Guild Wars 2

Why not just flip items on the TP. There’s not DR. There’s not chance your character will get KO’ed. And you will never get reported for it. Is Anet looking out for this kind of farming? Are they going to implement DR on mass trading? I mean, if you’re hard core you can hit DR in PvE with easy. Perhaps hardcore trading needs it too.

Gold sellers do not farm, they run bots. And there might be TP bots, who knows.

Gold sellers also steal money from hacked accounts and then use that to sell to more people to steal accounts from.

I know the run bots. :P But they’re still running them on mobs. That’s what I meant by “farming mobs,” but you’re right there’s a big difference. What I meant to say is why aren’t they using TP bots.

And yes, I’m aware that GS get a lot of their cash from hacking. But you know that’s not the only way otherwise we’d never see bots.

I’m not sure why TP bots aren’t operating. If there were, there wouldn’t be anywhere near the profits available in lower cost craftables there are.

SteepledHat.1345:

I know the run bots. :P But they’re still running them on mobs. That’s what I meant by “farming mobs,” but you’re right there’s a big difference. What I meant to say is why aren’t they using TP bots.

And yes, I’m aware that GS get a lot of their cash from hacking. But you know that’s not the only way otherwise we’d never see bots.

There are TP bots. You just can’t see them cause they don’t run around with bears.

It’s really easy to leave a “bot” running around but doing things like that on the Trading Post takes some research.

Because if you leave a bot doing TP flipping, you’re going to go bust in no time. TP flipping is a dynamic game… a resource node is always there, profit margins aren’t.

Gaudrath.6725, they exit. You’d be surprised what people can accomplish with programming.

There exists software that play the trading market for you. (in real life) They work.

They may exist, but they don’t work in the sense they should, which is making consistent profit. Unless someone successfully programmed an AI. Programs need predictable environment to work with, and TP flipping is anything but.

P.S. – real life stock trading software relies on bulk data analysis, something which isn’t available from GW2. You would need to pull data from the entire market, build up a history database, then use that data to create projection estimates on prices and then create your buy and sell orders based on that. Since you can’t do that, you can’t employ a multi-million dollar supercomputer to do your GW2 TP flipping for you.

Lol tp flipping is mind boggingly easy. You could program the bot to crawl sites like gw2spidy for items with a big gap between sell and buy, program the bot to place buy orders here and there, and then cancel them after a few days, then place sell orders at 1c less, and refresh them every few days.

Very simple programming task, there’s no real “AI” involved, so much as just doing some math and repetitive functions.

EDIT And since you edited your post to add a PS, let me respond that gw2spidy contains all that info, readily formatted and accessible thru APIs.

Programming a bot that buys and sells thru data mined from gw2spidy is a trivial task for a competent programmer.

Big gaps get closed real fast and are usually a sign that someone is about to manipulate the market, which means they’re already moving to exploit that gap. Which means runners-up usually get shafted. You want large bulk trades with smaller profit margins, not huge ones where nothing moves and you lose a ton of money on sell tax each time you repost your offers.

Also, is GW2Spidy real-time and updated directly from the in-game data? For example in EvE Online you also have market related sites, but most are updated by players, not realtime, which makes them useless for market trading where speed and flexibility is of importance. If they allow market data to be pulled directly from game servers by third party software, that’s weird.

Well I’m glad that we agree there is such a thing as TP bots.

Sure we do, we just don’t agree that they are effective.

I think players just don’t like to be reminded that what they are doing isn’t really that clever.

I don’t think there is actually any challenge in this game so great that succeeding would count as passing a Turing test. I thought it was hilarious that GW1 henchman were generally good enough in performing there roles that the only reason you’d want live players on your team was because they were real life friends who would keep you entertained in the voice-chat while you went about anhilating things .

Well, TP flipping isn’t that clever, it just requires patience, organization and some light math skills, the three things your average MMO player is deficient of. :p

PowerCat.5738:

Lol tp flipping is mind boggingly easy. You could program the bot to crawl sites like gw2spidy for items with a big gap between sell and buy, program the bot to place buy orders here and there, and then cancel them after a few days, then place sell orders at 1c less, and refresh them every few days.

Very simple programming task, there’s no real “AI” involved, so much as just doing some math and repetitive functions.

EDIT And since you edited your post to add a PS, let me respond that gw2spidy contains all that info, readily formatted and accessible thru APIs.

Programming a bot that buys and sells thru data mined from gw2spidy is a trivial task for a competent programmer.

Yes and an ocr that recognizes Buy/sell walls and basically everything else (like where your bids are placed, how many items that bid still has, how many items you bought, where they are at in your inventory and in which order they appeared from the tp)
Oh and you’d have to manually get the coordinates for the complete tp interface to position your mouse so you can even begin to enter values.
.
Several algos that detect market manipulation (if a bot would flip somewhere a real person flips that bot would waste his money to a smart person in a matter of minutes). Fake bids etc etc.

Those are just examples to show you that there is a bit more to programming than people who have no clue think.

edit this is not meant as the beginning of “things you have to take care of if you plan to code a bot”. Its only a few examplles

goldi.3129, bots don’t need the GW2 client. lol.

The TP is a website that you can access thru simple html requests

You don’t seem to have very technical knowledge of programming. But trust me, OCR has nothing to do with it, you can pull all data from a request to the website, you don’t have to get the coordinate of anything within the game client, as all requests are sent thru html

The “algo” thing you mention is irrelevant, as humans do the same thing, the bot would simply relist every few days, as a regular player would.

I’d suggest you do more research. I know for a fact that they exist. Don’t ask me how.

Yeah, I just realized that the entire TP is based on web server technology… which makes it really easy to both scoop up data and send it via third party programs. Not sure why they decided to do it like that. Market data and especially market input should be protected.

PowerCat.5738:

goldi.3129, bots don’t need the GW2 client. lol.

The TP is a website that you can access thru simple html requests

You don’t seem to have very technical knowledge of programming. But trust me, OCR has nothing to do with it, you can pull all data from a request to the website, you don’t have to get the coordinate of anything within the game client, as all requests are sent thru html

The “algo” thing you mention is irrelevant, as humans do the same thing, the bot would simply relist every few days, as a regular player would.

I’d suggest you do more research. I know for a fact that they exist. Don’t ask me how.

I work as a senior programmer. I also suggest you try to sell anything via the webinterface. AFAIK its not fully operational yet. And google what an algorithm (short form algo) is. You are also on ignore as I don’t waste my time with children thanks.

You are also welcome to search for any item and try to get he plain text from the html. And than wonder why you won’t find it and the html won’t change regardless of your selections.

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

Thats the one he’s talking about.