Guild Wars 2

So I’ve been buying lots of rare lvl 53 weapons for a while now. I’m doing this for trading purposes. During a trade I place around 35-50 buy orders on a variety of weapons within the lvl category described above. Adding all these buy orders takes about 15 min. It generally takes quite a lot of time before you see any of your buy orders filled. Lately I’ve noticed the following:

Whenever I place my buy orders, someone or something immediately overbids me by 1 copper making my buy orders useless since I’m not on top any more, thus I wont see any of my orders filled. Now of course being overbid is common and an annoyance we all face. This is not what amazes me. What does amaze me is the speed in which I’m being overbid shortly after putting my buy orders up. As I’ve mentioned it takes about 15 min to place all these buy orders. Though I’m being overbid within minutes. The thing or person overbidding me always orders in a fixed number, being 10 of each of the 35-50 different lvl 53 rare weapons.

I tested whether or not it makes any difference at what time of the day I place my buy orders. I’ve placed ’m in the morning, afternoon, night, midnight and very early in the morning. No matter when I place ’m, the same thing happens all the time. I get overbid by this kitten using a script or bot rendering all my efforts useless.

Obviously this sucks for me because I pretty much cant get any of the weapons I want unless I start buying them at high sell order prices. What worries me the most however is what damage these scripts or bots can do to any individual player out there and on the economy as a whole.

I’m not sure what I hoping to achieve with this post. Perhaps to create awareness so that they might get banned or caught, this is probably a long shot. Maybe anyone of you has noticed the same recently in other parts of the TP?

I doubt all of that is scripts.

With all the servers linked together it very well could be live players.

Highly doubt it judging on;

a) Overbidding happens in a fraction after placing my bids
b) Always with the same quantity of 10 per weapon type
c) Overbidding happens at any time of the day/night
d) With any of my previous trades (same weapon category) I haver never seen this behaviour

When I place bids like that I spend the 10-15 minutes placing them, then immediately go through and remove/replace bids that are overcut. Get as few as 3-4 people doing this concurrently and you’re bound to have instances of “instant 1c higher”

That being said, I’ve definitely seen evidence of bots on the TP, so it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility. For example, take Cured Coarse Leather Square on Jan. 2 http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/19734 whose price jumped to 10s from 50c while the sections responded by going up to 2s. The refined material was worth way more than the material itself, and my friend made 50g buying the sections and refining them into squares, selling the squares for the inflated price, and having them sell instantly. The only explanation I could think of for this behavior is a buy program that didn’t turn off properly.

StopSign.7124:

When I place bids like that I spend the 10-15 minutes placing them, then immediately go through and remove/replace bids that are overcut. Get as few as 3-4 people doing this concurrently and you’re bound to have instances of “instant 1c higher”

That would make sense if its an occasional occurrence. But not at any given time of the day and at with the same interval of them being replaced.

Replacing buy orders that are overbid takes time since the system of browsing trough, relisting and going back to your buy listings is awfully inefficient at the moment. This doesn’t match the time my buy orders have been overbid.

This would only be possible if someone is relisting its buy orders on a constant basis, meaning 24/7 at any given time without even checking the ones that have been overbid.

It’s worth remembering that the TP is not server specific. There are a LOT of people out there using it.

I disagree with the OP. I just did a quick search on the interweb and I could not find one TP bot out there that can do the undercutting that is suspected.

The only bots out there are the run around ones that get the ask price on the TP when they are dumping mats/items.

So you are not seeing bots. You are seeing real live people that are undercutting you.

Really? Thats what you got to say? Might as well not say anything, cause you really didn’t add anything but saying you don’t agree. Well sir, I don’t agree with you.

Try to substantiate your point the next time. Cause frankly its a waste of white webpage you used there.

Since most people just seem to doubt this, i want to confirm the suspicion of Volcane Crucio. I was trading these lowlevel weapons a lot because the market was not very active and still had a decent profit potential. Since the karka event the profit margin went down by a lot though and i hardly traded in this section at all since then. However IF i did, it was not uncommon for me to be highest bidder for several hours after placing my buyorders.

I just listed 20 buyorders on the first 2 pages of the lvl 53 rare weapons. However, after 5-10 minutes i got overbid INSTANTLY on all of them – apparently simultaneously. Due to loadingtimes of the tp it took me several minutes to place the orders, but when i got overbid it happened within seconds on all the weapons. Like the OP said – someone placed 10 buyorders on every weapon (apparently up to a limit of about 3 silver per piece).

This activity is highly unlikely for this itemcategory and furthermore there are only a handful of different buyorders on each item, which indicates that this is actually a script and not just an overall increased interest in these items.

I would ask everyone who doubts this or just wants to help out, to try the same – Just to get a few more confirmations here. Be sure to place multiple orders (ideally 10 or more) on several items since it is unclear if the script just runs periodically, or if it gets triggered by a certain marketsituation.
Also please try to forgo unqualified answers. “I didnt find it on the first google page” is definitively no valid argument against the existance of such a script. I personally am convinced by now that volcane is right (even though i will doublecheck within the next few hours) and hope this finds some attention here since this completely shuts down the tradingefforts of usual players.

Thanks for reading

edit: i wanted to mention as well that volcane and i are quite familiar with the tradingpost. We are playing the game since the beta and are trading a lot, so we both know that a lot of people are using the TP and it is not uncommon to be overbid quite fast by only one copper. This case however is quite suspicious due to the amount (10 items every single time) and the very short timeintervals in which the buyorders get placed.

so YES we know that (many) other people are using the tradinpost as well and YES we still believe that this behaviour is caused by a script

It’ll take a dev to verify it since we can’t see who’s posting the bids. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the market when the first wave of TP bots get banned.

I have noticed this too in last weeks, it only takes couple minutes before u get overbid no matter if its 3am or 3pm always with same amount of items and gold, in the end i just gave up bidding and drove the prices so high that theres barelly profit margin.

Volcane Crucio.4723:

StopSign.7124:

When I place bids like that I spend the 10-15 minutes placing them, then immediately go through and remove/replace bids that are overcut. Get as few as 3-4 people doing this concurrently and you’re bound to have instances of “instant 1c higher”

That would make sense if its an occasional occurrence. But not at any given time of the day and at with the same interval of them being replaced.

Replacing buy orders that are overbid takes time since the system of browsing trough, relisting and going back to your buy listings is awfully inefficient at the moment. This doesn’t match the time my buy orders have been overbid.

This would only be possible if someone is relisting its buy orders on a constant basis, meaning 24/7 at any given time without even checking the ones that have been overbid.

do you know that US servers and servers in Australia and South-Eastern Asia are in the same datacenter? Timezone difference between us goes as high as 8-12hours. What is your problem with being overbid during the night? Tens of thousands of people play this game, it’s not like flipping tomatoes in your local wallmart.

After reading this topic i decided to give it a test, with 8 different rares in the 50-55 range. All saw me overbid in a short time, 1c in stacks of 10. Tested a few times more on a few of the items, and the prices kept jumping 1c, in stacks of 10.

Could just be us reading this jumping over each other but then again, i never used stacks of 10, just random numbers from 3 to 8. Always 10 from whatever i was competing with. Its odd, but I supose there is no way to be certain, just speculation.

Altho i could see bots running on these low profile items to be quite lucrative.

I observed this behavior and wrote a post on this a LONG time ago (my post was “infracted” so don’t bother searching) – writing a TP bot for buying is trivial although anet did take steps to make it harder (not difficult, just harder).

For Anet though, the problem is that distinguishing (good) bot behavior from that of a committed trader is virtually impossible hence unless Anet does something radical (I would suggest blind “buy” order bidding where no-one can see the existing buy orders unless you have the item in hand to sell) botting and the TP will be an attractive way of making money.

I should also add though – the 1c overbidding on a range of TP items IS a common strategy – I used to do this on a range of armor and it was very profitable and I would repost my bids every 20 minutes (by hand). I’m sure that there are other players doing exactly the same and that IS a part of it, however I have also seen posts by less scrupulous players confirming that they used bots/scripts to automate this task.

Sadly the easy route IS human nature and it is a pity that the TP wasnt better thought out in this regard.

morphemass.2850:

I observed this behavior and wrote a post on this a LONG time ago (my post was “infracted” so don’t bother searching) – writing a TP bot for buying is trivial although anet did take steps to make it harder (not difficult, just harder).

For Anet though, the problem is that distinguishing (good) bot behavior from that of a committed trader is virtually impossible hence unless Anet does something radical (I would suggest blind “buy” order bidding where no-one can see the existing buy orders unless you have the item in hand to sell) botting and the TP will be an attractive way of making money.

I should also add though – the 1c overbidding on a range of TP items IS a common strategy – I used to do this on a range of armor and it was very profitable and I would repost my bids every 20 minutes (by hand). I’m sure that there are other players doing exactly the same and that IS a part of it, however I have also seen posts by less scrupulous players confirming that they used bots/scripts to automate this task.

Sadly the easy route IS human nature and it is a pity that the TP wasnt better thought out in this regard.

No lol. Human traders and bots will have separate behaviours.

I’ve noticed this as well and toyed with a few driving some prices way up. :o

I hope that Anet investigates this and is liberal with bans. Unlike bots, I don’t have 24 hours each day to check the market and place orders.

morphemass.2850 is correct.

This instant 10 item outbidding bot is way too aggressive. If it is less greedy, nobody would even notice.

I’ve felt that way with some odd items I flip as well , the "over"cutting it just way too aggressive and always a 10 item order that it looks suspicious and seem like it’s 1 person (since the previous 10 order disappears), unless someone is there 24/7 checking their items and instantly upping them (which honestly seems unlikely) then something is going on that should be looked into.

Field Marshal.7946:

I disagree with the OP. I just did a quick search on the interweb and I could not find one TP bot out there that can do the undercutting that is suspected.

The only bots out there are the run around ones that get the ask price on the TP when they are dumping mats/items.

So you are not seeing bots. You are seeing real live people that are undercutting you.

There are bots in the TP, doing item flipping. None of them are public (because it would hurt the margin of the few people who use them!!!), but they exist and are active since early December 2012.

xxxzavulonxxx.8413:

No lol. Human traders and bots will have separate behaviours.

The word you are looking for is “different” – “different behavior”.

Good bots attempt to replicate human behavior to avoid detection but tend to be less efficient than bots written with optimal algorithms to solve a domain specific problem. Things like random timings, less than 100% performance, rest times, restriction of focus etc., have to all be introduced in order to simulate human behavior. This may seem like a waste but the idea for the abuser is to automate the process, not to optimize the process.

morphemass.2850:

xxxzavulonxxx.8413:

No lol. Human traders and bots will have separate behaviours.

The word you are looking for is “different” – “different behavior”.

Good bots attempt to replicate human behavior to avoid detection but tend to be less efficient than bots written with optimal algorithms to solve a domain specific problem. Things like random timings, less than 100% performance, rest times, restriction of focus etc., have to all be introduced in order to simulate human behavior. This may seem like a waste but the idea for the abuser is to automate the process, not to optimize the process.

Actually separate is correct in that usage. Perhaps you should study linguistics instead of trying to tell people what words they are looking for.

And I disagree with your definition of a good bot.

So this is still going on. Yet no official response. Guess ill need to report this.

It’s possible I noticed this the other day with this item. Supply peaked at 1 for sale at 5g although the chart doesn’t show that detail.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24680

Either the bot went haywire or somebody made an expensive mistake with the amount they wanted to buy.

There are probably bots like that out there.

And it makes sense to program one like that, because they make much much more money than a normal kill → kill → kill bot.

They are probably kept very secret, thats why you wont find anything on the interwebs, the more ppl doing this the less profit the bot will make, thats why you want it to be unofficial.

I have now been screwing the bot (and myself) over by adding buy orders above 3s. The script/bot doesn’t seem to trigger on most weapons when the highest buy order is 3.1s and >. Example; bot/script has a buy order at 2.50s, instead of placing mine at 2.51s (thus being outbid in an instance) I place mine at 3.1s. This way avoiding the bot/script to trigger.

I just found one online doing a quick search. It looks like the script is made to sell 11 items in your inventory bag. It determines what the sell/buy margin is and if it should sell/buy the item.

Guy says that he can make 1-2 gold an hour using it.

Doesn’t seem like a lot of gold to me. Hope he gets the banhammer.

Field Marshal.7946:

I disagree with the OP. I just did a quick search on the interweb and I could not find one TP bot out there that can do the undercutting that is suspected.

The only bots out there are the run around ones that get the ask price on the TP when they are dumping mats/items.

So you are not seeing bots. You are seeing real live people that are undercutting you.

Not all bots are sold/publicly known (I’d guess that most aren’t).

It wouldn’t be difficult to write a bot that does what the OP is seeing. Given a couple weeks (and no responsibilities/FT job), I’m sure I could write something that not only mimics this behavior, but does it in a manner that isn’t nearly as transparent (e.g. not always making the same number of orders, emulating human-like response times, etc).

It wouldn’t even be particularly difficult to do it in a way that couldn’t be caught by any bot-detection software that isn’t particularly advanced (it would require some impressive pattern detection to find a bot that tries to emulate human behavior in a small, closed system like GW2’s trading post).

IMO, ANet probably ought to implement a simplified captcha system for TP transactions.

Not that I would EVER make such a bot, or encourage anyone to try to create their own (seriously, don’t – there’s a special place in hell reserved for people who bot/make bots, and you REALLY don’t want to be stuck in the same place as people who talk in theaters). Cheating ruins games for me, and only a complete kitten of a programmer would intentionally damage someone’s non-malicious product – especially a video game.

This is common in all popular markets where people flip for profits.

There’s a couple markets I really babysit my buy orders in, passing through many times during the day to 1c outbid across the board, usually for small quantities since I know they won’t be filled completely before I’m overbid and I don’t want to tie up my money (3-10 buy orders per item) Just dealing with 1 person (me) in those markets is probably annoying already. Now consider how many people play this game that do it.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Zicore-s-Trading-Post-Notifier-Open-Source/first#post1392525

??

that’s a notification program, not a bot. a bot would go one step further: take those notifications and place bids for you. I expect it’s that human bidding component that makes that notification program legal.

Mystic.5934:

that’s a notification program, not a bot. a bot would go one step further: take those notifications and place bids for you. I expect it’s that human bidding component that makes that notification program legal.

Yes but I think his point is, with the notifier, it is relatively easy for a human player to react upon his item being “uppercut” (it’s what I call it) almost immediately and uppercut the new price himself. So the phenomenon observed by OP can be easily attributed to the notifier since it’s a relatively popular program.

Mystic.5934:

that’s a notification program, not a bot. a bot would go one step further: take those notifications and place bids for you. I expect it’s that human bidding component that makes that notification program legal.

According to ANet’s official statements, any 3rd party program that makes the game easier or allows you to do things faster isn’t allowed.

Of course, that line from them is really a catch-all: my mouse driver makes the game easier and lets me do things faster than people who don’t have mice (or whose driver isn’t as good). Pretty much anything running on your computer at any given time that affects the game in any way violates that rule, so it’ll be up to ANet’s whim whether or not that sort of thing leads to the banhammer.

Akaji.1296:

Mystic.5934:

that’s a notification program, not a bot. a bot would go one step further: take those notifications and place bids for you. I expect it’s that human bidding component that makes that notification program legal.

According to ANet’s official statements, any 3rd party program that makes the game easier or allows you to do things faster isn’t allowed.

Of course, that line from them is really a catch-all: my mouse driver makes the game easier and lets me do things faster than people who don’t have mice (or whose driver isn’t as good). Pretty much anything running on your computer at any given time that affects the game in any way violates that rule, so it’ll be up to ANet’s whim whether or not that sort of thing leads to the banhammer.

Nice try, but thats not the precise wording. You are not allowed to use oder develop any tools which give you an advantage over other players, e.g. which allow you to play longer, more efficient or more accurate.

The fact that you own a mouse does not fall under this since you don’t gain an advantage over most of the community, almost everyone has a mouse installed to his PC. It’s not about making things easier in comparison to the previous state, but gaining an advantage over the average player! External tools which are shared with the community are a grey zone, they do give you an advantage, but this advantage is also accessible to everyone else.

If however you would develop such a tool WITHOUT the intent of sharing it with the community, you would violate against the rules. Same goes if you add ANY type of automation which exceeds pure data mining or cosmetic modification even by the slightest bit as you are not allowed to automate ANY actions.

Kaon.7192:

Mystic.5934:

that’s a notification program, not a bot. a bot would go one step further: take those notifications and place bids for you. I expect it’s that human bidding component that makes that notification program legal.

Yes but I think his point is, with the notifier, it is relatively easy for a human player to react upon his item being “uppercut” (it’s what I call it) almost immediately and uppercut the new price himself. So the phenomenon observed by OP can be easily attributed to the notifier since it’s a relatively popular program.

As I’ve pointed out before is it currently impossible to for any human player to relist 35-50 or so buy orders within the time frame this bot works on. So even if you have a program that notifies you, you simply wont be able to relist as fast as this bot does it.

Also, I feel like I’m reciting myself here, no human player would show this kind of systematic, bot like behaviour. ea; 10 at the time, same interval, 10 at all listings at the same time, no buy orders above 3s etc.

Volcane Crucio.4723:

Kaon.7192:

Mystic.5934:

that’s a notification program, not a bot. a bot would go one step further: take those notifications and place bids for you. I expect it’s that human bidding component that makes that notification program legal.

Yes but I think his point is, with the notifier, it is relatively easy for a human player to react upon his item being “uppercut” (it’s what I call it) almost immediately and uppercut the new price himself. So the phenomenon observed by OP can be easily attributed to the notifier since it’s a relatively popular program.

As I’ve pointed out before is it currently impossible to for any human player to relist 35-50 or so buy orders within the time frame this bot works on. So even if you have a program that notifies you, you simply wont be able to relist as fast as this bot does it.

Also, I feel like I’m reciting myself here, no human player would show this kind of systematic, bot like behaviour. ea; 10 at the time, same interval, 10 at all listings at the same time, no buy orders above 3s etc.

You don’t know if its several players or one player → response to “no human could outbid that fast” You also don’t know if he is -like you- making the circuit on his orders and simply outbids you while you make another bid.

I put up bos in the same pattern most of the time as well → response to systematic.

I also don’t bid over a certain limit where I know my profit will be too small to make it worthwhile. Don’t forget that this game shares a tp over all servers before you cry bot, simply because you get outbid on – probably not market niche-.

Don’t start a wichunt because other people play the same markets you do.

Don’t be so quick to dismiss this. You can tell when their previous orders are removed and replaced. These are not isolated incidents that these players are mentioning. They can all be easily tracked once suspected, if one wants to. If just involves spending a bit of copper.

I think the OP might be right, a skilled programmer will have no problem making a TP bot.

I find it hard to believe that only one such bot is in existence. I mean, wouldn’t the bots trigger one another in that short time frame?

No, because those bots are also affected by several “technical” limitations in the TP, to be precise some type of brute force protection which keeps any user (real or bot) from making more than one sell order every 3-10 seconds.

Besides, every single one of those bots works slightly different and usually only on a small subset of items. They might collide in rare occasions, but you will hardly notice. They only become noticeable to “real” TP players who work on the same set of items as they work much more efficient and thereby kill the profit for real players. They are even completely undetectable if they work on items with large volume because a single player can never make a huge difference due to the limitations.

I can assure, that TP bots do exist. Personally i would have all the knowledge required to do so, not just how to read data from the TP like gw2spidy does, but also how to place sell/buy orders and how to take items from the TP without a merchant. (I haven’t written a bot though, and I won’t do it for you. Don’t even ask!)

That happens to me sometimes too but I never attributed it to bots. It is just the annoying nature of the TP: People tend to buy things that are popular and avoid things that are not popular.

If it is a bot that triggers that fast, then it must be polling the server every second or so, and causing huge lag and DOS attacks on the trading post server. That would easily catch ArenaNet’s attention.

it’s not the bot that triggers too fast (it actually takes 5-10 minutes to respond), but the consistency and the speed with which it relists the items that makes it suspicious

Also most people seem to forget that 5-10 minutes response time is already extremely fast if this happens 24/7 on items where you usually see only 2-3 different buyorders IN TOTAL. So it is highly unlikely that there are tons of different players watching these constantly and are overbidding each other

Yes I think I know what you mean. I am having a bidding war against someone for past half hour or so, increasing by 1 copper every 1 min. I am so busy doing this that I don’t have time to play the game anymore.

Doesn’t seem that a human can be so relentless, it is probably a bot. I have read that someone was creating a TP bot to automatically buy and sell using AutoIT script.

I dont think I should post the hack url here since it is probably against the rules but if any staff from ArenaNet wants to see it, they can message me.