Posted - 2011.03.23 07:52:00 - [2]

 

^^ ... posted with the wrong char. I´m trading with AfraRaven on both items in Jita.

Posted - 2011.03.23 11:06:00 - [4]

 

Edited by: Wyke Mossari on 23/03/2011 12:11:42
Close down the margin such that it requires good skills and standing to make a profit.

Also you can easily confuses the bots, e.g.

Sell
10,000 1 item
12,000 1000 items

Buy
8,000 100 items, min qty 100 items
6,000 1000 items, min qty 1 item.

This approach is also a good way to differentiate between the market trolls and real bots. The market trolls will try to innovate.

Once you've really established that it is a bot oscillate the price, drive the price down and pick-up it's stock. Then drive the price up and dump the stock on it. Their speed is their downfall so rinse and repeat.

Posted - 2011.03.23 11:52:00 - [6]

 

You fool - everyone knows there are no bots in eve. What you're competing with here is a basement-dwelling, pizza-pocket eating cheeto-dust covered, neck-bearded, butt-hurt, jelly nerd.

Now that we've identified your enemy you have a few options:

First you could try interrupting the local supply of cheetos, that would force the nerd to leave his basement and forage further afield where he would be vulnerable to attack or capture. If you're able to force the nerd to forage out of his basement the clouds of cheeto dust that he kicks up when moving should blind him. This is the preferred option.

Second, you could prevent his mom from supplying him with pizza pockets (his backup nutritive source.) Starving the trader out of his lair may take time, basement-dwellers have been known to hoard up to six months worth of caloric intake as fat stores. Be prepared to wait if you follow this path. Be wary, if you hold the basement-dweller's mother captive she may try to bring you pizza-pockets as well. Do not be fooled into becoming dependent on this treacherous hag for your sustenance.

Third, befriend a female. If you can convince a female to speak to the basement dweller the excitement may overload his cognitive faculties long enough for you to capture him without a struggle.

Posted - 2011.03.23 14:24:00 - [8]

 

The sell orders with a quantity of 1 for dirt cheap and buy which have full quantity requirements is probably the best way to deal with them. Adding to that hint is do it in an order which you're second normal priced order is the second one in line. e.g.

Item sells for 10,000, bot is 0.01 and has three orders it changes. You work out the bot will not drop below 8,500. By this time there is probably a pretty big margin between yours and the bots order and everyone else. So simply remove/update your order to bring that margin all the way back. If it's a bot they usually re-adjust their order seeing as they are the only orders way below what everyone else is selling.

If/When that happens, place your dummy order for like 8,499.99. Then 0.01 the bots cheapest order. A normal human will see what was done and just re-0.01 your order, a bot will not adjust their orders because it costs ISK to change price. Most programmers will not put in something that costs ISK and has zero reward, a human knows better.

This will just confirm bot or human though, the very second your dummy order is sold, the bot will instantly spring into action. :(

You may want to consider what I now like to call The Wal-Mart bot. Came across this months ago. I was trying to work an non-mainstream item, I thought it was a bot and tried a few things but I realized something as I started to work out my own "wal-mart" style finance. The way I usually work with a bot is consider over all profit regardless of individual price. I'll sell a small quantity at a loss if I later sell a large quantity for a profit. (This is what Wal-Mart does in areas they just built in, in order to capture the market they run the store at a slight loss knowing others will cover that loss.)

It appeared the bot was doing the same, or at least a human working the same style of trade. The main difference, it was so.... precise! Literally had a defined number that wasn't rounded in any way. Total value was 72,944,831.83. I'm going to take a stab that the programmer has a database back-end, calculates the total cost including fees and spread that cost out across it's four orders. Why does this seem usually.. Every time I re-played with the bots "total value" it went up. Each order it changed it adjusted it's value by an even 100 ISK. (Well adjusted it by 100 ISK per adjustment). I stumbled across it because I noticed it's value never really changed across orders, until I saw it went up by 600 ISK, and it had done six order adjustments.

The way I picture the bot is, that 72.95mil was it's cost, there was no margin added because of the exact 100 ISK increases. This could mean either the user says "Make me 10mil" in which it's 62.95mil or the bot refuses to drop below it's cost.

The work around to this was actually pretty simple, Brokers fees are not always 100 ISK so what I did was reduce my inventory on the market by a lot and started working with smaller value chopping and changing the orders from one extreme to the next calculating the bots new cost every time. I got board of it but I managed to get the bots cost up to 73,002,284.21, it took a long time and wasn't worth the effort after a while but from a scientific point of view it was worth every second. The fact he player kept working with it for so long was pretty a strong confirmation it was a bot, or he thought I was a bot, either way it worth it to confirm a lot. Name is now removed from game for some reason, it was yinyoyobling, might have been yingyoyobling, I recorded both but I only remember dealing with one.

Posted - 2011.03.23 16:01:00 - [10]

 

you petition market bots until they become good enough that you can no longer distinguish them from human traders.

the idea that there are strategies/patterns that work against all market bots is stupid.

Posted - 2011.03.23 16:09:00 - [12]

 

Originally by: Cyaxares II

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...the idea that there are strategies/patterns that work against all market bots is stupid.

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^^ This..

You can't run with one bot and expect the same solution to work for another. I have yet to come across another Wal-Mart bot, jacking around with orders like I did wouldn't work for a bot that deals with regional averages or one that just works on price and price alone. I thought the guy that made that bot I talked about was damn smart, actually considered the impact of countless price adjustments. kudos to him for being that smart, but in the end it could backfire on him.

You can't really "fight" them in game, all solutions either lead to you turning a loss, or them winning. But need to make sure they are a bot, what people say in this thread is as good as any method available. Eventually they'll get smart, or CCP introduces automatic price adjustments like auto bidding in EBay.

Posted - 2011.03.24 03:07:00 - [14]

 

bots pull a lot of data from the server _constantly_, if GM reading petition is competent and CCP has logs for that its easy to flag them in the system.

Posted - 2011.03.24 07:41:00 - [16]

 

Originally by: AstarothPrime

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Originally by: Kaivar Lancer

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Originally by: SencneS

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or CCP introduces automatic price adjustments like auto bidding in EBay.

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^ Yes please.

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That would actually be fair and simple solution to .01 bot problem.

I.

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I don't get it ? People would just 0.01 their "floor" or "ceiling" price, and it wouldn't make a difference at all, except for the increased load on the server ? Please explain ?

Posted - 2011.03.24 10:44:00 - [18]

 

Originally by: Roelof Kremer

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CCP hase someting against market bot's. That is knowned.
Mining bot's thay are some what accepted by CCP at some lvl.

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Bots significantly affect infrastructure performance. If they let this 'problem' get out of hand:
1) 'real' players will leave due to ****ty performance
2) 'real' players will leave because they can't compete with bots
3) CCP need to spend more isk ehh money on infrastructure

What i'm trying to say the extra account income is a non-issue (or should be a non-issue). Not that CCP will increase priority, but mark my words, technology advances and programmers will adapt.

Posted - 2011.03.24 10:57:00 - [20]

 

Originally by: Knokploeg

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Originally by: Roelof Kremer

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Bot's are getting smart. Well the "smart"

Little list of bot's
Trading bot.
Mining Bot.
Hauling bot
Belt hunting bot.
And a few other usefull bot's

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A suicide ganking bot that would autoscan ships and kill them if the value was right, and scoop the loot on a second account. That would be awesome.

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Do you need one?
Realy usefull for ganking mining bot's. XD

Posted - 2011.03.24 13:24:00 - [22]

 

Originally by: Cyaxares II

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you petition market bots until they become good enough that you can no longer distinguish them from human traders.

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I wonder if bots are forced to adapt until they are no longer distinguishable from humans if it really matters to me at all if market bots exist anymore. I can compete well against humans and would expect that I could compete equally well against human-like bots.

Originally by: AstarothPrime

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Originally by: Kaivar Lancer

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Originally by: SencneS

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or CCP introduces automatic price adjustments like auto bidding in EBay.

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^ Yes please.

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That would actually be fair and simple solution to .01 bot problem.

I.

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So the bots would decrease their min/max price every update until they reach your min/max price at which point their new best offer price is .01 below yours.

Posted - 2011.03.24 13:58:00 - [24]

 

Edited by: SencneS on 24/03/2011 14:02:51

Originally by: Sito Jaxa

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So the bots would decrease their min/max price every update until they reach your min/max price at which point their new best offer price is .01 below yours.

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The easiest solution would be to queue the autobids, In fact they'd kind of have to.

If two people bid the same, it would be the "first" one that entered the autobid that would get adjusted. Then it would adjust the second bid for the same price.

I'll paint a picture here and why autobid wouldn't solve the problem, but it would make it DAMN difficult for a bot to complete with.

I'm selling an Item
Person X has Item the current lowest price on the market is 100 ISK. (Just to make it easy)
Since I know Person X probably have an autobid, I don't list it for 99.99 ISK, I list it for 95 ISK and place the autobid to go as low as 85 ISK.
Person X has their autobid at 90 ISK.

The back end looks at the "queue" once every 5 minutes. Depending on when in the scheduled the server looks at the market, my asking price of 95 ISK could be there for 5 minutes.
Once it checks the autobids, it adjusts the price of Person X's order to 90 ISK since it's first in queue, then ajusts mine to 89.99 ISK.

Now if Person X is a bot it sees it's not the lowest, and adjusts it's "autobid" price to 89.98 ISK.
But here is the kicker.
Server comes back around, and looks at the queue, adjusts my bid to 89.98 ISK, then adjusts the new updated autobid of the bot to 89.98 ISK.

What happens? Market mechanics comes into play, the "Oldest" order gets filled/sold first.
Since my autobid was older by microseconds, my stuff still gets sold first.

Now of cause, the bot will continue this operation until it is indeed the lowest.
Eventually the price of the item will get to 85 ISK (What my autobid was) and then update Person X's bid to 84.99 ISK.
This would take (assuming it only auto-bids 5 minutes apart, and the bot adjusts by 0.01 each time) 41 hours, 35 minutes, before the bot finally got the cheapest order, assuming no one else enters the market, and the person behind the Bot doesn't start again.

The bot would have to be a lot smarter, and 0.01 adjusts would be unrealistic. So even if the bot adjusted the autobid by whole ISK units rather then 0.01. The time my order would still remain the "First Sold" order would be 30 minutes.

Autobid wouldn't "SOLVE" the problem, but it would make a Bots life a hell of a lot more difficult.

Posted - 2011.03.24 14:43:00 - [26]

 

Somebody should make a bot that would detect (mining | ratting | market) bots and report them.

Posted - 2011.03.24 22:05:00 - [28]

 

Sometimes I wonder if it's a bot or some gang of children in some sweatshop taught to press certain keys every five minutes, underselling everyone .03 isk at a time 24/7. Or maybe there are people who actually want to sit and stare at their market orders 24/7 for kicks.

Posted - 2011.03.25 03:04:00 - [30]

 

Originally by: DrayPrescot

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Typical behaviour:
Long online times
Lots of small buy orders, updated very frequently.

The best hint i have is the amount of small buy orders which are updated in a strange manner. I´m pushing the price on both items with rather larger buy orders and i only get outbid by 1 or 2 orders with 1 to 2 units per order first then some more small orders are add.

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If this is the way people gauge "bot-ness", then I wonder how many have reported me! lol

15 days ago I came to jita with 1mil ISK with the intent to learn trading. Once I got there I realized that 1mil is reddonkulous to try and trade with, so I had to boost it with a combination of trading and refining...even then the cash flow scenario was precarious. Many times I scrambled to refine/sell off 1-5 items before the next item came in on a buy order so that the order didnt close because of insufficient funds (the perils of Margin Trading skill that nobody told me about).

As my funds grew and I could buy more expensive items with better returns, I found that I would suddenly have significant portions of ISK tied up in items that someone was 1 ISKing me on. Because this would compromise my fragile cash-flow scenario I would sometimes place another (or 2-3) small order....meaning I would always have low/high order even if the guy .01Isk'd me inside the 5min time constraint.

I now sit at 350Mil, which is peanuts by most of your standards i know, and I hope this is enough buffer to let me breath...meaning I wont have to be frantically checking orders every 5min the whole day through.

Now I am not saying the guy isnt a bot, merely pointing out that the criteria used could point to a guy who came to jita with small sum of start-up cash and is dealing with the cash-flow issues inherent in not being a big-wallet player.