Market Discussions

I'm a bot. No way you get past me.

being heavy into the market last year, then taking a break and coming right back into the market, I can say with certainty that the bots (if any atm) are much lower than what they once were. Add to that the expanded market pool which allowed some breathing room between traders and my profits had tripled with the same number, albeit different types of items.

More likely is just some very agressive traders. I've been petitioned as a bot on a couple of occasions myself and can say that when I want to sell something that will bring in good returns, there is very little that will keep me off the top of the list if I'm at the keyboard.

Reports from Crimewatch concur with the assessment that market bots are relatively few (and now even fewer after the banning). I myself have never been reported (as far as I know) as a bot but during certain times when I'm on doing something else I will update market orders repeatedly and from the other end it might seem like a bot. I would wager that overwhelmingly bot-like behavior on the market is usually the result of two traders being on at the same time selling the same item/s.

Slightly related, I also suspect that market bots have a lower margin of profit vs. effort than do other varieties of bots.

As far as I have seen, there are a very limited amount of market bots within the game. I trade and am often outbid quickly after I update orders but all you have to do is cycle through your orders and update yours, eventually the other aggressive trader will leave because he gets bored of having to update his orders all the time or he will log off and the market is yours.

Usually unless you are online and updating your orders, if you are in Jita you will be out bid within the hour of you logging off. There are several strategies to getting around that but I will not be sharing them on the forums. However feel free to contact me ingame.

Market Bots are currently a thing of the past. Since December 2011 and January 2012 I have not seen a single market bot last longer than one week before mysteriously vanishing. There are occasions where they do exist but they do not last for long :)

It must be noted that there is software widely available that will inform you which orders have been 1 isked allowing you to immediately correct that order without reviewing your whole spread sheet. This is just as effective as botting but remains legal in accordance with CCP EULA as there is not automated action and all interaction with the EVE client is user performed. People using this software can come across as bots but the difference is that these people need to sleep and get tired/bored, bots run 23/7.

Before December 2011 you really had no chance to market trade in any hub without being instantly 1 isked and the bots were freaking obvious everyone knew who they were because all you needed to do was buy or sell 1 item to them and get there name and back then CCP did not care about botting unless it was directly linked to real money trading (isk selling on ebay).

I move around between a lot of different markets [within Jita] and the level of 0.01 isking can vary quite severely. Some markets are practically fenced off by what appear to be bots - even a no-life mmo addict can't be on that much . A single bot can potentially ruin hundreds of markets, so it doesn't matter how few there are. It would only take one or two to sneak by the defences and have a serious impact on most of the leading markets in a trade hub like Jita.

In my opinion there is at least one such super-bot out there, and it is working several hundred markets in Jita. I base this on strange trading patterns that spring up in certain markets under certain conditions which intuitively feel like a background bot is taking these actions.

I often update my orders and when the screen refreshes, i see my order is just ahead some other dude who just updated his order too and there is only 1 second between em.

I just think then... "Sucker!!" hehe

What software is that?

Chribba was running some market crawlers a while back in order to spot bots based on their update patterns. I read he got quite a few of them quite easily. If you have access to good market data, apparently market bots become very distinctive.

I simply devastate the margins on the item that is being botted and/or aggressively traded.

When I'm trading, I don't care whether it was a 2% or 200% profit on a sale, as long as I make a profit. (And even if I don't, I've got enough income from other sources that I don't mind taking a 1 or 2% loss, just to deprive the bot/.01 isker a profit, as well. ) I've got no interest in camping the station and playing the .01 isk game, nor do I want to just drop out of the market to give the other person a win (I'm competitive (read: Stubborn) like that), so I turn it into a no-win situation.

Basically, if I find that someone is camping something I'm selling and .01 isking me, I'll gouge the margin. First by a relatively small amount, 5 or 10% of the total margin on the item. If they undercut me within a short period of time, I'll gouge the margin by another 15-20%. If they do it again, another 25%. They either learn their lesson and stop undercutting me or they don't make anywhere near as much money on their investment as they had originally planned.

The entertainment value of knowing that I'm wrecking another player's margins is satisfying enough. If I still make a decent profit on the item, it's just icing on the cake.

Now, if they want to buy my goods and put them up for resale at their original level, I've got no problem with that, haha. I made money, they get stuck with having to go through the trouble of selling the goods and .01 isking like they enjoy, so everybody wins, haha.