Guild Wars 2

Buttercup.5871:

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.

You are using the same clunky interface to verify your results and you have not explained to me why the “bot” has to wait for 16s to place a new order when, as you claimed, it can cancel and resubmit the order immediately (i.e. without waiting).

Just because it is possible to build a TP bot doesn’t mean that we are seeing an instance of such a case. You would need to submit more evidence to prove that it is a bot because, if they do exist, they are so rare as opposed to farming bots, which are already rare themselves. That is probably a human camping on the refresh button and 16s is more than sufficient time for me to do that. To say that is a bot, you have to first prove that it can’t be done by a human.

Lol, it looks very similar to some one trying to convince dark that the moon landing was real.

If I could link you the proof without breaking the TOS/forum rules, I would (I’ve sent it into a-net support).

It’s not “so rare” it’s large chunks of lower end markets.

But you can deny it all day long if you like. It’s not hard for the rest of us to tell when a bot is involved and how widespread the problem is.

Aberrant.6749:

But you can deny it all day long if you like. It’s not hard for the rest of us to tell when a bot is involved and how widespread the problem is.

I am just saying I am not going to believe the fantastic when a more common reason can still be used to explain it. Why do all dancing lights in the sky have to be an alien spacecraft when they can be a lighted balloon from a hoaxer?

Only when you have proven that it can’t be a hoax, or a plane, etc. and exhausted your common explanations then you can go examine the more esoteric ones. Even though accepting the more esoteric explanations feel more exciting.

I have not seen a bot in GW2 for a very long time and ArenaNet did a good job on that front. And users tend to explain all their losses by blaming their competitors for cheating. I know I always wonder whenever someone down me in WvW, if they are cheating. They can’t be better than me, it must be that they have no lag and they are cheating. I always feel good to think this way. It helps my ego.

So you find that a person constantly refreshing hundreds of low end items for hours and hours on end and quickly finding a single outbid item in that large set is a more probable explanation Vs. a bot doing it?

Even if I hadn’t seen the bot for myself I would be very doubtful of that.

Aberrant.6749:

So you find that a person constantly refreshing hundreds of low end items for hours and hours on end and quickly finding a single outbid item in that large set is a more probable explanation Vs. a bot doing it?

Even if I hadn’t seen the bot for myself I would be very doubtful of that.

You haven’t seen me play the TP yet. I sit there for hours just checking prices.

If you’re a human you’re not going to spend your time doing that on low end 1-2s greens. There are far better sections of the market to do that in. Also (once again) I’ve seen one version of the thing.

But I guess aliens.

DarkSpirit has apparently been stumping for an open API for the TP for months. He knows there are bots, and contends that they are not harmful to any trader that has a good strategy. Moreover, botting seems to be the biggest argument against having an official full-featured TP API, so he has to squelch the discussion where he sees it. At least now we can understand why he is being so intentionally obtuse about this.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/ArenaNet-should-release-public-API-for-the-TP
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/api/TP-API-for-buy-orders-bannable

Aberrant.6749:

If you’re a human you’re not going to spend your time doing that on low end 1-2s greens. There are far better sections of the market to do that in. Also (once again) I’ve seen one version of the thing.

But I guess aliens.

No, I must admit, I don’t camp on greens yet. I usually camp on cheap exotics though. Can’t speak for other traders.

But I trust that if it is a bot ArenaNet would know how to deal with it since they have done such a good job last time. This is why we hardly see any bots nowadays.

The Red Squirrel.7039:

DarkSpirit has apparently been stumping for an open API for the TP for months. He knows there are bots, and contends that they are not harmful to any trader that has a good strategy. Moreover, botting seems to be the biggest argument against having an official full-featured TP API, so he has to squelch the discussion where he sees it. At least now we can understand why he is being so intentionally obtuse about this.

Yeah I agree that this game is filled with people who are overly paranoid about bots, so much so that they are influencing the API development to a very bad end result, which to a developer like me who supports their api, is very disheartening. It seems many people want their api to be totally too useless to develop useful apps for the rest of the community.

This month there was a bot running around killing coyotes in WvW on my server for weeks despite people constantly reporting.

Botters/programmers are always trying to figure out new ways to get around the protections put it place.

Some don’t even care if they get banned. They’ve made enough from the TP botting to still make it worth while to just do it again on another account.

These are hardly new things for MMOs…

DarkSpirit.7046:

Yeah I agree that this game is filled with people who are overly paranoid about bots, so much so that they are influencing the API development to a very bad end result, which to a developer like me who supports their api, is very disheartening.

It sucks that some people ruin things for others, I agree.

I’m not paranoid, I’ve just seen it myself.

P.S. I still think that even having something notify you when you’re outbid gives one player an unfair advantage over another and thus shouldn’t be allowed.

16s is quite quick imo, its not like the bot camps only one item and its not just one query per item either and ontop of that maybe the bot doesnt want to poll to frequently (becomes kinda obvious).

The bot would need todo the following;

• Query the listings for the user (since only 10 items per query this happens more than once)
• Query all items (again only 10 items per query)

Ontop of this HTTP request/responses there is additional data parsing and database updates. Further if you want ANY more advanced logic such as bidding history (to eliminate 10s 1 item bids) you would need to do additional queries for EACH item.

This could result in several hundreds HTTP requests for each iteration, so I would say that 19s refresh time is not unexpected in anyway (heck it could even be written in Java which would make it impressively fast

That said, peeps… green items!?!?! I have yet to see ANY strategy that produces enough turnaround gain that a bot would be of value. People running bots usually have quite a fund and the profit on low level items like blues/greens are minimal.

Aberrant.6749:

This month there was a bot running around killing coyotes in WvW on my server for weeks despite people constantly reporting.

Botters/programmers are always trying to figure out new ways to get around the protections put it place.

Some don’t even care if they get banned. They’ve made enough from the TP botting to still make it worth while to just do it again on another account.

These are hardly new things for MMOs…

DarkSpirit.7046:

Yeah I agree that this game is filled with people who are overly paranoid about bots, so much so that they are influencing the API development to a very bad end result, which to a developer like me who supports their api, is very disheartening.

It sucks that some people ruin things for others, I agree.

I’m not paranoid, I’ve just seen it myself.

P.S. I still think that even having something notify you when you’re outbid gives one player an unfair advantage over another and thus shouldn’t be allowed.

The last time I have seen bots in GW2 was about a year ago. Remember those bow-wielding bot trains that teleported to grab their loot? I have not noticed any bot in the game since then because ArenaNet did a mass banning on those. So I trust that they would be able to do a good enough job preventing bots, based on their proven track record, and so should you. Having said that, do report them to ArenaNet if you noticed them.

But unless you have been playing a different game from me, there doesn’t seem to be that many bots running around nowadays.

As far as knowing when you have been outbid, I believe it is a missing game feature and that they should have a way of notifying that to the relevant players. The most common auctions nowadays in the real world, the highest bidder is usually publicly displayed, giving everyone the opportunity to up their bids if they so desire. One of the reasons that ArenaNet is releasing official APIs to their game is so that third party devs would be able to provide useful features that ArenaNet devs may not have the time or resources to work on. In the perfect world, gw2spidy charts and data would be implemented into the game along with TP bid notifications and all the other cool features that we have ever asked for.

Since TP bid notifier apps are free, then it is only up to the user if he wants to use it or not. So yes, they do grant an advantage, but so does analyzing gw2spidy data. Since accessing gw2spidy data is free, then everyone can use that advantage if he so pleases. Similarly for the TP bid notifier apps which are also free and open source.

aeneq if you’re going for blues/greens you salvage them. You can make quite a bit off of the mats. Although it’s usually like 1-4s per salvage, there are a LOT of them being dropped onto the market. I made 400g casually maxing my MF… bots would be making far more.

Dark I don’t see farming bots as often, but it’s not like they’ve all been wiped out. TP bots would require other protection/detection from those other types (and could potentially make them far more gold).

It’s a 3rd party program that gives one player an advantage over another… that’s all that matters to me (but it’s up to a-net).

Aberrant.6749:

Dark I don’t see farming bots as often, but it’s not like they’ve all been wiped out. TP bots would require other protection/detection from those other types (and could potentially make them far more gold).

Note that I have never said bots don’t exist anymore, it just seems to me that there are fewer of them compared to a year ago because ArenaNet did a good job detecting and banning them from the game.

We all know that there would still be some bots around but it is nothing like a year ago then. And I have faith that ArenaNet would continue to work on the bot problem, which would always be around, and they have been doing a great job so far. We can help by reporting any suspicious activity like this one, and have faith that ArenaNet is on top of this. The last thing we need is a bot paranoia about GW2 and false rumors going around.

We also should acknowledge them where/when they are being used and not deny it just because it suits an agenda.

I do hope they are able to put more things in place to prevent the TP bots better such as the one I sent them

Aberrant.6749:

We also should acknowledge them where/when they are being used and not deny it just because it suits an agenda.

I do hope they are able to put more things in place to prevent the TP bots better such as the one I sent them

To be fair, I am still not entirely convinced that has to be a bot and not a human. Everything that I have read so far from our perspective shows that it is still possible for it to be a human and human traders are still the majority on the TP, so probability is on my side.

But reporting to ArenaNet is probably the right call, and they would have better tools in place to show if that is a bot or not.

Haven’t seen any teleporting farm bots for months now, but farming bots are still around. I saw some back in October hanging out in Gendarran Fields and Harathi Hinterlands, always in out of the way spots farming tight clusters of mobs over and over.

In the same spirit I urged posters to not try to stop the botting, as the ones who can control it are unwilling to, I also urge posters to stop trying to reason with DarkSpirit. He/she isn’t trying to come to an understanding or be constructive, just looking to argue about something online and troll you all. The lack of logic in his/her arguments won’t hold credibility with Anet who is reading all of the good feedback we are giving. So to best keep the thread easy-to-read for them, and free of arguments over trivial details, I suggest scrolling down to the next post when you see that particular account name (at least until a block user feature is implemented).

I use to flip exotics quite frequently, I’d say a few 100 offers per day multiple times a day and I would get a nice amount in every time except during peak US hours. Lately, even if it’s during non-US peak hours, I’ll throw bids in when Im about to sleep and I get just a few items in then I’m overbid on everything, it also seems like there is a lack of bidders on these items like not many people are bothering compared to before. It almost seems to be like once gw2spidy prices update, I’m automatically overbid and would explain why I might get one or so of each item in before i’m overbid on items that have hardly any bidders.

If botting does exists, I hope it’s terminated immediately.

how you prevent a bot outbiding himself or even more complicated if many ppl use the bot… how you can make sure they dont enter an automated oudbiding frenzy between eachother?

Yamagawa.5941:

“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.”

This statement had so much truth in it, I had to spend a whole hour lying to people to balance it all out :/.

The thing is, YOU are not the only person trying to get buy orders filled. If you want an item now and that badly, just buy them out from sellers.

Alissah.9281:

Yamagawa.5941:

“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.”

This statement had so much truth in it, I had to spend a whole hour lying to people to balance it all out :/.

The thing is, YOU are not the only person trying to get buy orders filled. If you want an item now and that badly, just buy them out from sellers.

You’re completely derailing the issue. Programmers in this thread confirm they’ve tested putting a bot on the TP sucessfully. If you had read this thread, you would have seen that I and others have personally witnessed a bot, live, removing its buy offer and placing an identical new one virtually at the same time – in other words: at a speed no human could possibly do this in-game. I invite you to do that within 1/4 of a second. You can’t. No one can. And it wasn’t just done once: this impossible trick was performed repeatedly and consistently, before my and everyone’s eyes, whenever you would place a buy order on said item.

Had you read the threads linked by others, you would have seen that every programmer acknowledges that it’s even easy to run a bot. Already 6 monts ago, darkspirit said it himself:

DarkSpirit.7046:

Just because many of us have the technical knowledge to write our own bots doesn’t mean we do. They are not that difficult to write and at a minimum, anyone who knows how to write an autoit script can create a simple bot to buy/sell on the TP. You don’t even need to know a real programming language.

DarkSpirit.7046:

I have already seen selling bots mentioned on the internet by bot writers with details on how it works. […] Bot writers have already written harnesses that expose these function points to plugged-in bot modules.

Or what about Ryan, who raised the ethical side of automated trading when he wrote a program that could automate buy orders:

Ryan.9387:

I can guarantee you that people have created bots that monitor and auto update buy orders in game. I don’t do that myself. I give my program a list of items, and it buys them. All I avoid is having to type the individual names into the TP window. […] I could also create a program to monitor the time it takes for me to be over cut to prove that extreme botting exists, but the time spent confirming something I am 99% sure of is better used elsewhere. […] While I could easily create a program to auto update my buy/sell orders I don’t consider that fair at all.

Or Clark:

Clark Skinner.4902:

[…] And it’s the autobidders that are cheating. People are doing it 24/7. A minute or so after they are outbid, their old bid is removed and a new one is replaced. There are one or two bots dominating areas of the market that others can’t come close to competing with. It is automating in-game actions, getting an advantage over other players by doing things that take time with the slow UI, and can be done at the same time as doing other in-game activities. It’s solid cheating and it’s being completely ignored by Anet, unless it’s them doing it.

The list goes on and on. These are programmers that know their stuff. The only programmer that doens’t want to stop this process is Darkspirit, in order to advance a personal agenda – as linked in this thread. The other programmers have been telling us for months that botting is real, and that their impact on the market is massive.

Buttercup.5871:

You’re completely derailing the issue. Programmers in this thread confirm they’ve tested putting a bot on the TP sucessfully. If you had read this thread, you would have seen that I and others have personally witnessed a bot, live, removing its buy offer and placing an identical new one virtually at the same time – in other words: at a speed no human could possibly do this in-game. I invite you to do that within 1/4 of a second. You can’t. No one can. And it wasn’t just done once: this impossible trick was performed repeatedly and consistently, before my and everyone’s eyes, whenever you would place a buy order on said item.

So you are saying that some people admitted they wrote a TP bot on this thread? Then what are we waiting for? You should go ahead and submit their user id to ArenaNet now!

By the way, you have taken my quotes completely out of context. Like I have said, TP bots though possible, are rare. We should just report them and let ArenaNet handle the situation. I don’t see the purpose of you making a fuss out of this, other than spreading paranoia among more gullible players here that all the traders on the TP are likely bots. Bots would always exist in some numbers but the situation is well under control. This game is currently not infested by bots, we don’t need anyone spreading false rumors publicly to hurt the game for personal agenda or ties with another competitor game studio.

DarkSpirit.7046:

TP bots though possible, are rare.

DarkSpirit.7046:

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.

DarkSpirit.7046:

Doesn’t work if the bot has UI driving functionality to take its money back from the trading post NPC after canceling its bids. I am sure many bots already have that feature since it is easy to implement.

Error. Cannot compute.

Clark Skinner.4902:

I also urge posters to stop trying to reason with DarkSpirit. He/she isn’t trying to come to an understanding or be constructive, just looking to argue about something online and troll you all. The lack of logic in his/her arguments won’t hold credibility with Anet who is reading all of the good feedback we are giving. So to best keep the thread easy-to-read for them, and free of arguments over trivial details, I suggest scrolling down to the next post when you see that particular account name (at least until a block user feature is implemented).

And this. I will follow your advice from now on Clark. Thank you.

Buttercup.5871:

Programmers in this thread confirm they’ve tested putting a bot on the TP sucessfully.

You not answered my question. Did they really confess to running a bot on this thread? Have you reported them yet?

Who specifically stated that they ran a bot on the TP (include quotes please)? Or did you make that up?

Buttercup.5871:

Error. Cannot compute.

Like I said, you took it out of context. There are many different types of bots, for example farming bots which can be implemented with UI Automation and there are TP bots, etc. You can’t just take one context and simply apply it to another without considering the differences.

Yes I suggest we stop this thread after all, ridding the game of bots falls under ArenaNet’s jurisdiction. There is nothing we can do as players, besides reporting them, even when we see a definite bot in the game. ArenaNet has done a good job keeping them under control and I am sure that they are still working hard to maintain that right now. Regardless of any personal bias against me, I still maintain that the bot situation is well under control in this game, at this point in time. There is no need to help spread false rumors that this game is full of bots which would only serve to undermine confidence in this game and any good work that ArenaNet has done to keep it relatively bot-free.