Competition died down a bit after the broker-relations and relisting-fee changes. Some of it was players laying off, but it really felt like a lot of it was bots disappearing.
In the last week, though – and particularly this past weekend – the market competition (in JIta, at least) has exploded. It’s almost back to pre-change levels, with tons of traders frequently updating their orders.
Now maybe it’s players piling back in to the market after sititng it out for a little while.
But it really feels like what we’re seeing is the bot-makers took a few weeks to rewrite their code to handle the changes – and now they’re back.
I have no evidence either way – but the change is highly noticeable, and the behavior of the new traders is pretty bot-like, IMO.
Maybe CCP should check into any trader who was a regular before the change, and has now returned after a weeks-long break.
Just the usual: a whole bunch of orders, updated every five minutes, over a longish period of time.
Not saying they’re bots; hell, I play that way sometimes. Just saying it’s the sort of thing bots do, and there are noticeably more such players in recent days.
Shrug. Not worth reporting because they don’t meet my threshold for that. I only report bots when I’m pretty darn sure they are bots. This is me noticing a change in the broad pattern of trading.
I’m mentioning it here for kibitizing purposes, and also to get out the broader idea: maybe it’d be worth a general look at players that disappeared when the anti-bot measures were put in place, and are now re-appearing with the same bot-like behaviors.
CCP seems pretty good at ignoring false bot reports, so I’m not trying to get anyone banned who shouldn’t be.
If you cared enough to make a post accusing people of being bots on the market, I would have guessed you would have gone through the 3 clicks of effort to report the bots. The final determination is for CCP, not you, so you should still report if you suspect it. Who knows, maybe it is and CCP bans them, helping everyone else out.
Again, report them to CCP if you think they are bots.
CCP has their own procedures to track bots and bot-like behavior.
If they determine it’s not a bot, then your report does nothing. You don’t have to worry about false ban reports unless you’re excessively spamming them.
Well, there’s also been a lot more players playing Eve (including returning players who might not have read the patch notes), and I used to be accused of being a bot when .01 isking. So, this is hardly indicative of bots. Of course, you can always report them if you want to play it safe.
Also, as scoots said, what they’re doing isn’t a long term viable strategy. In fact, we got quite a few people come to the forums crying that they had lost millions of isk because CCP didn’t warn them about the brokers fee increase (And, of course, we all pointed to the patch notes).