Guild Wars 2

John: I’ve been making money on a nice little TP niche for a couple months now, dutifully providing liquidity for those who don’t want to wait for sell orders to fill. Over the past week, however, I’ve noticed that none of my buy orders have been getting filled. I did a little experiment and placed buy orders at various times over the past day, including three sets of buy orders this morning, spaced around 30m apart each. I’ve found that within five or ten minutes of posting a buy order, someone else had posted an order for five items at 1c higher. I’m also noticing the 5 order increment in items I’m not buying.

I suspect this is the work of a bot or the greatest p-socker in the world.

I’d rather not disclose what I’m buying here on the forums, but would be happy to discuss in private. I’m also curious if anyone else has noticed this in other markets.

There could potentially be over a million people using the trading post at the same time.
If you post something (at which I assume is the highest offer) someone else would most likely think the same thing and post it at the new highest offer.

Most likely nothing to do with bots, but rather multiple people thinking the same thing.

Sounds like your niche has been discovered. It isn’t bots, it’s other players.

I do increments of 5 items until I discover the buy speed at which point I increase or decrease my posts per price point. It could very well be that I’m competing with you in this market.

I’ve seen other people fly in and out of my niche before, but the rapidity with which the bid increases come in is something novel, that’s all.

TP bots are alive and well, and have been for many, many months now.

There was a thread in this sub-forum some months back where at least one player running a TP bot explained how his worked in order to justify running one.

To battle them off, you need to keep raising your buy orders until you reach the bot’s upper buy order limit, or until the account running the bot temporarily runs out of gold to place buy orders.

Both methods require you to have a deep gold reserve, depending on what you are buying.

Anet has turned a blind-eye to these because they are nigh impossible stop, and they operate in a ToS ‘grey zone’

Oh, and every thread created discussing TP bots gets deleted after a few minutes, so do not expect this one to last very long

EDIT: Just to add, you can easily tell when buy orders are placed by a bot, compared to those placed by a ‘human’ …

Even all of that aside, bots are fairly rampant on the TP. You’ll find them mostly in low-volume high-spread items as well as some medium-volume items. They may be in some high-volume low-spread items, but it would be impossible to identify them. Also, few of them are involved in flipping. Mostly they are picking up salvageable and forge-able items for cheap for (nearly) guaranteed profit.

So, I mostly see them active in these markets:

1) Cheap low level rares with large spread and low sell volume.
2) Lvl 76-80 rare and exotic weapons and armors when the buy orders fall below a certain price.
3) The cheapest common minis when they aren’t volatile (they are volatile right now because people are opening BLCs and dumping the minis.)
4) High demand forge-ables (lv 76-80 rare swords, greatswords, daggers, staves) when there is profit. (I’m not sure the bots are active now with the buy orders in the 50s range.)

Back in the winter, someone had a bot camping buy orders on every weapon that salvaged into platinum — that’s 700 or 800 items. This is what convinced me that most of the botting is done by RMT. The operation is just so vast.

I’ve found bots in some strange places though, like in that set of lvl 400 recipes that came out a few months ago (forget their name) — it was a pain picking those up and fighting with the bot. I also found one on the Evon Gnashblade Representation Buttons too at one point (I got burned playing around seeing how high I could make him bid.)

The weirdest though was one I found on Blacklight Dye back when I was trying to get one. Low buy order was 62 gold, and his bot would keep re-raising until about 85 gold. Once he stopped re-raising me, I would drop my bid back to 62 gold and he’d outbid me again. I tried running him out of gold – burning him through about 2k before I gave up.

I used to send detailed reports to in-game Support, but I stopped doing that when I realized that, if the botters are indeed RMT accounts, it’s kind of an exercise in futility. If someone can confirm that it’s helpful to report TP botting, I will report it when I see it.