Market Discussions

So sometimes, actually quite often at the moment, I'm updating market orders and see somebody selling just 1quantity of an item below whatever price my same items are listed at. I figure whatever there's no point in micro-ISK warring for a single sale.

Hours later the same product, which normally moves quite quickly, is still sitting with 1 quantity below mine and I haven't made a single sale. I notice this behaviour with quite a few products at the moment, in various hubs.

I haven't investigated too heavily but what I'm wondering is if there are bots with this kind of behaviour, just automatically relisting 1 quantity of a product over and over again? Perhaps I am simply unlucky of late.

might be a test for a bot??? I know that a russian guy have coded a macro for trading...

You don't bother mentioning the volume that item trades at, which is rather important.

It could easily be someone who keeps half an eye on his orders, and put new items on sale when needed and since it is just one you won't undercut.

I have yet to see market bots listing 1 item forever, I strongly believe these are new traders just trying to make something.

I remember doing it myself, thinking, the big people with "billions" (lol yhe I thought billions) wont undercut me because they will lose more by undercutting my 1 item then if they where to just wait.

this is also a scare tactic, sometimes I will list 4-12 sale listings 1-3 items to make it look as if the item price is crashing by more then 100%, it takes allot of practice thought, for example, SOMETIMES, some one will just buy all the listings out and relist the whole lot just under my real order.


as for market bots..

Go to Amarr trading station and at the very current moment, place orders up for any of these items to see what a market bot is.


5 random items:

#1.
Imperial multifrequency L

#2.
Aurora L

#3
apocalypse Navy issue

#4
Megathron Navy issue

#5
Scorpion Navy issue



October 21st 2011, there is a bot or something not human working those orders right now, place your buy orders and see for yourself how it is.

I ran into this about 18 months ago, there was at least one bot in the citadel doing this on t1 hulls for every station in the region belonging to a list of corps. The best part was that if you located him and parked an alt outside his current station the _moment_ you bought his hull somewhere else in the region he'd undock in a freighter and autopilot to the station to deliver a new hull and refresh the 1-unit order.

******* annoying to compete with and ******* impossible to get CCP to deal with. Fortunately his take per day was like, a handful of millions - and even then you could totally screw him by messing with his prices in those stations or by forcing him to autopilot longest-possible routes over and over.

The thing to remember is "ghost orders".
You can actually sell a product without it being visible on the market, undercutting everybody else.

Just place an order at a lowball price (but not above that of the highest buy order) and let it expire.
Until the NEXT downtime, unless somebody undercuts your ludicrously low price, you WILL get every sale, and you will get the price the visible items on the market sell for, not the price you asked.

This coincidentally makes it look as if somebody is always placing 1 unit at the best price, but they don't actually move any units at all.
Just look at the remaining time on the order - if it hasn't changed yet somebody still made a sale at that price, you can be 99.99% sure there's at least one "ghost order" involved.
Obviously, if the price changes and the time left refreshes, that could be a potential bot indeed.

As they say, the devil's in the details.

the bots im running into seem to have pre programed priced for certain items, I.E some one will always run the same items over and over.

The Russians are heavily rumored to be hardcore on the subject, and one more rumor, I believe there is but 1 Russian in Amarr at the moment.

I get a strong impression, from my interactions on the forums, that dev's are aware of market bots, but no one seems to want to step to the plate to actually begin cleaning up and rid of them, as in, no one is assigned to the job, is my guess, could I be wrong?

some bots are just plain annoying, as one person in amarr runs it 24/7/365 days of the year, its bin reported several times and nada.

In the end, they dont REALLY hurt the pro traders, but they can really mess up new players who either get turned off altogether or assume they can do it to.

I wounder, if, there are, any plans to crack down on this wave of botting?

It matters in that the market is set up so that the more active trader clears their orders sooner and grab higher portions of the trade volume. If you're just dumping a bunch of product every few weeks, it doesn't really matter. If you're doing "high frequency" trading (here, on the order of checking the price every few minutes or so), then having to sit down at the computer to trade versus not is a big disadvantage even if you can beat the bot most of the time.