Market Discussions

I'd rather just do what I do now. Fly around nullsec shooting stuff all day without a care for what the losses cost. if I ever need some additional ISK I'll just sell some plexes.

I get were you are coming from, and I do not disagree that market botting is on the rise.

However I look at this as more an opportunity then a problem. Market bots, no matter how well programed are not human. They can not reason, and can not tell the difference between a manipulation attempt and a competitor. If you find a item that a true market bot is active on, you only need to test the bots reactions to find a way to exploit it. Not exploit the game, but the botter that is violating the rules. If you can figure out the programed rules that bot is following you can manipulate that bot for your own profits. If the bot is undercutting every sell order you place then manipulate them down with a series of small orders until there price drops below your profit threshold. then you can buy out there orders and repost them at a higher value.

All high volume items move up and down in value constantly. if you know what the range you can expect to see is you can play that market very easily. play right along with the 0.01 iskers, even jump by larger amounts that you know they will undercut by 0.01 isk. when the price gets down buy up the lower orders, all of them and quickly. then you can repost them at a value you know the bounce back will exceed. even if it is only a 1-2% profit, if you do this in high volume you can make massive isk. market bots make this easier not harder. you just need to determine the bots threshold and snap up the orders 1-2 isk before the bot hits its threshold.

We can not expect CCP to eliminate the bots for us. not matter what they do the botters will very quickly adapt and keep going. They are doing a good job of identifying bots and locking there accounts, but there are always new ones popping up. If however, the non botters continue to out play the bots, which is easy to do, the players using the bots will stop as they will be losing isk.

The big problem is not with bots but with isk sellers and is something that can never truly be addressed in any MMO. The problem is there are many businesses in third world countries where MMO games are a major source of income. If you could pay 200 people $2 per day to play an MMO with a dedicated focus on efficient raising of ingame wealth with no regard for having fun. It is a job after all. and they each make enough isk/gold/credits what ever that in game currency is, to sell that thru the companies website for even $50 per week that company is making great returns.

Consider this, a $15 sub which is common for MMO's plus $2 per day adds up to $75 per month cost to the company. If each employee is averaging them $50 week income from selling the earned in game currency for real money thru the companies website,, that is $200 per month. Or $125 profit. multiply that by 200 employees that is $25,000 per month. Ad administration fees and building maintenance, etc, they are still going to be making at least $15,000-$20,000 per month profit. Not a lot of money for a company of 200 employees, at least not in the US or western Europe. But in a country where the average monthly income for a person is only $40-$60 per month that is a lot of money. And these employees are grateful as it is one of the best paying jobs in their county. In a country where the equivalent of $2 USD per day is a really good gob a company making $20,000 per month is a very successful company.

this is why botting and thrid party gold/isk sellers will never die. it is not some guy in his basement trying to make a little extra money, it is companies in third world country's with no other option to make that kind on money.

I don't sit at Jita. Look at it in another perspective: station trading is like the "starter system"s for a trader. Expecially in the "low entry barrier" characteristic. Later on they switch to swing trading (me), market manipulations, pre patch and then post patch speculation and many other avenues.

I can sit and update my orders for long periods of time but I'm human and I eventually crack and need to walk away from the PC and take a break from it, its not human for someone to be able to sit at their machines updating orders constantly for 6 - 12 hours everyday, its just not.

Fortunately I don't have to because I use various trade strategies that take away most of the hard work.

Hint.

Find only items that have a decent profit margin, something like 15% or greater but over 25% is good, do not bother with something that only generates 3% or something crap like that, otherwise enjoy your pathetic 100 mil per week...

Work out the average hourly volume traded, so in the price history table sort by date with most recent at the top, add the volume amounts over the last 5 - 10 days excluding the current day at the top, and taking care to avoid including abnormally high or low values, divide that value by the number of days you added to find the daily average. Divide that value by 24 to find out the average hourly volume traded, then a little trick I use, I divide the hourly amount by 2, this insures that I'm taking into consideration that the volume is both buy and sell, since it would take too much work to manually work out from spreadsheet imports to difference between the 2.

Multiple that by the hours you think you are willing to sit at your computer, now set up your buy order with that volume, for example titanium chromide shows it has a margin of 16% and its average sell price is climbing, so that's good item to invest in today, it might not be tomorrow but today its good...

I work out that titanium chromide has an average trading volume of 326,591 units over the past 10 days not including today's trades so it averages just over 13k per hour, when I divide the value by 2 I get 6,803 , so I multiply that value by 4 giving me 4 hours worth of stock 27,215 which I can now buy and sell confidently within 4 hours and the total isk needed will be around 74,089,571.7 isk when I sell the stock I'll make around 12 million isk on that item over 4 hours, so roughly 3 million isk per hour for just that item, so do you see what I mean about doing the research and understanding how it works...

Sorry I suck at explaining things in writing but maybe it will help lessen the frustration, its so much better to camp 5 - 10 items and make 25% or more profit than it is to camp over 100 mostly crap items and totally burn out after 3 days and then coming to whine on the forums about trade bots

/edit

This is obviously from a station trader perspective but it could be taken to the regional level with some thought!

The thing about .01 isking is: It's the right thing to do.

What you don't want, is 2 or 3 players changing prices by huge margins. Those 3 guys can cut all your margins in 15 minutes if they start bumping prices by large amounts.

Lots of arm flapping panic going on in this thread.

If you get outbid immediately it doesn't mean it's a bot.
If you update your price randomly (more than .01 over the next) and you get .01'd it doesn't mean it's a bot.

I run buy orders in Dodixie as well (not on this character). Sometimes after I update all my buy orders I keep my market character open on my other screen while I'm off doing fun stuff with this one. I notice out of the corner of my eye that someone just outbid my most recently updated order, outbidding me by 1,573.12 isk. I modify my order, typing in the price because I'm hella fast with 10-key and it's too much to bother mouse wheel flicking. I up them by .01 because I care about money and maximizing profit is, in fact, the most reasonable and rational thing for someone to do.

Then I go through all my orders, because if someone just outbid this one, they are probably going through and doing the others too.

because you say so? it might be not be easy to backtrack, but 100% EULA lega as you say, I´m not sure.

But the thing is, you and all the traders knew for 100% fact this was never going to happen.
The mentality is, if you want it cheep then good luck because there's 50K people on the servers who want it cheep while 1-50 of them are directly fighting over that exact cheep.

you should take great care not to do it with any character that will ever fly costly things or industrial ships, because no one ever sells just 1 drone.

This is how you beat people with 0.01 programs. Playing to their game and going .01 lower (Only to be immediately undercut again)isn't the 'right thing to do' it's the way to make sure you barely sell anything.

If you've got more free time to kill than you know what to do with .01 away but for new players I'd recommend working how to make around 10% profit on the sale and then cutting towards that with a grim determination. It's working great for me.

Okay so we have established that everyone has seen the market bots.

Is it CCP cheating at their own game?

If that is the case I am gone.

Is CCP cheating?

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