Market Discussions

Dear lovely traders of Eve,

I am new to trading, well newer than the majority of people here i imagine, and really need some advice.

After spending weeks setting up buy orders then sell orders and updating consistently to rise above the 0.01 isk wars, i give up.

Is it common knowledge that i have just missed, that there are Bots that rule the 0.01 isk war ? (are there ± 0.01 isk bots?)

I see the same orders being changed every 5 mins without fail every time im on. I can probably get 2 sales in a few hours of updating 30 items.

Am i totally missing something here? Real human players cannot seriously compete like this can they?
Is there anyway to set up a buy/sell order that could last longer than 10 mins before being sent to the bottom of the pile (or is this the thing that you have to find on your own?)

Any wisdom is much appreciated.

-Guido

You will not win against the bots. However knowing that bots are in your item market can work to your advantage as you can manipulate the hell out of them for great iskies.

Bots come in two flavors: smart and stupid.

The stupid bots will have bought theirs or are amateur coders. These are really easy to spot as they update every x minutes regularly and for a certain price (not necessarily .01 but some standard variable) . What makes these bots stupid is that they are programmed to keep the order at the top/bottom all the time. So they will follow your orders down even if you start moving the orders to zero profit margin all the way to buy orders. These you manipulate to get the order down and buy the goods at a great price. I recently did this with a stupid bot and some PI goods I needed to acquire, was simple and fun.

Smart bots have profit margins built in and will update randomly it seems. These you can manipulate only to a certain level then they stop updating. They are smarter as it keeps the bot profitable.

The best combo to find is the stupid bot who has both buy/sell orders on the same time. This is the absolute funnest bot to exploit. You acquire the good in question and place it for sell and place a buy order at the same time. You move the buy orders up to the max the bot is wiling to go, while moving the buy order down. If you figured out the bot will follow you move slowly in case it has some sort of outlier programmed or use multiple stacks. You get the buy to the highest price and then spring the trap by placing your sell .01 isk above the bot buy, when the bot updates the order they sell all their goods to themselves

This is especially fun when your blue frog shipment arrived from rens or dodixie full of goods that needed to go at a quick high buy price.