fix =/

Andykay.5198:

This is really obvious right now. The entire economy is tanking again and the instances of me putting up big buy orders, only to have them filled with huge blocks of 250 eight times in a row, continue to go up. Apparently whatever Anet did was a temporary fix =/

I’m not sure what you mean by “the entire economy is tanking”. Prices are coming down, but there’s still people buying and selling items and making profits…

Bot banning is an ongoing battle between ArenaNet and the botters, and it was always going to be the case. I believe however, that ArenaNet may be able to respond to the influx of new bots faster than they did with the initial surge because part of the delay was due to ArenaNet developing the tools required to deal with the botters.

Ryuujin.8236:

There’s a number of items, namely salvage bags that’re flooding in by the truckload right now; I’ve been buying these bags for a while now, and they used to cost twice their current value and you’d only get like 4 or 5 every 20 minutes.

Now they’re pouring in by the truckload, like a stack every 20 minutes, and the value of the relevant items has nosedived hard are are continuing to dive.

Are the new fractal instances dropping large amounts of bags, or have the bots returned? – at this rate of influx the T5, T6 and core and lodestone values will be back down to the prices they were a few weeks ago before the bot bannings. (Not that I’m complaining, crazy amounts of supply favour the crafty and the crafter. But I’d rather not be unwittingly funding bot farmers)

Not to my knowledge they aren’t What I am seeing tho is there are places in the world of Tyria (I won’t mention where) where there are bags that have a fairly fast respawn rate where you can simply pickup the bags from these open world spots quite often for long periods of time.

Seeing this happen in higher level zones made this thief very happy. Like Japanese kitteh statue happy.

Astraea.6075:

Andykay.5198:

This is really obvious right now. The entire economy is tanking again and the instances of me putting up big buy orders, only to have them filled with huge blocks of 250 eight times in a row, continue to go up. Apparently whatever Anet did was a temporary fix =/

I’m not sure what you mean by “the entire economy is tanking”. Prices are coming down, but there’s still people buying and selling items and making profits…

Bot banning is an ongoing battle between ArenaNet and the botters, and it was always going to be the case. I believe however, that ArenaNet may be able to respond to the influx of new bots faster than they did with the initial surge because part of the delay was due to ArenaNet developing the tools required to deal with the botters.

Prices are plummeting really fast at the moment. Fine crafting mats are one of the best indicators of this, as they’re pretty much the base of the economy. They drop frequently, and then people turn them into everything else, runes, gear, ectos, and then eventually better gear. When they fall, everything falls. And they’re steadily losing their value again after peaking. There’s always going to be some up and down, but a lot of the crafting mats have lost ~50% of their value in two weeks.

Anet bans bots in waves, so it could be that the bot buildup is beginning to reach a critical point, where they are now in higher level areas, stealth-farming away, as I noticed certain mats (Specifically armored scales) getting supply-flooded.

Oddly the T6 mats did not at all react in a consistent manner; Scales took a steady dive over 3 days to half their price before then due to a quadrupling of supply, while vicious claws for example had doubled supply, and then over a full day of normal prices later, had a few bad hours, and then someone (or rather, a bunch of someones) decided to dump an enormous quantity of their mats and dropped by buy orders all the way down to under 6s, but it was rather transient and it quickly rebounded, and is back a bit higher than it was before the dive. Ancient bones have always had pretty low prices, and haven’t really changed. Blood went down a few silver, but had a supply burst about half a week before with similar results, and as of a few hours ago also experienced a similar dump, like the claws have. They will likely rebound, but not as quickly as claws did.

Astraea.6075:

Andykay.5198:

This is really obvious right now. The entire economy is tanking again and the instances of me putting up big buy orders, only to have them filled with huge blocks of 250 eight times in a row, continue to go up. Apparently whatever Anet did was a temporary fix =/

I’m not sure what you mean by “the entire economy is tanking”. Prices are coming down, but there’s still people buying and selling items and making profits…

Bot banning is an ongoing battle between ArenaNet and the botters, and it was always going to be the case. I believe however, that ArenaNet may be able to respond to the influx of new bots faster than they did with the initial surge because part of the delay was due to ArenaNet developing the tools required to deal with the botters.

Right. There are plenty of items going though the roof as I type. I’m assuming the items you have been farming/buying/selling/flipping for the past month or more is dropping through the floor, so you’re concerned. This happens to all items and the scope of items on TBLP is way beyond what you’re touching.

Relax, sit back, and be patient. Markets naturally correct themselves in real life and in games.

Andykay.5198:

Prices are plummeting really fast at the moment. Fine crafting mats are one of the best indicators of this, as they’re pretty much the base of the economy. They drop frequently, and then people turn them into everything else, runes, gear, ectos, and then eventually better gear. When they fall, everything falls. And they’re steadily losing their value again after peaking. There’s always going to be some up and down, but a lot of the crafting mats have lost ~50% of their value in two weeks.

Given the increase in price for (most) T6 mats and ectos over the past month, it’s no big surprise that the market is correcting downwards… yes, some prices have now dropped to nearly 50% of where they were at two weeks ago, but that price is still (generally) much higher than where it was a month ago.

There are some valid concerns about whether the bots are coming back, particularly if they come back in a large number, but it’s a big step to say the economy is “tanking” based solely on those concerns.

Maybe alot of people are now done with their ascended backpieces? (or the hype is gone now?) I think that coupled with the banning is what drove the prices up in the first place.

penatbater.4710:

Maybe alot of people are now done with their ascended backpieces? (or the hype is gone now?) I think that coupled with the banning is what drove the prices up in the first place.

While I don’t think the ascended items have actually done much to the price when compared to the initial bot bannings, I am personally part of the increased demand side of the equation. Not because of ascended gear, but because I finally finished levelling one of my craft skills to 400 about two weeks ago and started buying ectos on the TP in order to craft exotics…

Just saying that increased demand can be due to multiple factors, not just the one people assume is the culprit…

Astraea.6075:

penatbater.4710:

Maybe alot of people are now done with their ascended backpieces? (or the hype is gone now?) I think that coupled with the banning is what drove the prices up in the first place.

While I don’t think the ascended items have actually done much to the price when compared to the initial bot bannings, I am personally part of the increased demand side of the equation. Not because of ascended gear, but because I finally finished levelling one of my craft skills to 400 about two weeks ago and started buying ectos on the TP in order to craft exotics…

Just saying that increased demand can be due to multiple factors, not just the one people assume is the culprit…

Ah well of course it also depends on the maturity of the players as well (I mean how far they’ve gone into the game). But I’m merely citing those as big spikes in increase in demand/decrease in supply. I’m not saying it’s the only factor, but it could be a significant factor to consider.