Guild Wars 2

Hello,

So, something weird is happening with parots carriers but I’ve seen happen before with other stuff, whenever I sell one to the highest bidder (only 1 person buying at this price), one order of the same price is instantly added.

Isn’t that a bot? Is it even legal? There’s one other order with 99 orders and I can’t even sell that because of the bot that keeps auto adding new orders.

I’m very confused about this situation.

How many times has this happened? If you don’t sell to the highest bidder do new orders appear anyway, or is the listing stationary until that one order is filled?

Because the TP is anonymous it’s very hard to tell if it’s the same person putting up orders or lots of separate people, and because it’s shared across the entire game (all NA and all EU servers) it’s not that unlikely that new orders would appear just after one was filled.

So unless you’ve established an actual pattern of activity (which given the number of confounding factors – other players buying and selling – would require a lot of repetitions) it’s virtually impossible to know for sure what’s going on.

But the upshot of this is if you think it’s something suspicious the best thing to do is email exploits@arena.net with the info you do have and let them check. They have access to far more data so it’s much easier for them to work it out, and they’d have to do that anyway before acting on the report.

I’ve tried 4-5 times, there’s constantly a new order of 1 with the same amount added instantly after I sell 1.

Of course the attachment doesnt show anything, but Im pretty sure Anet can see it in the logs, everytime you sell one, one gets added. I was never able to sell 99 of them at 7s4c because of that.
If It’s not a bot I don’t know what can do that.

What else could do that? 4-5 other players who don’t want to pay more than necessary but still want it ASAP so they place a bid 1c above the current highest bid.

With thousands of players online at any given time it’s not impossible 5 of them would be buying mini parrots at the same time.

I’m not saying you’re wrong and it’s definitely not a bot. I’m just saying there is no way for you, or me, as players to know for sure. At least not without spending a lot of time and items/gold making sales and tracking the response. Anet can do it much more effectively, and then if someone does need to be warned/banned they can do it straight away.

Here is a novel idea, don’t sell instantly put it up as an offer.

Bots buy items to resell at a higher price. If you sell it now at 0:07:06 and the offer to sell is 0:25:04 you are gifting them over two thirds of the value of the item.

LEARN TO PUT SELL ORDERS UP.

For that matter anet should stop pushing people into selling by automatically selecting the ‘sell it now’ option.

sell orders doesn’t solve it. I see this all the time buying sell orders (I don’t buy sell orders all the time, but when I do, I often see this)
I believe it’s not a bot. my main reason is that it’s too fast. a bot would at the very least be limited by ping. be generous and call it 50ms to know it’s listing was sold, another 50ms to list a new thing = 1/10 of a second. these listings are reappearing instantly, at least less than 1 frame (call it 1/30 of a second for generosity). unless there is a bot on the same local network as the gw2 servers, it isn’t a bot.
plus, I see it with quantities above 1, on several listings. there might be a listing for 9, 7, 42, 1, 1, 30, 2, 48, 12, 20, 1, 5, etc. and I’ll try to buy 100. the 9, 42, 30, and part of the 48 will disapear, leaving 7, 1, 1, 2, 40, 12, 20, 1, 5. so I buy another 60, and the 7, 1, 40, and part of the 12 disapear, leaving 1, 2, 3, 20, 1, 5. these aren’t exactly what happens, but you get the point.
what I think is going on is a visual bug caused by efficiency. like, to be more efficient, the TP servers don’t relay everything to each other, so server A might know that there is something listed there but not how much or by whom (the actual data of the listing is stored on server, so it displays 1. when you go to buy it, it finds out from server B that even after the purchase there are still things listed there, but again, not how much, so it keeps 1 there.
either that or it’s selling us the same listing multiple times because the servers were bogged down and didn’t complete the transaction before refreshing the screen, letting us buy the same one many times in quick succession. but I doubt this is the case, usually it’s seconds before buying it a second time, and I’ve even bought as much as 38 in a row before it ran out.

Mystic.5934:

sell orders doesn’t solve it. I see this all the time buying sell orders (I don’t buy sell orders all the time, but when I do, I often see this)
I believe it’s not a bot. my main reason is that it’s too fast. a bot would at the very least be limited by ping. be generous and call it 50ms to know it’s listing was sold, another 50ms to list a new thing = 1/10 of a second. these listings are reappearing instantly, at least less than 1 frame (call it 1/30 of a second for generosity). unless there is a bot on the same local network as the gw2 servers, it isn’t a bot.
plus, I see it with quantities above 1, on several listings. there might be a listing for 9, 7, 42, 1, 1, 30, 2, 48, 12, 20, 1, 5, etc. and I’ll try to buy 100. the 9, 42, 30, and part of the 48 will disapear, leaving 7, 1, 1, 2, 40, 12, 20, 1, 5. so I buy another 60, and the 7, 1, 40, and part of the 12 disapear, leaving 1, 2, 3, 20, 1, 5. these aren’t exactly what happens, but you get the point.
what I think is going on is a visual bug caused by efficiency. like, to be more efficient, the TP servers don’t relay everything to each other, so server A might know that there is something listed there but not how much or by whom (the actual data of the listing is stored on server, so it displays 1. when you go to buy it, it finds out from server B that even after the purchase there are still things listed there, but again, not how much, so it keeps 1 there.
either that or it’s selling us the same listing multiple times because the servers were bogged down and didn’t complete the transaction before refreshing the screen, letting us buy the same one many times in quick succession. but I doubt this is the case, usually it’s seconds before buying it a second time, and I’ve even bought as much as 38 in a row before it ran out.

this happened to me plenty of times on the sell listing side as well. I buy a listing and it doesnt disappear.

Usually it’s better to ask a question rather than assume an answer. As people have noted, there are several potential explanations for what the OP has observed

The rate of speed in which a bot would need to refresh the TP in order for such a thing to happen would have to be very high. High enough that Anet should be able to see the activity with ease (whether or not they care to look, I do not know).

It is likely a bug. I have seen times in which buying items resulted in the same quanity, same price being there before I got back to the listing. Repeatedly.

I’ve also had issues with selling items to highest buy order, in which I received gold, but the item was not removed from my inventory (that bug appears to have been fixed however, not long after I started going in depth about it with support).

I believe there are bots on the TP. That being said I do not believe this is a bot case. I think it’s a bug, and one that Anet should probably focus on, as it does, in a small way, affect the economy. Items are being duplicated instead of transferred.