Market Discussions

If CCP does nothing about the trade bots, then they are simply unbeatable, given that they are programmed well enough.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a bot stamping on a human face — forever.

Botting in eve is like speeding on the highway/motorway/autobahn, it's officially against the rules but loads of people do it and the police/ccp are relaxed with it as long as you don't smear it in their face.

You get plenty of warning in EVE if your doing something wrong. Botters currently get 3 warnings before even getting threatened with a ban. Take this how you see fit. 3 Warnings. I used to moan all the time about bots but now I don't, Meh they hardly effect the game.

I love it. "Define an Obvious Bot" "Um, well, I can't, but it doesn't matter, let me see everyone's name so I can know who to gank easier. I know an Obvious Bot when I see one." Much like the US Supreme Court's stance on obscenity. If you are losing to bots, find something else to play with. It's like complaining about lowsec griefers. Fly somewhere else.

And let's not forget, a lot of people are much better at making you miserable in the market than bots.

Edit: Market trading isn't PVP . . . youmustbenewhere.jpg

So what happens if a smart player uses a bot?




Where is?

What magic tools could CCP give us to identify bots?

Lots of traders operate like bots. They will:

* Constantly refresh the market to quickly update their orders to stay on top.
* Post multiple orders to bypass the 5 minute modify timer.
* Update their order to be the same amount lower than the next order every time.
* List a new order as soon as the old one was completed.
* Do all of that for obscenely long periods of time.

Really the only way I see to detect them is to access the server logs and see if they're doing that for periods of time simply not possible for a human or detect the interaction from the bot program in the client. Neither of those will CCP ever give you the ability to do.

I agree, I think you would be surprised how many people you think are bots actually are real players.
Never underestimate the ability of people to put up with tedious mind numbing tasks.

OMG again with the pointless question, the fact is people use bots
make it easier to detect these people by showing trader names in market window.

Bots are annoying.

That being said, I still make plenty of isk trading.

There are many items to be traded, they're not all 'botted'.

I am skeptical that the 'obvious market bots' are actually market bots. Coding a bot that behaves like a human is trivially easy; adding slight, pseudo-random variation in delays between actions, writing algorithms to avoid manipulation by other players; using multiple accounts to control the same market; frequently cancelling poorly performing orders to seek out and identify better orders. This last one is probably key. Humans tend to stubbornly stick to the orders they have active rather than seek out new ones (this is why, when you discover a new item to exploit and nobody else is buying it, it takes a few days before you're competing with a lot of people). It takes a lot more effort to hunt out new orders than to update existing ones. A bot doesn't have this shortcoming though. It could scan the market rapidly and tirelessly, cancelling the orders that under preform in favor of greener pastures and in the process, regularly shift ISK and activity around to avoid drawing suspicion.

At least, these are the sorts of things that I would do if I were going to write a market bot, and I've only given the problem a few minutes of though. I'd like to think my fellow code monkeys (yes, even the ones that write bots) are intelligent enough to write intelligent bots.

At any rate, market manipulation is where the real money is at. It's much more lucrative and much less time consuming than .01 ISKing. And given the level of intelligence that is required to perform this activity well, I don't think you'll see any market bot sophisticated enough to compete with you at it.

Bingo. A human can be very efficient at updating orders over reasonable periods of time but noone can keep it up 23.5/7.