If you look thru the posts there are a number complaining of large scale bots and CCP’s lack of doing anything about them. To name a couple recent ones…
Here’s a very short version of my own experiences, this time with market bots.
For nine months I have been reporting market bots who were operating on a number of the same items that I was competing for. I started off using report bot function but nothing ever happened, so then I moved to support tickets, which initially they just closed giving me a standard response of use "Report bot“ function in the EVE game client
As fast as they closed them I would send in a new one in, this time listing offending accounts (who I identified via selling to). Eventually they got the hint and one morning a got a response it had been actioned, and 19 accounts that I listed as bots all disappeared from Jita local the same morning, as did their buy orders (prior to this they were 24/7 bots)
The only problem was, I told them in my tickets there were still many others operating across the commodities in question, and whilst I hadn’t named individual toons, I told them where and how to find them. (to identify them all would have cost me many billions selling to them, plus I thought leaving 80% in situ would help in gathering evidence as they were all clearly connected) To my frustration none of these bots had been touched - they had simply taken the easy route and banned the ones I listed, not bothering to do any work their side to properly clean house
Ok… so let me put this into context what we are dealing with, I’m talking trillions of isk and without doubts RMT’ing on an industrial scale - I’ve seen the contracts. I would love to list multiple toons here so you can see their contract histories yourselves where tens, if not hundreds of contracts per toon showing where a shuttle is exchanged for 8 bill, a hobgoblin for 7 bill, a worthless bpc for 12 bill and so on and so on…, but rules say I can’t - but correct me if I’m wrong, there’s nothing stopping me passing this to anyone in game if they desire it.
Just a quick note on how they bot - They use multiple toons with buy orders up for the same goods. Lets take 6 toons and call each toon, A,B,C,D,E and F - each has a buy order up for say Large Caldari Control Towers, A might have buy 3, B might have buy 4 and so on. Each toon runs a script which checks to see if they are the highest bidder, if not they increase their own buy order by .01 or .04 or whatever is set over the existing highest buy order.
Now this is the interesting part… each toon actually runs their script say every 20 minutes (not 5 mins which was what I was used to), with each toons script running 5 mins staggered to the next. Also they’re programmed to ignore each others buy orders ie A ignores, B,C and so on, but not anyone else’s.
End result being, you better A’s buy order which is currently top, 3 or 4 minutes later B scripts runs and he hops over yours. 5 Minutes later you increase your buy order again so again you’re now top. This time B stays where he is, but C’s runs and now jumps over you. You again increase yours 5 minutes later, now its D’s turn and he jumps you, and so on and so on
Doing it this way draws less attention to individual accounts as its not a single account that is always at the top, it also means they have resilience and can drop a toon or two during the day and that the total of buy orders are large but not noticeably so.
Equally, they also have a short army of toons which are selling, doing the same, bottom line, buy low, sell high = isk
Another thing I can tell you is the goods which they are operating on. So if you fancy having a play with them then help yourselves - 90% of their buy orders are listed for 3 days or less. Recently they’ve started changing one or two to 89 days, but the majority are staying 3 days or less so they are easy to spot. (obviously there may be a genuine buy order up for this, but this is rare and a quick test with putting your own buy order up soon sorts these out
And… by disclosing the above I can’t be screwing up anything that CCP may be doing, as they’ve had this info for months and done naff all with it
Items which I know they are active on (some are more active than others) at time of typing marked the ones which have multiple bot buy orders up on -
Amarr Control Tower Large
Amarr Control Tower Medium - hot
Amarr Control Tower Small
Caldari Control Tower Large
Caldari Control Tower Medium - hot
Caldari Control Tower Small - hot
Minmatar Control Tower Medium
Minmatar Control Tower Small
Gallente Control Tower Large - very hot
Gallente Control Tower Medium - hot
Gallente Control Tower Small
Advanced small ship assembly array
Capital ship assembly array
Large ship assembly array
Anyone else have experiences they want to share or views on how bots are currently handled… or should be handled
Plus, is this a knock on from Alpha clones??
