Guild Wars 2

There’s a bot bidding stacks of 10 on every blue weapon between lv 19 and 60. Every time any weapon is outbid, a minute or two later the bot’s bid is removed and placed on top.

Try any blue weapon in that level range and the top buy order will be a stack of 10 or less. After the 10 are filled, the bot reposts another 10. It continues up to a uniform maximum, where the bot no longer auto-outbids.

I reported this 2 days ago and no one is doing anything about it. 1621 items all reserved for one bot. Possibly other items on the TP I haven’t looked into.

Please shut the bot down before any more damage is done.

I really don’t think it’s a bot. There are entire guilds pooling gold resources to artificially inflate prices and gouge people once they bump the price over a certain threshold. The economy in this game is severely broken but nobody seems to want to acknowledge what’s staring them in the face. I think ArenaNet’s economist wanted a ‘pure’ free market. Well, this is a pure free market with no regulation, companies (players/guilds) will take advantage and kork as many people as they can in their quest for more money (gold). Anyone remember Enron?!

I am not a bot, I’m a human being. But it’s not me this time.

I do something like this when playing the market. I put in bids starting with A’s (or Berserker) work my way to the end and they go back to the start and update any bid that’s no longer the highest. Rinse, repeat for and hour or two then cash out. Entirely manually. No automation, just a mix of asperger, OCD, market PvP and a fanatical devotion to the Pope.

It could be a bot.. but more than likely it is a text message notifier program that people use. As soon as you post a bid they get a text and can replace their bid if it is under their threshold. Apparently this is within the rules of the game even though it uses an outside program and uses real time tp prices.

Behellagh.1468:

I am not a bot, I’m a human being. But it’s not me this time.

I do something like this when playing the market. I put in bids starting with A’s (or Berserker) work my way to the end and they go back to the start and update any bid that’s no longer the highest. Rinse, repeat for and hour or two then cash out. Entirely manually. No automation, just a mix of asperger, OCD and market PvP.

And for the most part it only hurts the people looking to make a quick buck off of someone, but there are the rest of us forced to wait for the feeding frenzy to stop. Also, unfortunately, this game has rampant inflation so these prices always level off at a higher price point, especially after all of these “wonderful” changes in the last patch!

I don’t do it every hour of every day. Maybe a few times a week, shafting Oceanic usually (sorry Aussies). I get one or two items, the guy who out bid me gets one or two, I out bid them and get one or two, etc. In the end I get a few items, they (singular or group) get a few items and those selling them to us, get a bit more copper.

Yes, but usually those outbidding buy orders are just used to inflate the price to the point needed to reach a large quantity sell order that was posted by the person bumping the buy prices.

Then greedy folk see this item rising quickly in price and say “ooh, I can make a killing on this”, and buy up all the inflated stock. Then prices level off. The bumper makes a lot of gold and the speculators lose a lot of gold.

It’s not manual at all. They know as soon as the item is outbid and it gets topped quickly.

There’s also no learning involved. They will remove and rebid many items at the same time. Faster than the UI allows a human to. At best, it’s a person clicking an “outbid” button next to each item as they rapidly go down their list of 1621+ items. No human could keep up with that many items with the sluggish UI. If they can monitor all bids realtime, outbid rapidly, they can make the bot bid automatically.

The behaviour is robotic. I’ve done some testing and the bot reacts in ways a human player wouldn’t, and never changes its pattern, even when it is doing something foolish.

It’s not like Behellagh’s activity at all.

It isn’t hard to test either, they can go to any item and find the account doing the highest buy order to find out who is doing it. Then check the activity. There must be some obvious signs in the log.

Yeah, you would hope they are tracking the TP. Now it’s whether or not they do something about it… It still may not be bots though, you have to remember the TP is across every player in the entire game and ArenaNet made massive(ly bad) changes this patch which threw everything out of whack. So it may just be tens of thousands of players trying to get rich off the changes. I intend to stay away from the TP for MONTHS before trying to buy anything.

Behellagh.1468:

I don’t do it every hour of every day. Maybe a few times a week, shafting Oceanic usually (sorry Aussies). I get one or two items, the guy who out bid me gets one or two, I out bid them and get one or two, etc. In the end I get a few items, they (singular or group) get a few items and those selling them to us, get a bit more copper.

Hmmmm, there’s a good chance that we’ve been battling each other on the TP. :P

Behellagh.1468:

I am not a bot, I’m a human being. But it’s not me this time.

I do something like this when playing the market. I put in bids starting with A’s (or Berserker) work my way to the end and they go back to the start and update any bid that’s no longer the highest. Rinse, repeat for and hour or two then cash out. Entirely manually. No automation, just a mix of asperger, OCD, market PvP and a fanatical devotion to the Pope.

I do the same and i am sure there are many more of us.