here are the current features put in place to prevent trading bots, their pros and their cons
Limit order modification timer (5 minutes)
Pros:
It prevent bots from modifying their orders until the 5 minutes timer is over.
Cons:
It is problematic when the order you submitted had a wrong price or quantity, since you cannot cancel nor modify it before 5 minutes.
Players reaction time is lower than 5 minutes.
Limit order set-up fee 10%-7.3% Fees ( 5% - 2.3% Broker Fee + 5% Sale Tax = 10%-7.3%) and Limit order modification fee (apologies I didnât calculate it)
Pros:
Bots that place orders get rekt incrementally per order.
Bots that modify their orders get rekt incrementally per modification.
Players and Bots are incentivized not to spoof their orders.
Cons:
Players that place orders get rekt incrementally per order.
Players that modify their orders get rekt incrementally per modification.
Bots still process and react faster than a human to a price change in another region or whatever information that could affect future price.
Reduce market orderbook liquidity since there is reduced incentive for market makers to provide it. (Which is not a problem for items that are already liquid but doesnât help with items that donât already have a lot of volume)
Possible solutions to reduce bot effectiveness while not nerfing players trading experience:
Limit order modification timer 1 seconds + 10 orders per h (this number is completely arbitrary and I donât think itâs a good or bad one itâs just here for the example)
Pros:
It prevent players and bots from modifying their orders until the 1 second timer is over (faster than a human) and it incentivizes them not to spam or spoof their orders since they have a limited number of them.
Cons:
Bots still process and react faster than a human to a price change in another region or whatever information that could affects future price.
Reduce the fees ? Itâs completely subjective anyway but if you wish to nerf trading bots without nerfing day trading players then I think itâs a good idea to do it.
If your intention is to prevent people to make too much money from day trading then fine I have no problem with it, I just wrote this post in case you didnât.
How do you submit a wrong priced / wrong quantity order? Like, just slow down and look at the screen.
Price your orders correctly the first time and you wonât have to adjust incrementally. How difficult is that?
You need to first show us that market botting is an actual problem before suggesting solutions to solve the problem.
Everything youâre suggesting here would be a major overhaul to the entire system for the sake of address a tiny and insignificant âproblemâ that is better named âannoyanceâ.
I donât like playing volleyball, so I donât play it. If you donât like the Eve market, then donât be a trader. I agree with you, the market sucks - the fees are stupid-high. But there are people who like it, so whatever, thatâs cool.
At best, these solutions are ineffective at indirectly addressing the symptoms of a peripheral problem. At worst, theyâre nonsensical and inconvenience players and make the market less realistic and may detriment the economy without denting botting.
And the solution is actually quite simple: allow players to choose which order to buy from/sell to, instead of automatically filling the most logical one. Additionally, add a new statistic for market orders that shows how many times an order has been modified (maybe even be able to check a time graph of the modifications).
Bots arenât going to have a business when you stop giving them business.
An extension of this idea is to tax orders and weigh their broker fees according to how often they get modified. A âpopularâ order that gets modified more often would cost its owner more ISK to maintain.
Thereâs also the nuclear option of requiring a captcha-like input when you modify an order more than a set amount of times in a specific time period.
I guess thatâs fairly subjective, so it might not necessarily be the worst, but itâs definitely one of the most unfair aspects of the game. My primary income source over the years has been trading, and I also know how to make bots, and have made thousands of dollars from them in other games. Itâs just so fundamentally easy, and thereâs no counter to it. At least you can kill a ratting/mining bot, or prevent it from functioning. A properly-programmed market bot canât be affected without spending money, and if you do, then itâs a charity service. Competing against players, the bots win every single time, because they make their money on volume and time. Even if you sit there the whole day and try to compete with the bot, the bot will still have more market up-time on its orders.
If you use the market to shop and get rid of stuff ASAP, then itâs not a problem youâll notice. But if youâre a trader, this is one of the worst things to have to deal with.
Once again, fanboi Scoots Choko defends the ruination of Market PvP. A player puts forth some valid arguments and Scoots immediately nitpicks and criticizes.
I have railed in futility against the incompetence of CCP in controlling bots at the expense of every trader in the game. There is no excuse in penalizing 99% of all legitimate sellers in order to control bots. (and suck on your âcitation neededâ, Scoots. )
The wrecking of the market is over. The only distinguishing characteristic and tactic of sellers is that he/she has a lower price than his/her competitor. By penalizing a seller for changing an order with obscene broker fees removes the primary incentive to enter the market to begin with.
I put a Jaguar up for sale, and within a few days 8 sellers had beat the price. It used to be 100 Isk to change an order. Now it costs me hundred of thousands of Isk. Every change constitutes a lowering of profits and dis-incentivizes the rationale to participate in the first place.
CCP isnât going to change this approach to bot control because they can hardly manage the game as it now progresses. Look at the warp tunnel animation. What a farce. All resources are hell-bent on creating the Triglavian New World Eden order. Look at the recent fiasco with the skill point daily login campaign. Look at the failed succession of special events in the past 2+ years.
This game has become another âproductâ owned by a corporation with little or no incentive to respond to player feedback. CSM is a joke, primarily a marketing tool at its best, a cruel manipulation of well-intentioned players at its worst.
The market as currently implemented rewards knowledge and skill. If you understand the market cycle for the products you are trading you will thrive in this market. If you consistently misprice your product the relist fees will kill you and thatâs a good thing! Market bots are rarely that intelligent - people are still a lot better at pattern recognition than machines so the bots may not have gone away but I doubt theyâre profitable.
Trading frictions arenât really relevant as long as they are the same for everyone - a level playing field - you simply need to build them into your price.
I just want to know how I apparently lost 2 bil in assets today out of the blue from no where. Everything is in a npc station and I think I only had 90 bil in assets to begin with, which all of a sudden became somewhere in the 87 range. No it wasnât isk or plex, just poof gone and no red dot to help.
There I can help. Contract all you stuff over to my character in the game. I will spray your stuff with a very hard to come by secial âDonât VanishÂŽâ repellent so it can never happen again. I will then contract your stuff back to you protected from vanishing ever again. Just set up the contract you pay me 10 milion for the trouble. I got the âDonât VanishÂŽâ spray very cheap.
Have you ever created or used a bot before? Have you seen one work?
The ânet worthâ figure changes all the time because itâs tied to recent market data. I observed it drop by high 11 digits on one of my characters recently because there was no market data on a big stack of a single item. It came back 1-2 days later.
Although I love the net worth calculation in idea, I find it also frustrating to not know what lost so much money so quickly.
This is not the first time this has happened either, its just usually the source is some event that has the value of the skins dropping ridiculously high because they used to be only available for plex.
I sure wouldnât mind a few more red dots to warn me what took a nosedive though.
