Guild Wars 2

Found an item today that whenever I placed a buy order a bot/script overcut me immediately. This occurred until I placed a buy order above 10s (seems they setup some ebay type of bidding script with a maximum bid value).

I you hope Anet to take a look at that, please give more specific information of the item in question.

Even if this was true, isn’t that their loss? The listing fees would tantamount to be much greater than the actual selling price.

Grumpy.8365:

Even if this was true, isn’t that their loss? The listing fees would tantamount to be much greater than the actual selling price.

No. The point of algorithmic system is to use trends and past data to in general produce a net profit.

The down side is that for us non-botting player, a bot will ruin the experience and fun of playing a game where others gets unfair profits by just running a program.

Hey Grumpy OP said BUY ORDER which carries no charges.

I have noticed this as well although it feels automated, but it could simply just be the amount of users on the TP, the realist and cynic in me knows better.

What’s the problem here? The bot still has to pay whatever it’s offering. If you are willing to outbid it, then you get the item. If you are worried about bots always outbidding you by a small amount, then make an offer that accurately reflects your valuation of the item (i.e. your max bid). If you can’t get it that way, you wouldn’t get it anyway.

Why should he have to pay “Max bid” while the bot buys things cheaper?

Perhaps they should investigate who is placing the orders and check for bot like activity like he suggests. (Since buyer/seller are transparent to us)

Because if he sets his bid correctly, then the bot doesn’t buy things cheaper. It has to pay more than what he’s willing to offer. The “problem” that people seem to see here is that the bot is opportunistically taking advantage of lazy sellers because there’s no competing offer. Rather than provide that competition to help set a fair market price, people want to be able to do what the bot is doing, i.e. flip stuff. Their primary complaint boils down to the fact that the bot can do a better job of flipping than they can. So my argument is:

A) Stop trying to play the market, or
B) Don’t complain when someone else beats you at it, or
C) Offer a fair price if you actually want the item

And it seems like the OP eventually found his way to C.

Eh, it’s still not fair. The bot can place a max bid but potentially get it for lower, while we have to pay our max bid no matter what (even if the market value was lower and we made our max buy higher than necessary). The bot doesn’t have to know the true market value, just a general range. If you’ve ever used ebay you know how much of an advantage this system is.

The item in question btw was “Carrion Banded Legs of Flame Legion” (lvl 75). Not surprisingly now that the buy order is above 10s all bids below 10s except one (at 4s1) have disappeared (part of the script most likely).

i have been outbidding for one copper on buy offers for as long as i can remember, and i am surely not the only one! :O

Yes, but this is different. This is a very obscure item, and whenever I placed a bid, three bids were placed instantly: one at 1c above, one at a few more c above, and one more a few c above that. The faster I bid, the faster these bids accelerated in pricing. And most importantly, whenever I waited (sometimes for a full minute), exited the tp, and came back, there were never any more bids. Only when I placed an order, and then the bids came instantly.

How is it an obscure item? It’s a rare with desirable stats and a popular rune. It has an ask price of 25s and you are complaining that you’re being outbid at 10s. It’s currently at 16s. Nice try though, but I see no evidence of bot manipulation here.

It’s obscure compared to mats and such is what I mean. For example, I ended up receiving 5 of a similar item with a buy order of 4s2c when its sell price was also at 25s, so what I experienced seemed pretty unprecedented. Still, thanks for the strawman argument.

The important point is that I tested it for a good 5 minutes and the buy orders NEVER came unless I placed one, and then it was always 3 instantly, and never at the same price as would be expected with multiple players who often overcut by 1c. Yes some players placed some orders above 10s afterwards, but that was bound to happen over the course of a night. Topping it off with the fact that all orders below 10s except the lowest one are now gone (there were probably 30-40 before) is just way too suspicious.

What was the straw argument? You made a false claim about this being an obscure item and misrepresented its value, and got called on it. There are tons of people who would be interested in this item and compete for it. As evidenced by the price movements.

You got 5 of a “similar” item? Pray tell us what item that was, lest we again be misled about its nature.

Why would new buy orders come in unless you raised the high bid? Why would bots be more willing to raise the price higher than 1c as opposed to players? If what you say is true and cannot be explained by something as simple as the rate of refresh/updating on the TP, then there were indeed strange occurrences here, so strange that even the botting theory does not hold.

Leablo.2651:

How is it an obscure item? It’s a rare with desirable stats and a popular rune. It has an ask price of 25s and you are complaining that you’re being outbid at 10s. It’s currently at 16s. Nice try though, but I see no evidence of bot manipulation here.

Bot owner reporting in I take it?

I’ve noticed this happening too. I place buy orders for crafting components, not materials, and it seems that no matter what I try to buy, I get overcut almost instantly, and the orders are bizarre, such as 250 soft focus casings or some very specific number like 132 seasoned staff heads, and this happens over and over, so I know its the same person or thing. I can’t think of any explanation for this behavior other than bots flipping for a profit. Sometimes I feel like me putting a buy order in actually triggers bots to start focusing it, because these weird 132x or 250x offers never appear BEFORE I place my offer.

spacemayu.4817:

Bot owner reporting in I take it?

There is no evidence that it is a bot manipulating and not a human being. I know that it is emotionally easier to assume it is a bot though.

Some people just like to camp the TP.

I found items like this as well. I think that there could very well be scripts. When I first read this post I thought they were crazy.. until you find an item that it happens to you :P I found it with the f&f dyes about 3 weeks ago. All day a price would be instantly placed over mine for the exact same amount until I got too close to the actual list price. I played around with it for a bit.. leaving a bid that would not get out bid and then removing it and lowering- bam instant over bid. It was pretty strange imo.

It depend how fast the bid is.

I sometime check AH every 30 second to make sure no one outbid me. But if it is instance like 1 second. It’s something weird.

NoOneShotU.3479:

Why should he have to pay “Max bid” while the bot buys things cheaper?

Perhaps they should investigate who is placing the orders and check for bot like activity like he suggests. (Since buyer/seller are transparent to us)

+1

Farming bots got rarer over time b/c they had no Anonymity, someone who knows what they look like is eventually going to stumble onto its hidden circuit off in the mid-level zones and — maybe even record it. But a Market bot is indistinguishable from an AFK player and can’t be found to be reported in the first place so there’s no telling how many of them there could be.

It’s an item you can salvage for ectos to earn profit. It’s not strange at all for such a thing to have aggressive buy order competition. After all, it’s pretty much instant profit once someone sells, especially if the price was as low as 10s.

I’m in no way disputing this case as being a bot or human… just keep in mind though there are people like me that as infrequently now that I buy something for myself if I’m not busy I reload that every 15-30 seconds to make sure that someone or some “bot” didn’t either… so there are people that do these things too.

Why must everything one doesn’t understand be a bot by default?

To add to the previous comment, sometimes when I notice that I’ve been recently outbid, I actively sit in the custom order window, place a new order, spam click refresh, and outbid the person on the other end repeatedly as they respond.

Why? Because it’s obvious that someone is online on the other side doing something similar, and I want to see who wears out first. That doesn’t make me a bot/script.

I think some people also do not grasp the number of players in the game at any instant in time.

This isn’t something that happens sometimes. It happens all the time on certain items. The issue isn’t whether there are bots. It’s what Anet will do about them.

What I witnessed was odd and I am inclined to believe it was not a person.. I could be wrong but I’ll explain what I witnessed about 3 weeks ago.

So on a f&f dye I put in a bid as the highest offer in under a min I was over bid. I put in another bid as the highest and again was out bid in under a min. I figured it was someone else wanting the dye so I backed off and left my bid as 2nd highest for a few hours. I went back after the time had passed and set my bid as highest and again was outbid. It was always by the same amount on the bid. I left it until that night and decided to experiment with the bids. I went up high enough on my bid to cut out the profit on the dye but still considerably cheaper than the dye was listed as. I was not outbid again. I left that for awhile and then decided to come back and lower my price to try to save some gold. Within a min I was outbid again by the same price.

This happened a full day and within in minutes and was the same amount. You really think that was a person? It was so strange I was going to post about it but got side tracked, so I am glad to see this post again to remind me.

So by your logic if someone is earning thousands of gold by flipping with his bot then it’s ok?

Psychol.5783:

So by your logic if someone is earning thousands of gold by flipping with his bot then it’s ok?

more OK than a farming bot. Flipping is an economic sink, it counters inflation in a BIG way… farming otoh generates massive amounts of inflation and is catastrophic for the long term.

Obviously no bots is best, but given the choice I would take TP bots over farming bots every day of the week.

Worth remembering that the market is global. At any one time there could be many thousands of people trading. Being over or under cut in some way within a minute is hardly going to be a unusual occurrence.

Just so you know there is a program called Zicore’s trading post notifier. It syncs itself with the trading post. If you update by 1c, I get a notification and can repost immediately. I also usually have a cutoff price where I feel the profit isn’t worth it. I tend to get a bit annoyed when people play the “I’ll repost again and again even though the guy keeps under/overcutting me” so I get carried away sometimes going for 40 mins-1 hr or more….

There are also other programs like Gold Wars 2 that accomplish the same thing and according to their website’s FAQs , this is completely legal and complies according to Anet’s terms and conditions.

Don’t complain that it’s a bot because someone is probably just sitting somewhere next to a trading post relisting over your price.

This is a global market so only ONE person needs to be watching the market or that item at that one time. It seems highly likely its actually a person and not a bot.

I think that is actually a good feature. As a player, why am I not allowed to undercut other people’s undercuts? It is my gold afterall, if I am prepared to pay more for the items that I really want, why not?

I think that it could be these bid notifiers. I have never heard of them. I think though maybe those programs should be looked into because it basically allows people to own a market through flipping. If someone really wants an item they have to cut a person out, who is not even playing at the time, by a huge percentage or else they log right in and outbid them.

I am not against flipping but really, a text anytime you are out bid so you can log in and change your bid so you can flip the item. It seems wrong.

TP notifiers from programs such as Zicore and gold wars 2 have been around for a long time. I have raged against them on this forum, pointed out exactly which TOS + code of conduct rules these notifiers explicitly violated, but nothing happened. I fear that most traders use it though. I still refuse, at my own detriment.

Just because you keep getting outbid on some mystery item, doenst mean its by a script.

Atleast provide more information on what item it is…

The fact is that there are open source projects out that allow interaction with the Trading Post, these atm dont use the buy features officially due to it being classified as automating ingame behavior which is disallowed.

However its very easy to add such behaviors so that bots can track orders and quickly update the order if it gets outbid. It will not be instant due to protocol and polling delays for getting the new data but it would be very responsive either way.

The bad sideeffect of a bot is that they basically can corner markets, tracking several hundred items without problems and implement a “trading strategy” with good turnaround since it can track several hundred bids without problems.

This basically means over time that each profitable “strategy” will be occupied by bots and manual TP players will not have markets to play anymore. It also means that bots might compete with each other thus eliminating their own internal profit margins…

In the end well see very little TP profit margins if bots are running rampant, which in turn is actually favorable for drop farming, go figure…

aeneq.1760:

The fact is that there are open source projects out that allow interaction with the Trading Post, these atm dont use the buy features officially due to it being classified as automating ingame behavior which is disallowed.

However its very easy to add such behaviors so that bots can track orders and quickly update the order if it gets outbid. It will not be instant due to protocol and polling delays for getting the new data but it would be very responsive either way.

The bad sideeffect of a bot is that they basically can corner markets, tracking several hundred items without problems and implement a “trading strategy” with good turnaround since it can track several hundred bids without problems.

This basically means over time that each profitable “strategy” will be occupied by bots and manual TP players will not have markets to play anymore. It also means that bots might compete with each other thus eliminating their own internal profit margins…

In the end well see very little TP profit margins if bots are running rampant, which in turn is actually favorable for drop farming, go figure…

High Frequency Trading! hahahahah, hilarious

Hell Avenger.7021:

…

High Frequency Trading! hahahahah, hilarious

Not sure what your comment refers to, there is no mentioning of high frequency trading in the post… Would be helpful with some clarification…

aeneq.1760:

Hell Avenger.7021:

…

High Frequency Trading! hahahahah, hilarious

Not sure what your comment refers to, there is no mentioning of high frequency trading in the post… Would be helpful with some clarification…

HFT is a program developed to monitor the market and make money off through price spreads. It can get much more complex than what I described, but it sounded people are making things that a real world investment bank/hedge fund would do.

Kinda funny and interesting. To be honest, if it is not against the rule, I would like to make one just for kicks, and see how much money it makes and lose

I bet you would make a ton.. and apparently it is not against the rules.

Just an edit.. I would be careful if you do though.. it could end in a ban after all who knows.

Hell Avenger.7021:

aeneq.1760:

Hell Avenger.7021:

…

High Frequency Trading! hahahahah, hilarious

Not sure what your comment refers to, there is no mentioning of high frequency trading in the post… Would be helpful with some clarification…

HFT is a program developed to monitor the market and make money off through price spreads. It can get much more complex than what I described, but it sounded people are making things that a real world investment bank/hedge fund would do.

Kinda funny and interesting. To be honest, if it is not against the rule, I would like to make one just for kicks, and see how much money it makes and lose

Ah interesting! Yes you could do some pretty advanced analysis based of data from sites like gw2spidy without being in violation or risk of being targetted. Their data is slightly out of synch with the TP but for broader analysis it should be fine.

Yes, there are a lot of money to be made on the TP. The only big problem is managing trades which is hard due to the ingame UI (which is why these external tools are so popular).