(edited by The Red Squirrel.7039)
Showing Posts For The Red Squirrel.7039:
I can totally empathize with you on this. Back when I used to do a lot of daytrading, I was looking for the quietest place and settled on Black Citadel because, at the time, it was the quietest for me.
Black Citadel: Only real annoyance is the two Charr guards, but their dialogue doesn’t cycle too often.
Rata Sum: Most convenient amenities, but also extremely crowded and it has the most annoying and repetitive NPC dialogue.
The Grove: Same. These NPC dialogues are so annoying.
Divinity’s Reach: I used to get annoyed there by the NPC laughter, but I think they have changed that since then.
Hoelbrak: Crafter and Bank were a bit too far apart for my convenience.
Timberline Falls – Kyesjard: I tried this one too, and while it was peaceful, I ended up dead from events a couple of times.
Now that everyone can have permanent minis, I’ve noticed that some of them are noisy too, but the one with the most annoying sounds is the Toxic Hybrid.
I’ve noticed a reduction in open-world exotic drops too, but it goes beyond just exotics. The frequency of rare drops seems reduced since the patch. I run with 330-350% magic find, and since the patch the change has been noticeable. A night of WvW that used to get me 4-8 rares might get me 1-3 now.
I also tried hitting a Dry Top dust storm, where pre-patch, I used to end up with 3-4 rares and a few T6 from a single set of dust storm events. Now I get 0-1 rares, and most of the time it’s 0. T6 seems to have dried up too.
Another thing: since the patch, it seems like more of the mobs I kill don’t drop anything at all than ever before It’s not just a tagging problem, because it happens with solo-kills too. Sometimes I’d almost guess i was stuck in some kind of unshakable DR.
I’m going to do some more data-collection to try to figure out if this is a real issue, or just a serious slump due to the extra-streaky RNG in this game. It’s difficult though, when all I have is perceptions of how it used to be, but I never kept any data on my drops.
Stin & Squirrel: have you guys sent your data to exploits@arena.net? Seems to me botters are moving to the TP, since megaservers makes it harder for the armies of bearbows to go unnoticed. ANet should figure out how to nerf them out of existence (and I hope they can do this without throttling legit power trading).
I’ve sent all the info that I posted to that address, including the newer revelation that bid for 2 is two accounts running the same script, each bidding for 1. I’m willing to scour the TP and report each item that has a bot on it, but I need to know that this is going to be used to do something, otherwise it’s a lot of effort for nothing.
I noticed this too, and recently posted some info with my observations.
It is definitely botting. Moreover, it’s coordinated botting by multiple accounts running the same script. You may have noticed with your exotic bids, that you are getting simultaneously overbid by 2 accounts buying one item each. This is a massive operation by gold-sellers to increase their bankroll.
They’ve got entire markets covered, and their scripts automatically discovers new items to bid on. The sad thing is, this is the new reality. Gold sellers have access to a nearly unlimited number of stolen accounts, so I am very pessimistic that anything can be done to stop this. You ban 100 accounts, they fire up 100 more and turn on the bots again. They seem to have a nearly inexhaustible supply of gold (which makes you wonder why they need to bot the TP 24×7 in the first place.) I’d really like some confirmation from Anet that reporting specific items can help though.
Otherwise, StinVec’s advice is solid. You should always be able to pick up an exotic at (Sell Price minus 20%) or thereabouts.
(edited by The Red Squirrel.7039)
Squirrel: could you also send your data to exploits@arena.net ? Given the volume of posting in the forums right now, I have a feeling that this thread might not get immediate attention..
Thanks for the suggestion; I just sent a copy to that address. I never knew about that email, so I always reported TP-bots in game, which probably wasn’t productive.
Sigil of Generosity is 45/56 gold, so it would save you money for that.
The real way to look at it is to compare it using gems bought with real-world cash. 250 gems on the exchange right now would get you 22g 90s, so it’s worth it for any sigil that costs more than that.
Generally though, I agree that it feels overpriced.
(edited by The Red Squirrel.7039)
RMT?
Real money transaction. Goldsellers.
So, one of the things I’ve most enjoyed about this update is that the API changes effectively shut down all the bots on the TP. For the past 2 days, the trading post has been a lot of fun because I’ve been able to get buy orders filled in markets that the bots drove me out of ages ago.
But as of this morning, they are back, and are nastier than ever. Because of the new faster API, they can rebid in 10-15 seconds. You used to be able to accidentally get a few buy orders filed on some of these items because the refresh time on the API was on the order of several minutes instead of seconds.
Here’s a short sampling of items that are current exhibit this problem:
http://www.gw2tp.com/item/20499-steel-dye
http://www.gw2tp.com/item/27023-rampagers-soft-wood-focus-of-water
http://www.gw2tp.com/item/64212-mini-grawl-berserker
http://www.gw2tp.com/item/26240-rampagers-iron-sword-of-earth
When it is active, the botting is widespread. The following categories are covered up to a certain spread. I sampled randomly from the first page of each of these searches, and placed a buy order and found the bot was active on each one I tried.
Cheapest Common Minis
Cheapest Forge-able Rares
Cheapest Forge-able Exotic Weapons
Cheapest 76-80 Exotic Armors
Cheapest Masterwork Dyes
Strangely, the bot was on this morning, then it seemed to go dormant for about 90 minutes. In that time, hardly anyone else outbid me until the bot was turned back on. I’m the only other person messing with this stuff much today. These items are low-volume. Also, this is apparently the activity of 1 person or coordinated group, since the bidding on all of them ended/started again at the same time.
Frankly, if I see a set of buy orders that looks like this:
2 Ordered 96s 18c
5 Ordered 96s 17c
10 Ordered 96s 15c
1 Ordered 96s 13c
then I know not to bother bidding. It’s botted. This particular bot always orders 2, and keeps the buy order topped off. I still suspect this is RMT gold-generation, but I’m less sure about that now that I seen it turn off and then back on simultaneously across several markets. If it’s just one player doing this, then I’m more optimistic that it can be stopped. The amount of illicit gold being made here by someone is vast though.
So in the past, I was able to tolerate TP botting because it was possible to keep ahead of it if you refreshed your bids every 5 minutes or so. The new API with a higher refresh speed presents a game changer. This curtails my enjoyment of the marketplace, as I can’t compete with the guy who can write a script to find and camp every undervalued buy order on the TP. So my main question here is, how can we help to give you the information you need to squash these accounts?
(edited by The Red Squirrel.7039)
search for “sup sig des sla”. Their text-searching algorithm is pretty fricking awesome. you could even do “s s d s” but that would return too many false positives (like Shaman’s Dagger). “su si de sl” would probably get what you need, but again there might be false positives. All of these will return a large list, but the one you’re looking for will be in the first spot 99% of the time (and be in the top-3 99.9% of the time).
Thanks for this suggestion. It is making a world of difference for me.
If they won’t go with public, I’d suggest they make them more like the Permanent Bank, which pops open when you click on it instead of spawning an interactable NPC that nobody else can use.
Even all of that aside, bots are fairly rampant on the TP. You’ll find them mostly in low-volume high-spread items as well as some medium-volume items. They may be in some high-volume low-spread items, but it would be impossible to identify them. Also, few of them are involved in flipping. Mostly they are picking up salvageable and forge-able items for cheap for (nearly) guaranteed profit.
So, I mostly see them active in these markets:
1) Cheap low level rares with large spread and low sell volume.
2) Lvl 76-80 rare and exotic weapons and armors when the buy orders fall below a certain price.
3) The cheapest common minis when they aren’t volatile (they are volatile right now because people are opening BLCs and dumping the minis.)
4) High demand forge-ables (lv 76-80 rare swords, greatswords, daggers, staves) when there is profit. (I’m not sure the bots are active now with the buy orders in the 50s range.)
Back in the winter, someone had a bot camping buy orders on every weapon that salvaged into platinum — that’s 700 or 800 items. This is what convinced me that most of the botting is done by RMT. The operation is just so vast.
I’ve found bots in some strange places though, like in that set of lvl 400 recipes that came out a few months ago (forget their name) — it was a pain picking those up and fighting with the bot. I also found one on the Evon Gnashblade Representation Buttons too at one point (I got burned playing around seeing how high I could make him bid.)
The weirdest though was one I found on Blacklight Dye back when I was trying to get one. Low buy order was 62 gold, and his bot would keep re-raising until about 85 gold. Once he stopped re-raising me, I would drop my bid back to 62 gold and he’d outbid me again. I tried running him out of gold – burning him through about 2k before I gave up.
I used to send detailed reports to in-game Support, but I stopped doing that when I realized that, if the botters are indeed RMT accounts, it’s kind of an exercise in futility. If someone can confirm that it’s helpful to report TP botting, I will report it when I see it.
(edited by The Red Squirrel.7039)
Blessing. In GW1, my Xunlai chest is filled with gold weapons and inscriptions that have value, but would be painful and too time-consuming to try to sell via Kamdan-spam and direct trade. In GW2, the TP is easy to use and convenient.
I’ve got a couple of tangential questions, since you’ve got a series of identical characters.
1. Do you find that measurable differences in drops between them? For example, maybe one of your guards gets noticeably more dyes than the others, or another of them always seems to fill his bags with monster trophies and gets very few equipment drops. There have been some theories about character-bound RNG seeds affecting the drop results, and comparing identical characters rules out differences in how each class tags and does damage.
2. Do any of your characters ever get stuck with a DR that’s difficult to shake. I recall some old reports about a kind of perma-DR for people using magic find, which has made me wary about the account-bound stat, which you can’t turn off when things go wrong.
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
16 second response time is not a big deal, but it differentiates this particular bot from the more common one that triggers a rebid based on GW2spidey’s timer (which is 10 minutes, and external.)
The tell-tale sign is the amount of time between removal of the old bid and placing the new one, which was about 1/4 of a second with no variability.
I really don’t know why DarkSpirit and some of the other forum warriors vigorously try to discredit any report of TP botting. Clark Skinner pretty much has confirmation from ANET that there are TP bots in the form of his ticket response and their action to resolve it (for that bot he reported).
BTW, I still suspect that the bot who is active in the low-priced fine and masterwork is probably a set of accounts because of the sheer volume involved. Possibly gold-sellers. You ban the botters and they keep coming back using their horde of stolen accounts.
Found an interesting one just now:
http://www.gw2tp.com/item/25970-rampagers-axe-of-water
Put a bid on that, and spam refresh, and you’ll see that within about 15 seconds, the buy order for 9 of them will disappear and reappear above yours. Now try duplicating his response time. You’ll find that you can’t with the current TP interface because first you’d have to bring up your buy order page, find the item, and remove it. Then, you’d have to search for it again to place your new bid.
Careful observation prove there are bots, because the in-game TP interface is too cumbersome to be that agile. BTW, this is the fastest response time I’ve seen on a bot so far.
I’m pretty sure I’m trying to beat a market bot at placing buy orders. Every time I put a higher buy order (on a certain range of items), it gets beaten by a buy order of 20
Were you bidding on the cheap mid-level fine and masterwork weapons that are profitable salvages well above their current buy-order prices? Those are all covered by a bot. I reported it a week ago, but it is still there. That’s several hundred items, and it rebids them every time GW2spidy updates (so every 10 minutes.) I think the same bot covers some armors and trinkets in the same price range. For the massive amount of items this bot is hauling in, it might be spread over several accounts and something this size may be part of a gold-seller operation.
We had a discussion about this a couple of weeks ago. Someone (or some group) has been dumping large numbers of precursors (and by large, I mean maybe a dozen of each) into the buy orders all at once. If you look at the other precursors last night, they saw the same thing. We can’t tell from Spidy’s data, but potentially some bidders may have had their orders filled at a pretty cheap price.
Buy order dip on Zap was significant at 12. The graph doesn’t show it as significant because there are probably 1000 orders for Zap that are so low that they don’t really factor in to demand — probably placed a year ago, and those people no longer play.
We don’t know anything more about it though.
My guess is that the gold/100 gems was accurate when you saw it at its peak, but over time the data is sampled at some rate such as once every 10 minutes. The end result of sampling is that the data is smoothed out, removing peaks and valleys that occur at a much higher frequency than the data is sampled. The best they might do is to record an average value of gold/100 gems over that 10 minute interval instead of the end value. As a result, the instantaneous 5-day high that you saw gets smoothed out to something lower.
It was a sell off.
For posterity (since the 10 minute increment data will fall off of the Guild Wars Trade sliding window soon), here is what was sold on Oct 14th in the 10 minute window ending at 10:53 PM EST:
13 Dusks
8 Dawns
10 Legends
7 Zaps
14 Sparks
3 Collossus
3 Hunter
1 Howl
I thought I noticed a similar sell-off a couple days prior, but the fine data is already gone from Guild Wars trade. You can still kind of see it on GW2spidy on the night of the 12th. Maybe we will see another one tonight.
That’s a lot of precursors though. There are a number of way to explain this.
1. A person or guild engaged in a massive forging operation for (hopefully) profit.
2. Someone dumping their wares from a recent exploit.
3. Someone dumping their wares from a past exploit now that they think they are no long being watched (Godskull).
As a rational behavior, 2 and 3 don’t really make that much sense. It would make more sense to list them slowly, unless you think they will be sharply devalued soon.
My pet theory is that this relates to the buy-order bot that has camped the cheapest lvl 75-80 weapons for the better part of this year. I’ve often wondered what someone was doing with the sheer volume of tridents/warhorns/focuses/spears that they have been picking up each day, since they don’t ever seem to be being flipped (cf., common dyes, which are bought by buy order en masse and relisted in huge chunks.) Mystic forging them all for random precursors would make sense, though I don’t have any feel for how profitable it may be.