Guild Wars 2

I’m pretty sure I’m trying to beat a market bot at placing buy orders. Every time I put a higher buy order (on a certain range of items), it gets beaten by a buy order of 20. I try at different times of the day and it gets beaten within a couple of minutes.

Considering I refresh about ~70 buy orders across a range of levels (same item type) at a time and they all get beaten within minutes.. seems very likely to be a bot running these buy orders.

I’ve reported this through the bug report function.. (since I’ve no idea who it is)..

Anyone else seen this going on? Any other ways I could resolve it?

Well.. One thing you may not be aware of is programs that send people text messages the instant they are outbid. There may be bots but more than likely it is the text message programs. I had a huge post/debate going on about this a few months ago and I think these programs should be banned but nothing so far so doubt it will happen.

It’s likely, as others will point out, a TP text program. That said, it could very well be a bot, as I’ve encountered similar experiences with high-end low-availability items(pres/legendaries): basically near-instant re-bids/up-bids.

Tawn.9871:

I’m pretty sure I’m trying to beat a market bot at placing buy orders. Every time I put a higher buy order (on a certain range of items), it gets beaten by a buy order of 20

Were you bidding on the cheap mid-level fine and masterwork weapons that are profitable salvages well above their current buy-order prices? Those are all covered by a bot. I reported it a week ago, but it is still there. That’s several hundred items, and it rebids them every time GW2spidy updates (so every 10 minutes.) I think the same bot covers some armors and trinkets in the same price range. For the massive amount of items this bot is hauling in, it might be spread over several accounts and something this size may be part of a gold-seller operation.

It’s gotten impossible to place buy orders for many items because of the bots. I tried reporting, but things have only gotten worse.

Tawn.9871:

I’m pretty sure I’m trying to beat a market bot at placing buy orders. Every time I put a higher buy order (on a certain range of items), it gets beaten by a buy order of 20. I try at different times of the day and it gets beaten within a couple of minutes.

Considering I refresh about ~70 buy orders across a range of levels (same item type) at a time and they all get beaten within minutes.. seems very likely to be a bot running these buy orders.

I’ve reported this through the bug report function.. (since I’ve no idea who it is)..

Anyone else seen this going on? Any other ways I could resolve it?

I have a funny imagine in my head of a guy on the other end thinking to himself “Omg, this has to be a bot, he keeps outbidding me minutes after I refresh my bids! I’m going to watch these like a hawk now.”.

Kidding of course :P Aside from the apps that alert you, I do have a feeling there are tp bots, but it could just be someone more anal than you.

But I’m not a bot, I’m a human being.

“zomg, every time I pale a bid in a game with millions of live, human players, an disallowed program is outbidding me. It can’t be other players because its always outbidding me promptly by a small amount and a round quantity.”

…

That and two pence nets you two pence.
//Portable Corpse

Yeah this probably is someone with a program which tells them when their buy orders are beaten. There’s periods of time where they don’t immediately respond.
Guess I’ll have to kill the profit margins and see if he’s still as keen.

Such silly conspiracy theories. People sometimes forget that they’re not the only ones who play this game. In fact, there are those who do nothing but watch the Trading Post all day long. To them, that is their game. Buy low, sell high. And if there’s something I want, and I get outbid, I’ll be sure to post a new Buy Order.

Though I feel a bit honored that you think my playing amounts to being a bot. That shows I’m doing a good job with beating out my competition.

Tawn.9871:

Yeah this probably is someone with a program which tells them when their buy orders are beaten. There’s periods of time where they don’t immediately respond.
Guess I’ll have to kill the profit margins and see if he’s still as keen.

I’ve done that before; pushed kitten item to over 20s. The bot outbid me right on schedule, and I just pulled my order. It doesn’t really work for you though. As soon as the item is sold, the bot will replace it 1c against the next highest bid, and you’ll be right where you started. Hopefully, Anet will do more to address actual bots on the tp.

Heh. That’s pretty compelling evidence that it was a bot, yeah. Still, maybe you should have kept it going just to mess with the bot’s owner by forcing him to pay exorbitant prices for crap items.

There are bots and they usually operate on a large set of items, things like mass salvaging for Ectoplasm+mats sale or for TP strategies that require a lot of items (things like Precursor hunts or salvaging for Sigil toilet upgrades etc).

These are quite easy to identify if you look at the whole dataset and there is minimal gain to try to force them to their limits since they cover a large set of items and also that they have price limits thats correlate to their projected profit. So the only thing you gain is a reduction of their profit margins.

I’m glad you checked in Aeneq, I was about to refer to the earlier thread in which you explained that TP botting was possible through third party programs, but I see that won’t be necessary anymore.

(Just to clarify: Aeneq is one of the few programmers on this forum that is fully transparent about the possibilities of TP 3rd party programs. He knows his stuff).

Have you considered that maybe you are the bot and are bidding against another player who is equally frustrated by “bots”?

My point is, there are millions of players, and if you want to buy something it is very probable that someone else also wants to buy it. This means that it is entirely possible that your “bot” is another player who is equally frustrated by a “bot” (you) bidding against them.

If you are taking the time to frequently rebid, in all likelihood there are other players who are also taking the time to rebid, all of whom are getting outbid by each other and many of whom are blaming bots.

strange you mention ‘20’, because I spent a couple hours this weekend placing buy orders of 20 for several items, and often I would recheck items and find someone had outbid me, so I’d bid another 20. usually too much work to remove the first bid, and it wouldn’t hurt as it would be better if those went through as well. I like to use less common numbers so I can see if the highest bid is mine or not. looks like I’ll have to be more tricky and use 22 or 30 instead… maybe 28…
anyways, what type of items were you noticing this on? I was buying exotics. plz don’t kill my profit margins.

Yes those are bots. You can easily test if it’s a real person or not by placing a single order out of a large set. Take all items that salvage into soft wood. Bid on ONE of them. If it gets outbit shortly after by 20 then it’s a bot. No person would seriously flip through all those items constantly and find the ONE out of hundreds in that set that you bid up.

https://guildwars2.zendesk.com/home is probably a better place to report them. I also reported a place they are getting the bot from so I’m sure they have a copy of it and are hopefully figuring out ways of being able to ID and ban them.

As Aberrant said its easy to check if its a bot, since bots operate on large sets of items they dont look at volume/availability.

Therefore you can try to outbid someone on a low popularity item in a specific item set, if you get a quick response you can try to raise the prise until you get to the bots price limit. When you got this you can do the same on another low popularity item in the same item set, if the behavior is the same its highly likely its a bot.

edit: For frequently traded items where the bot needs to rebid a lot it causes the bot to drain the gold reserve if the bid quantity is high. Therefore bid quantities on these kind of items are fairly low which also is a hint, unless the bot has a huge stockpile of gold.
Have been afk a while, beta testing another MMO has taken all of my free time

Im folding tin foil hats.. anyone want one?

MaxTheWrecker.5832:

Im folding tin foil hats.. anyone want one?

Max, Aeneq knows how it can be done. We’re not just theory crafting here. He’s a programmer who explained in another thread that the widely used “harmless” TP 3rd party programs can be tweaked in such a way that they can become bots. We’re way beyond folding hats here.

It’s not just a person with a notification program. They can automatically bid and remove bids outside of the game. There was a thread not too long ago by a poster here saying he figured out how to and wanted to know if it was allowed to place bids from outside the game.

If it’s possible for an app to automatically notify when you’re outbid. And it’s possible for an app to make a bid. Then it’s possible to auto-rebid when outbid.

And there are ways to test it. I have done many. I reported one instance a couple of months ago, where a bot was covering EVERY blue item on the trading post up to a certain max limit. It was thousands of items. It would literally take a real person their entire day doing only repostings to handle that number of bids. I reported it, 2 days passed, and the same morning I got a response to my DETAILED ticket, the botter was removed.

However, I’ve seen bots covering other items, and I found a few ways to test that they were bidding from outside the game beyond the shadow of a doubt, and presented the evidence to Anet, but nothing was ever done.

It seems like too much work to verify the examples, or they don’t have the level of detail in logs to do so.

I spent a lot of hours trying to make it easy for Anet to weed these parasites out, but it was all wasted. So I gave up, the bots can have the game, and Anet won’t get any more of my time and effort trying to help them. I suggest you save yourself the sadness and do the same.

Oh its def. possible, as Buttercup mentioned I have done some programming work in that area and I ofc. have tested it (just tested it mind you) and its quite easy todo as long as you have some programming experience.

The software package that gw2spidy uses for instance (which is open source) contains code todo this, atleast that code was working when it was written. The APIs have changed slightly so it requires some tweaking…

Some people on the forums might be hesitant to admit to trying these APIs out but I am confident there are additional people who has the same experience and its not a long leap from there to assuming that there are people out there who exploits this feature.

Due to the design of the APIs this isnt something ANet can resolve quickly, any update to fix this also impacts the normal TP behavior. The quickest one would most likely to remove the “buying/cancel” functionality and replace it with the same logic that governs selling which is an ingame mechanism that doesnt go over a HTTP API.

If they did that then they could even open up the API for datamining officially (wouldnt solve the issue with alert programs but I think those are acceptable).

IMO alert programs give an unfair advantage and automate what a player would be doing.

Player 1 having one doesn’t have to check the TP, the program does that for him.
Player 2 that doesn’t have one would need to constantly scroll through listings.

That’s kinda messed up.

Aberrant.6749:

IMO alert programs give an unfair advantage and automate what a player would be doing.

Player 1 having one doesn’t have to check the TP, the program does that for him.
Player 2 that doesn’t have one would need to constantly scroll through listings.

That’s kinda messed up.

I so, so wholeheartedly agree. This is also the reason why I have argued, referencing the relevant clauses, that use of them violates the very core of the user agreement. But I don’t want to stray off course. That is:

People in this thread confirmed – and tested – that you can use a bot to trade for you on the TP, from in- and outside the game, and it’s not even that complicated to do so.

To me, the significance of that is pretty huge. Sorry for the bold + lines and stuff but it needs attention. I’m sick of people thinking this is not really a problem. It’s a huge problem, and it won’t go away either by simply ignoring or downplaying its existence.

Tawn.9871:

I’m pretty sure I’m trying to beat a market bot at placing buy orders. Every time I put a higher buy order (on a certain range of items), it gets beaten by a buy order of 20. I try at different times of the day and it gets beaten within a couple of minutes.

Considering I refresh about ~70 buy orders across a range of levels (same item type) at a time and they all get beaten within minutes.. seems very likely to be a bot running these buy orders.

I’ve reported this through the bug report function.. (since I’ve no idea who it is)..

Anyone else seen this going on? Any other ways I could resolve it?

I know I have been pressing the Refresh button every few seconds on the TP lately. Was that you? I thought you were a bot.

I just came up with an interesting thing ANet could do

If they move their ingame TP to use an ingame buy mechanism then it would mean that anyone using the public API is running a program in violation with the TOS.

Buttercup.5871:

People in this thread confirmed – and tested – that you can use a bot to trade for you on the TP, from in- and outside the game, and it’s not even that complicated to do so.

Clicking on the refresh button every few seconds is not a violation to the rules of the game though so how can you tell, with certainty, that it definitely is a bot versus someone like me, who likes to click on the refresh every few seconds.

I know that whenever I lose, I would like to think that I lost simply because my opponents cheated and I’ll come here to vent that I lost to a bot because doing so makes me feel better. It is a very natural human response to repair one’s ego.

It all depends on the item being bid on, I doubt anyone comes here complaining that they bid on rare weapon x of lvl 70+ was outbid in 5 secs (that’s to be expected, heck in that market segment only a bot can actually produce any likelihood of a buy going thru).

Where its easier to detect is in low volume areas, one example are rare weapons below 60, I used to peruse that area for sigil salvaging and usually you could get the weapons for vendor price.

If you in that segment suddenly saw an increase across the board of being outbid in 5min at any time of the day and they all stopped outbidding at a fixed limit. Its likely some automated system is in place, if the response time is uniform its then likely its not a text alert program.

But its true even in that scenario its possible that it is a human with just nothing else todo.

However noone is arguing that its not possible to automate the process and if there are people who knows how todo it then it is being done.

Now wether thats desireable or not is another matter, I know that Dark is pro TP automation and there are others that feel the same just as there are others who dislike the very notion.

The end is still the same, its up to ANet to define whats acceptable and so far they havent done anything either or and I doubt this will change.

All I am trying to say is to look for the most down-to-earth, most common, possible explanations before making a fuss whenever you see lights in the sky and claiming it is an alien spacecraft.

I know that I always get anything I wanted from my buy orders as long as I am patient and have the gold. This is because if I really want to buy something, I would talk to the TP npc and hold that connection while clicking on the refresh button on the buy orders, regardless of whether the item is popular or not.

Personally, I don’t think TP bots are popular and they are not easy to make work well. Cancelling a buy order would work well if the bot has a way of getting the gold back from the npc. This implies some kind of UI automation also which is not a straight-forward task. Then there is a problem of doing inventory management, if they have enough space or not. They can earn more gold by writing bots for champion farming than for outbidding items on the TP.

Before I put in orders I calculate a max that I won’t bid above and often I will be driven to that point which is when I stop and leave that last bid up. So I would also look like a bot.

And I manually scan some 200 items when I go into TP mode. Well it’s less than that because I use GW2TP to list only the items that haven’t exceeded my max yet, usually it’s only 30-40.

@DarkSpirit, if the account used by the bot has enough gold then it has no need to pickup the gold and that task can be relegated to a manual interaction. Ofc. that requires the account to hold a few thousand gold to operate at its best but thats not unlikely.

@Behellagh, yes as mentioned its possible. However the ingame TP ui is really bad and doesnt lend well to frequent rebidding on a large set of items. Even the “ordered” list breaks occasionally and doesnt show wether the item is outbid or not so you need to go into each specific order.

If you are running against external sites like GW2Spidy and others and use that to track against what you know you paid for each item then it becomes a rather big recordkeeping/matching excercise and it would be really feasible for a long term consistent behavior unless you actually retrieved the order list directly.

If you are at 30-40 items from a base of 200 then it seems like the items would most likely already be above the bots price limits as well.

It should however be clarified that bots are only useful when enacting a TP trading strategy, examples of this would be;

• Buying cheap rares for ectoplasm salvaging (cost <~10s of ectoplasm)
• Buying cheap rares for sigil/rune salvaging
• Buying cheap rare weapons for precursor hunting.
  etc.

Sigil/Rune hunting isnt possible anymore due to the crash in Exotic sigil market but it used to be quite profitable (and little competition).

All of these market segments are extremely active, if you put a bid on an item youll be almost immediately outbid. No person can actively try to stay on top, even bots come down to random luck, i.e. will someone sell an item before highest bidder is outbid.

aeneq.1760:

@DarkSpirit, if the account used by the bot has enough gold then it has no need to pickup the gold and that task can be relegated to a manual interaction. Ofc. that requires the account to hold a few thousand gold to operate at its best but thats not unlikely.

If it requires manually intervention to work then it is really not a bot is it?

As for cancellations of buy orders, the bot still need to take the gold back from the NPCs because it can’t predict how often it would be outbid by others itself. If it doesn’t pick up that gold, then the more times it is outbid by other players, the more times it would have to cancel and the more gold it would lose. Maybe you can say that the botter has so much gold that it doesn’t need to care, then your bot would need to have all these assumptions in place whenever it bids for an item and would not be a generic TP bot anymore.

Fully automated TP bots, if they even work well enough, would be rare with lots of work needed and with a lower payoff than a typical farming bot.

This is why in most cases, when people vent here that they have lost their bids to “bots”, they can’t say with any certainty that it is definitely a bot and not a human camping on the refresh button. When most of the time, the common explanation that they lost the bid to another human trader, who has more patience than them, would suffice to explain it.

The bot I saw doesn’t require you to be there at all and automatically removes the old listings (and I reported to a-net where they can get ahold of the bot).

It’s not at all a question/guess that people are using it or if they exist.

As I said before it’s easily checked dark. Just find a set that’s being botted and outbid on ONE of the hundreds of items they are botting. No human is constantly going through hundreds of items and checking every single lower green T2-4 scepter/bow/etc. for hours and hours on end at a time.

@DarkSpirit

Heck even to start a bot is a manual activity, I don’t think picking up your gold every 12h would make the classification of the program change. I think you are referring to some mythical bot that automatically plays the market for you, if thats what you mean then yes those would be very rare if they exist.

Being outbid and placing a new bid isnt a big drain on the gold available, even in the 70+ rare weapon market you would be ok with ~2k gold for a 12h period and it doesnt get more active than that.

@Aberrant

Yes cancelling orders are easy todo, the issue is that each cancelled order returns the money to the TP pickup window distributed in the item chain with all the items bought. This means that if noone interacts with the bot then it will run out of money (unless it has an insane amount of it)

All the bots I am aware of requires manual intervention to “harvest” the items/gold on a daily basis and to execute the trade strategy the bot is used for.

That’s why the orders are so small (20) and are on low end/inexpensive items (1-2s ea). It wouldn’t take an insane amount of gold unless it had a lot of large orders or the items were expensive. Then again your definition of an insane amount of gold might be quite different than mine lol (a few thousand gold wouldn’t be hardly anything to a botting/gold selling operation).

Depends on the items, salvageable rares for ectos has a cost per item @~25s, order of 4 of these is 1 gold in a cancelled order and theres a LOT of activity in that segment.

But that said with a big activity the orders can be kept very small (2-3 items) but it still can put a drain on things.

aeneq.1760:

@DarkSpirit

Heck even to start a bot is a manual activity, I don’t think picking up your gold every 12h would make the classification of the program change. I think you are referring to some mythical bot that automatically plays the market for you, if thats what you mean then yes those would be very rare if they exist.

Being outbid and placing a new bid isnt a big drain on the gold available, even in the 70+ rare weapon market you would be ok with ~2k gold for a 12h period and it doesnt get more active than that.

How do you know that just checking every 12 hours would suffice? What happens if the bot is under attack by a human trader who outbids it by 1 copper every time at the first hour after launch? How can you be certain that your bot would have enough gold to withstand the outbidding war for the next 11 hours, if it doesn’t have the capability to take back its gold from the NPC?

First of all how many people actually have a disposable gold of 2k? Of those small number of people, how many would actually spend the time and effort to develop an automated TP bot? If they have that much gold, time, and expertise, don’t you think it would have been more profitable to develop a champ farming bot instead? Furthermore, if you have 2k gold, would you bother writing a TP bot just to outbid a rare item that is worth only about 50s? Is that even worth the risk on your 2k gold account since every time you run your bot, you take a risk?

Now you know why it is unlikely that everyone who has been outbid on the TP comes here to vent about bots, are really outbid by a TP bot. When I have been easily outbidding people just by camping on the refresh button. Some people in this forum has too much paranoia about bots and gives the impression that the TP is just overflowing with bots all round us. I don’t think we need to encourage any more paranoia about the TP.

Found an interesting one just now:

http://www.gw2tp.com/item/25970-rampagers-axe-of-water

Put a bid on that, and spam refresh, and you’ll see that within about 15 seconds, the buy order for 9 of them will disappear and reappear above yours. Now try duplicating his response time. You’ll find that you can’t with the current TP interface because first you’d have to bring up your buy order page, find the item, and remove it. Then, you’d have to search for it again to place your new bid.

Careful observation prove there are bots, because the in-game TP interface is too cumbersome to be that agile. BTW, this is the fastest response time I’ve seen on a bot so far.

The Red Squirrel.7039:

Careful observation prove there are bots, because the in-game TP interface is too cumbersome to be that agile. BTW, this is the fastest response time I’ve seen on a bot so far.

That is because most people don’t know how to do this right. Let me teach you a simple trick and it works well for people like me with dual monitors or more. And you don’t need a bot.

Open this URL on your browser on the other monitor.

https://account.guildwars2.com/login?redirect_uri=http%3A%2F%2Ftradingpost-live.ncplatform.net%2Fauthenticate%3Fsource%3D%252F&game_code=gw2

Go look for the item that you are interested in and check its buy orders. Hit the refresh button every so often. You have your GW2 launched with TP opened by talking to a TP npc and ready to cancel and buy on the other monitor. There, easy enough?

The Red Squirrel.7039:

Found an interesting one just now:

http://www.gw2tp.com/item/25970-rampagers-axe-of-water

Put a bid on that, and spam refresh, and you’ll see that within about 15 seconds, the buy order for 9 of them will disappear and reappear above yours. Now try duplicating his response time. You’ll find that you can’t with the current TP interface because first you’d have to bring up your buy order page, find the item, and remove it. Then, you’d have to search for it again to place your new bid.

Careful observation prove there are bots, because the in-game TP interface is too cumbersome to be that agile. BTW, this is the fastest response time I’ve seen on a bot so far.

Wow that was fast! Hahaha, exactly like you said, I counted the seconds as well.
Well, I’m saying haha but on the inside I cry a little.

DarkSpirit.7046:

How do you know that just checking every 12 hours would suffice? What happens if the bot is under attack by a human trader who outbids it by 1 copper every time at the first hour after launch? How can you be certain that your bot would have enough gold to withstand the outbidding war for the next 11 hours, if it doesn’t have the capability to take back its gold from the NPC?

First of all how many people actually have a disposable gold of 2k? Of those small number of people, how many would actually spend the time and effort to develop an automated TP bot? If they have that much gold, time, and expertise, don’t you think it would have been more profitable to develop a champ farming bot instead? Furthermore, if you have 2k gold, would you bother writing a TP bot just to outbid a rare item that is worth only about 50s? Is that even worth the risk on your 2k gold account since every time you run your bot, you take a risk?

Now you know why it is unlikely that everyone who has been outbid on the TP comes here to vent about bots, are really outbid by a TP bot. When I have been easily outbidding people just by camping on the refresh button.

It ofc. varies on the item being bought on, if one has a price war on a legendary then youll run out of gold asap. However if its 1c on a 20s item and its a manual war (ie. a player is bidding) then thats over 9k bids for a 2k budget.

This is extremely unlikely, its more likely if it ends up in a price war with another bot but even then its going to hit its price roof and thus become moot. Also the example I gave was for an extremely active market segment youll work with a lot less gold in another segment.

And even if it runs out of money, whats the big deal? It ran for a while and its just rinse and repeat after that.

A champ farming bot is a lot harder to develop than a TP bot, also if you have any know-how of TP strategies the return is a lot bigger.

To get any big profits on the TP you need a high throughput strategy, camping and waiting for legendaries/precursors for flipping is risky and often punishing (due to listing fees when selling). Your biggest return is in the segment below that produces the high cost items or in items that can provide a steady stream such as ectos.

This puts your best return of investment below 1g, anything above that will most likely just be flipping items (which is not a high revenue stream).

Buttercup.5871:

Wow that was fast! Hahaha, exactly like you said, I counted the seconds as well.
Well, I’m saying haha but on the inside I cry a little.

Thank you, with enough preparation and training, anyone can be fast too.

DarkSpirit.7046:

Buttercup.5871:

Wow that was fast! Hahaha, exactly like you said, I counted the seconds as well.
Well, I’m saying haha but on the inside I cry a little.

Thank you, with enough preparation and training, anyone can be fast too.

Dark, you must be joking right? You’re really grasping at anything to defend your automated moneymaking now. Look, when you do what he says, you’ll see that – around the 16 second mark – the order for 9 of these will be removed and placed 1 copper above you almost instantaniously. That’s not possible Dark, no matter how hard you try to justify it. It’s a bot. You know it’s a bot. I know it’s a bot. What are we even discussing here?

Buttercup.5871:

DarkSpirit.7046:

Buttercup.5871:

Wow that was fast! Hahaha, exactly like you said, I counted the seconds as well.
Well, I’m saying haha but on the inside I cry a little.

Thank you, with enough preparation and training, anyone can be fast too.

Dark, you must be joking right? You’re really grasping at anything to defend your automated moneymaking now. Look, when you do what he says, you’ll see that – around the 16 second mark – the order for 9 of these will be removed and placed 1 copper above you almost instantaniously. That’s not possible Dark, no matter how hard you try to justify it. It’s a bot. You know it’s a bot. I know it’s a bot. What are we even discussing here?

So are you saying that there are 9 orders from 9 bots waiting to buy the same item? I find that highly unlikely. Also 16 seconds to cancel and then place a buy order is well within the human response time.

DarkSpirit.7046:

Buttercup.5871:

DarkSpirit.7046:

Buttercup.5871:

Wow that was fast! Hahaha, exactly like you said, I counted the seconds as well.
Well, I’m saying haha but on the inside I cry a little.

Thank you, with enough preparation and training, anyone can be fast too.

Dark, you must be joking right? You’re really grasping at anything to defend your automated moneymaking now. Look, when you do what he says, you’ll see that – around the 16 second mark – the order for 9 of these will be removed and placed 1 copper above you almost instantaniously. That’s not possible Dark, no matter how hard you try to justify it. It’s a bot. You know it’s a bot. I know it’s a bot. What are we even discussing here?

So are you saying that there are 9 orders from 9 bots waiting to buy the same item? I find that highly unlikely.

Dark, come on. What he’s saying is simple, but I’ll try to explain it more explicitly since you’re unwilling to test it yourself.

The bot places an order for 9 axes. ONE order. You out-buy-order him by 1 copper.
16 seconds pass.
BOOM. His buy order for 9 axes disappears and reappears 1 copper above you at the same time.

Buttercup.5871:

DarkSpirit.7046:

Buttercup.5871:

DarkSpirit.7046:

Buttercup.5871:

Wow that was fast! Hahaha, exactly like you said, I counted the seconds as well.
Well, I’m saying haha but on the inside I cry a little.

Thank you, with enough preparation and training, anyone can be fast too.

Dark, you must be joking right? You’re really grasping at anything to defend your automated moneymaking now. Look, when you do what he says, you’ll see that – around the 16 second mark – the order for 9 of these will be removed and placed 1 copper above you almost instantaniously. That’s not possible Dark, no matter how hard you try to justify it. It’s a bot. You know it’s a bot. I know it’s a bot. What are we even discussing here?

So are you saying that there are 9 orders from 9 bots waiting to buy the same item? I find that highly unlikely.

Dark, come on. What he’s saying is simple, but I’ll try to explain it more explicitly since you’re unwilling to test it yourself.

The bot places an order for 9 axes. ONE order. You out-buy-order him by 1 copper.
16 seconds pass.
BOOM. His buy order for 9 axes disappears and reappears 1 copper above you at the same time.

If it is such an OP bot, shouldn’t it be responding much faster than 16 seconds? 16s feels more like a slow human response to me.

I really don’t know why DarkSpirit and some of the other forum warriors vigorously try to discredit any report of TP botting. Clark Skinner pretty much has confirmation from ANET that there are TP bots in the form of his ticket response and their action to resolve it (for that bot he reported).

BTW, I still suspect that the bot who is active in the low-priced fine and masterwork is probably a set of accounts because of the sheer volume involved. Possibly gold-sellers. You ban the botters and they keep coming back using their horde of stolen accounts.

The Red Squirrel.7039:

I really don’t know why DarkSpirit and some of the other forum warriors vigorously try to discredit any report of TP botting. Clark Skinner pretty much has confirmation from ANET that there are TP bots in the form of his ticket response and their action to resolve it (for that bot he reported).

BTW, I still suspect that the bot who is active in the low-priced fine and masterwork is probably a set of accounts because of the sheer volume involved. Possibly gold-sellers. You ban the botters and they keep coming back using their horde of stolen accounts.

I don’t know why you guys claim that a response that takes 16s has to be from a bot and not a human. 16s is actually a long time for a program.

I suggest you take a stop watch and count for 16s to see how long it really is and honestly say that it is too fast for a human.

16 second response time is not a big deal, but it differentiates this particular bot from the more common one that triggers a rebid based on GW2spidey’s timer (which is 10 minutes, and external.)

The tell-tale sign is the amount of time between removal of the old bid and placing the new one, which was about 1/4 of a second with no variability.

DarkSpirit.7046:

Buttercup.5871:

DarkSpirit.7046:

Buttercup.5871:

DarkSpirit.7046:

Buttercup.5871:

Wow that was fast! Hahaha, exactly like you said, I counted the seconds as well.
Well, I’m saying haha but on the inside I cry a little.

Thank you, with enough preparation and training, anyone can be fast too.

Dark, you must be joking right? You’re really grasping at anything to defend your automated moneymaking now. Look, when you do what he says, you’ll see that – around the 16 second mark – the order for 9 of these will be removed and placed 1 copper above you almost instantaniously. That’s not possible Dark, no matter how hard you try to justify it. It’s a bot. You know it’s a bot. I know it’s a bot. What are we even discussing here?

So are you saying that there are 9 orders from 9 bots waiting to buy the same item? I find that highly unlikely.

Dark, come on. What he’s saying is simple, but I’ll try to explain it more explicitly since you’re unwilling to test it yourself.

The bot places an order for 9 axes. ONE order. You out-buy-order him by 1 copper.
16 seconds pass.
BOOM. His buy order for 9 axes disappears and reappears 1 copper above you at the same time.

If it is such an OP bot, shouldn’t it be responding much faster than 16 seconds? 16s feels more like a slow human response to me.

Dark, you’re grasping at straws now. Stop defending the undefendable. Stop defending bots. They are there. You know it. Stop trying to protect your little moneymaking program at all cost. Noone can instantly remove a buy order and place one at the same time. The interface is too clunky for that, it cannot be done. Yet this bot will do it, live, every time, around 16 seconds after you have placed the highest buy order on that axe.

I’m off to bed now, I’ll read the rest in the morning.

again, for those new in this thread, it’s been tested by programmers in this thread that botting can be done. If you want to witness the results of botting yourself, live, start by following red squirrel’s instructions.