Market Bots - The market is saturated and something needs to be done asap- Read!

Why complain about bots when you can game them? :wink:

sorry, if its any consolation I know most people aren’t going to read that lot but I do it anyway
but at least we can all see
I’m not a bot

Will have a look.

But don’t think they will ever get destroyed completely, because then you might stop trying to destroy them

and it will be terminator for real and no eve, and please keep reporting them and please don’t rely on confirmation from CCP that you were right or see a lack of immediate bans as proof they have given up,

and then give up playing for real- because then they win

Sorry I don’t know how to multiquote, discobot has warned me so wont do it again.

Most of the time they wont get spotted, v. high volume stuff and are going after tiny margins and not getting greedy, the site I saw was talking 50mil profit a day trading hours IF YOU WANT TO STAY UNDETECTED, they are often just scalping, but someone could have sseveral.

and in some markets it is all about the carpal tunnel especially new traders with small rolls who cant make big orders, so bots essentially steal their profits because they can just keep it going, and it is cheating.

BUT so much of what people describe or say is definitely a bot just isn’t, or might be but could be a human, and I don’t think there are that many because the publically available ones are a bit ■■■■ and I’m not sure how much rl cash can be made from eve as opposed to other games, due to plex, to justify RMTs having proprietary super bots.

Because the ones i’ve seen for sale, if you tried to trade significant amounts someone would spot you and wipe you out. Or… maybe its just me and the OP, and youguys are all bots, OR maybe I have sixteen going and this is a ruse- or we are all NPCs and RL IS walking in stations because they got the VR so good and when they turn the servers off we all disappear? who knows?

Thanks for the details, will make use of it to help my business :slight_smile:

Obvious bots are obvious.

I put up a sell order at 270,000

A miniISK trading player outbids me at 269,999. OK, I’m not a .001 person, but that’s fine. It makes no difference whatsoever to my business strategy because I’m a manufacturer not a trader, I just want to sell stuff. I’m watching ISK/hr, not Buy vs Sell. We are both helping to keep the economy running.

A bot bids at 269,543.
Random last digits. Humans don’t type random digits! This is a presently against game rules, so it’s fine to ban the account.

I usually just roll the mouse up or down and this makes it “random”.

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I sometimes 0.01isk with mouse wheel, sometimes more.
I sometimes freetype. Often I DO use random digits so
2300687.09 I might bump to
2300691.13
Variety is the spice of life.
Also if elinor or something is set to give a percentage difference it will apear random like this.
Oh also when I 0.01 exactly its usually elinor.

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All above confirmed. You can more or less reverse the rules bots are setup to follow.

Made me sad to see why my income have been reduced to almost 0. But it now totaly clear what is going on. I suspect this is only the tip of the iceberg, ie. only the bots setup in this exact way.

I could play on if this was the only current issue. But it is just another issue that makes me feel that the game is no longer worth the time investment. We are on a clear slope.

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I start to like the bots, ensuring my profits. Manipulated a bot today raising to my preferred dump to buy order price with just a tiny order volume.

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I did some stupid stuff too when I started, I don’t mean accidental stupid, I mean not looking at the volume of the order I was leapfrogging and looking at margins not volumes, I had isk as well as I extracted a character-

all suspicious activity need to be reported, but it wont all be bots or proveable as such.

I have definitely had buy orders pushed up and then left and had the ones below me moved and had stuff dumped on me, if it was July could have been me ha ha, but I hope Ive learnt and I’m not in Jita, and I made my mistakes back.

You could read all the half info about trading and buy a load of plex and make some STUPID moves-

and the bots will just be taking no risks low volume orders with medium spread just scalping tick tick, you can manipulate them but its gonna be loads of little stuff not huge orders because why take the risk that you lose so much when someone catches you. The odd guy might set it up like that but he’s the one you will spot and is most likely to get banned.

Obviously if the example above is using multiple bots on alpha accounts using vms and coordinating them to bid against others but not their fellow bots, that’s a step above, but it also makes it easier for CCP to work out there is something fishy going on (more patterns, double violation of terms).

Honestly check these bots out and their scummy forums, they are cheating but they are not the reason someone isn’t making any isk at all.

Its the ratting bots that aren’t really exploitable, you cant make them LOSE isk, that are really scary to me.

Pretty sure it was a bot, it outbid me with huge volumes and multiple 3d orders. All signs described here applied. Anyway, bot or not, I will do this manipulation attempts more often in the future. No risk, but more profit if it works.

EDIT: strange buy side behavior definitively has increased compared to a couple of months ago. Sell side not so much, still get my stuff sold easily.

Sounds like you got a good one, exploit it, document your exploitations as they form proof, then once you have your ‘evidence’ (isk) report it with evidence. win win.

Don’t expect it to be banned overnight though, but I reckon watch it and eventually it will go with a bunch of its friends as well.

Wish I had the liquid isk to play these games but one day.

edit- do CCP still give plex if you can prove RMT?

-> Mathra

Good luck and courage if you hope to report trade bots.

An active forum lobby says almost allways the same for years : to summarize : trade bots don’t exist, have no impact, are fun to play with, should be reported but you need to proove it and such bull.sh.it

for CCP team it could be more than easy to check how many times the trade orders are modified. I can’t imagine a human player doing order modifications 500 times a day, 365/7. SImple as this

Trade bots do exist indeed (google “EVE trade bot”) are massively used and have a huge impact. Otherwise people would not use them.

CCP simply does not care.

No problem. WIth years, I care less and less about renewing my sub, due to multiple metagaming abuses. I play from time to time, 2 months out of 18 usually

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That seems to be one way to tell if a bot or not. Most players will not drop or raise their price by a few ISK because someone put up a single widget as opposed to the 300 I have for sale. But apparently some bots will.

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Hey man, I also spotted some suspected bots who always update the price 24h a day.

I managed to get the names of the players. Strangely, they all have below features in common:

  • in an NPC corp
  • buy orders duration set @ 3 days
  • similar contract history, they all bought Acolyte I BPO at 500-700m ISK
    a couple of times
  • characters were created around mid July 2017
  • they seem to be targeting items that have wide gap of buy/sell order and the ones with enough trade volume to make decent profit.

I can give you the names of the players and how I got them, just mail me in-game
Once we have gathered stronger proof, we should bring this up to CCP for sure. But as of right now I am 100% certain that trade bots do exist.

o7

They do actually. They’re just being SMART about banning bots. If you had 10 bots using ABC to JKL methods of botting, which would you rather do? Ban them one at a time and giving the bot makers clues as to WHY that bot was caught (ban ABC only, botmakers update all their bots to explicitly avoid doing what ABC did)? Or would you rather they ban as many bots as they can every 2-3 months or whatever, and ensure that whoever is writing these bots isnt literally handed the reason why the bot was caught?

I wonder if this is another symptom of the “iwantitnowGIFMEHNAO” generation…

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Does not care about trade bots I meaned (has a trade bot ever been banned ???). And for years. It’s not being impatient, it’s being deeply bored. I even thought about using a trade bot myself to counter it (just to sell my production, not to trade). But no because it’s not so important : I have better things to do irl rather than competing vs machines in a video spaceship game :smiley:

FWIW, being able to write sentences is not beyond today’s bots.

Source: http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/

(I’ll finish reading the thread then post a non-shitpost response later)

I’ve done a couple of things that might have set off your alarms recently on my Jita market character (iPod Blues). I have a limit as to how large I will make a sell order (generally no more than 1-2 billion ISK) and if I have more than that of a given item I will split it into multiple orders. These will then outbid each other at various times, especially if I’m trying to drive someone out of a market or carry out some other type of market shock.

I’m also using short duration buy orders a bit more at present due to T2 market turmoil. For instance while it’s filled now, when I was testing the waters before pulling the trigger on the Adaptive Invuln Field II manipulation, I put up a buy order for 1200 units at 2400k/unit. This was very deliberately constrained to 24 hours because I wasn’t sure my manipulation would stick and so I wasn’t wanting the order to fill three weeks later.

I think you’ve acquired fairly significant evidence but it’s not enough on its own to be conclusive.

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