Eve Bots - are they a bad thing, is CCP complicit in their use?

Communications Center General Discussion
41

It’s about adding customized words to your mouth and since you both disagree with that concept people can say you are wrong, therefor the statements you made; you are wrong :thinking:

I can’t say for sure, but I think it has to do with less complex bot behaviour, for whatever reason someone decides to do that.
If the bot doesn’t get any input to take action for 3 days it dissolves, without the risk getting in complicated situations for 3 months and not knowing how to react to it, which could prevent isk losses, I don’t know tho.

I believe it’s not possible to make bots not viable, but you can reduce their (destructive) effects towards human players in many ways, but there are different degrees in that in how much you sacrifice of abilities involved which makes the activity.
Let me make an example.

  1. Orders can’t have their price changed by 0.01isk, they have to be changed at least (at least) by 1%
  2. Depending on the market activity of an item, the less the activity the more % change have to made to an order when modifying its price
  3. A button on the order window which automatically increase decrease the price by %(?) by clicking it.
  4. Combined with that the order overview can also show more data like; how much % you are out bit, how much activity, % difference between sell and buy, how long the current (modified) order is up
  5. These additional information on the overview have their info boxes in colors, which allow you to see in a quick overview which of your orders require attention to your interest.

What this does is;

  1. Makes market trading easy one push button to operate if you want to.
  2. Closes the gap between (how much?) buy and sell, reducing or (taking away) profits being made by illegal market activities.

Needs refined details which I’m not going to write an essay about here now, but imo this is a possible valid solution

1 Like
42

True, but in this case, whether its to do with the bot coding, or trying to keep a lower profile, or building resilience into their management, they use different toons for each buy order, I know as many a time I’ve sold to them, top to bottom, to ascertain who they are - check you mail in game on this toon

If you look at Amarr mediums, I dropped my own buy orders hours ago, but theirs are all still sat at 165 because is programming doesn’t manually adjust down. If you now place a buy order of your own just above theirs, they will better it within 5 mins, thus showing its active. But, as mentioned, it won’t go the other way as quick because its something its not programmed to do. Bots are smart, but they have their limitations.

43

For info, following several months of gathering evidence / intel, and a couple hard days of grinding further enquiries.

Support Ticket submitted today to CCP naming 51 active toons that are strongly believed by myself to be running market bots across the Jita market.

Of the 51 toons, 37 of them have recent suspicious contract histories, consistent with RMT’ing isk - ie contrat 8 bill for a shuttle, 6 bill for an ibis and so on

Will be interesting to see the outcome

44

How does 1 or 2 prevent bots? Or make life harder for bots?
Wouldn’t these options also take choices away from real human players who may want to undercut by .01isk as its the most rational choice for them in a given situation?

3 and 4 are available now using third party tools, would be nice to have this kind of thing in game but it is also pretty cool that the api allows clever eve players to release stuff for us to use- more sand to play with? Not sure how it has anything to do with bots?

5- yes please would be great to just be able to mark/highlight orders with different colours, organising 150+ is hard- but not sure how it has anything to do with bots?

Unless I have misunderstood?

45

There’s a difference between an offline bot presented to CCP and one doing damage ingame in real time on the live server with interacting legit fair and honest players.

There’s also a difference between a player or account which logs in the morning after downtime and stays on all day, actively processing activity, commands and data, compared to one afk for over 8 hours a day.

Of course the chat log is on, but that is not the same as the pilot not doing anything.
Even autopilot, if not destroyed, probably doesn’t take that long.
It’s not impossible to compare and verify.

Someone who steal is someone who takes property which he is not allowed to.
Use of force or circumventing security measures to prevent and track that is another thing and can be aggravating.
In fact, they may have exact figures as to how many ISK/hr and other related factors this may be comparable to or equate to, such as, how many more players would be joining or participating without this unfair play.

All dissension aside.

46

Yes it does, but why not .00001isk, they either haven’t that option…the point is what is the purpose of it?
It’s just a concept I wrote here but what it affects is that it will tighten the gap between buy and sell.
Have you ever traded every single day and playing the 0.01isk market pvp, see how long you hold that game, it’s a matter of weeks or days before you just abandon the market and leave it to the so called “autistic people” clicking all day long.
I want to see CCP paying a 0.01 isk market pvper to stream online to show it all, and we can see how long it takes before his face turns yellow of it.
Seriously what you gain from it changing the price by 0.01isk on a item which is worth 160.000.000,00
Only get on top, but wouldn’t you come eventually with more creative tricks to compete with your competition who are doing the same thing as you all the time?
I’m pretty sure 3 is not allowed, more integration or hosting of these stuff would be neat yes.

Making it more accessible for human players, I’m not saying there are no humans but it’s just more accessibility, and more humans, the less bots in ratio.

The damages I refer is when people feel like they have to work like a robot to compete in an activity or the psychological effect on people when they think or are aware they are competing with robots, they quit doing a certain activity, since they want to be properly acknowledged in terms of effort/reward.
Lets say humans are limited in what they do, they have 60p power to spend over a day, they require at least 5 coins (without inflation) per 1p power spend in effort as a reward.
Now throw robots in the game, they got 400p power, that’s when inflation is going to happen on the reward system, these 5 coins are going to get less worth, yet they are still the same 5 coins.
That’s when people abandon an activity, when they feel like they are not properly rewarded for what they do.
(people already playing like robots in eve online to keep their game up)
And that’s the destructive effect I was referring to as a whole.

1 Like
47

Don’t be surprised when people destroy robots to save their lives.

48

Hi

I am not sure you understand why people 0.01isk.

Or appreciate that a bot can be programmed to adjust by the same minimum margins you set?

Your changes would change the game for sure. Bots would adapt, traders would adapt, depending on how narrow margins were implemented station trading might only be viable for those with massive balances and max skills/access to ciradels- often the guy 0.001isking all day is just building a bank roll and strating out, as he/she doesn’t have the capital to wait for markets to move, or they are buildiing stock. Or more ikely. as happened with the recent tax changes, margins would adapt, traders would only trade if it was worth their while so stuff just gets more expensive, because the ‘autistic’ traders literally provide the markets that are not NPC seeded or run but player run

Also I am a trader and an actual autistic,
but only update once or twice a day,
but often by 0.01isk as I want to maintain the margins as I do low volume high margin stuff-

You say:
‘Only get on top, but wouldn’t you come eventually with more creative tricks to compete with your competition who are doing the same thing as you all the time?’

Yes sometimes a more aggressive undercutting strategy is required, but reducing a 160,000,000 item by 0.001 isk or 20 million has the same effect on others- no one is going to avoid undercutting you unless you make a much more significant cut which in many cases eats into your bottom line but does not make your orders fill any faster with less updates because, yes these are markets but they are GAME markets so the psychology is a little different.

The competitive tricks as you put it, what I would call a coherent trading strategy, comes from item choice and market choice as much as pricing- but different traders have different strategies.

(by coherent, I mean there is no point having ten orders open and 0.001isking all day on an item with minimal volume that’s already over traded, or bumping your one order daily on a market so heavily traded that within ten minutes you are order no.33. In the second example you would either a)update more, b)leave market, c) raise price/undercut significantly and wait for market OR… well there are other options you need to think… but most of the time when you do bump 0.01 isk it is just rational).

You do realise that without these people playing the markets there would not be a market for players to right click buy/sell from? They are literally making the market- ‘market makers’.

Yes there are bots, but you need to understand what actual humans are doing with the market and how the market works before you are in a position to spot them

Honestly, market bots are less worrying than ratting bots as far as I am concerned, because they are predictable by necessity and they are ‘PVP’ bots so they can be gamed- as the OP says you can spot them _when you know what you are looking for_and adapt, which they cannot, which at least gives you an edge. This does not apply to ratting bots for instance as they only do PVE.

Its the guy who goes ‘DUR want sell implant quick cant be bothered to update DUR 5 orders selling 130mil, buy is 85mil, Ill put mine up for 120mil and not update again’ of course traders follow, he makes less and is still bottom, and his order sells 5 days later in any case when anyone taking a quick look at the market history knew it would, who it is harder to deal with from a strategic point of view because he is unpredictable, but it is not impossible either.

ALSO re. 3, Elinor and Evernus allow you to auto copy a new price using control/c and preset amount to undercut by either a percentage or set amount, other players use excel with hot keys to copy and whatnot, 100% allowed, how you think I update 150 orders in 45 minutes while chilling with my morning coffee, yes chilling, no yellow face here. Also shows you margin etc.

49

This is insane. Take any big ticket item… Like a HIC costing 200 mil at start. That means I would lose 2 million isk if I want to under cut. The next person would have to lose almost 4 mil just to move their product. Someone with a large supply could easily hold the market hostage till everyone else had to bail and then up the prices.

Setting some high limit on change screws over the basic concept of a free-market.

50

I don’t think he’s traded before or understands how it works tbh

edit: not the OP

51

Identifying botters with certainty is a hard problem made harder by the many bot-like capsuleers who camouflage them. May I suggest that you make bot-aspirancy against the rules as well? The New Order has had great success in Highsec since we made “the appearance of botting” illegal.

“…it’s a bad idea to give off the appearance of being a ________, even if you technically avoid the crime of ________. It’s the exact same thing with botting.” – James 315 http://www.minerbumping.com/2017/09/avoid-even-appearance-of-botting.html

I’d be more than happy to offer my consulting services on a pro bono basis to CCP in order to help solve this problem.

*Edit: original quote censored for the sensitive

52

lol

You use elinor evernus to change your price by 0.01isk? :thinking:

Yes

53

I don’t understand what you are getting at here?

Why lol that’s how it works, what do you think is going on?

And yes third party tools (and excel- other spreadsheets are available) allow you to do this its supported by CCP- its not scripted you have to copy yourself-

And no not always 0.01isk, as I said its situational, but usually because why wouldn’t I?

This thread is about bots, you can only spot bots if you understand what actual human traders do (in eve) and why they do it,

unless you do and, as I suggested may be possible, I have misunderstood you, however cryptic one word responses to single line quotes that avoid saying anything definite after a lengthy post of your ‘ideas’ suggest you have no real response here, and in fact

do not understand the mechanics of which you speak.

feel free to set me straight though I might, as I said, have misunderstood.

54

You say you got autism and changing prices by 0.0001isk, I don’t know you know what autism actually is, it’s not some kind of perk or something.
And what do you expect me to, write a whole book for you here?

55

I was just pointing out that changing prices by that amount or any amount isn’t necessarily bot-like, and that setting a minimum amount or using a percentage or whatever,
would not do what I thought you were suggesting, assuming you are here for discussion, I
was hoping you would respond to what I said as this is a forum?

And no its not a perk, its just that what you wrote amused me,
given the context.

56

Why not? what else would it do other than what I wrote on the technical side?

57

See above

58

What is wrong when them adapting in that concept?
You get the point of what such mechanic does right, it’s not to make human traders rich and non humans traders not rich.

59

No, I think we can safely say I don’t get the point at all,
instead of having to bump yourself to the top by 0.01isking you would have to change by 1%
or more if an item is less actively traded?

This thread is about bots isn’t it?

So I am saying this would not hinder bots at all, and would be pointless, unless I have misunderstood.

60

Yes like I said you can’t get rid of bots, you can only reduce their effects, that’s the concept.
And that way you can even use them by utilizing them by using them as npc market seeders, I would have no issue with these kind of bots :smile:
What I do have issues with are bots which play to exhaust humans of the market and you end up with buy price at 100 and sell price at 500 with over millions of quantities in market activity of that one particular product.