EVE General Discussion

Why you hate profits?

QFT, it uses the cheapest possible to be in the sale regardless of selection

Then why does the guys stack I bought from go down?

They usually aren't bots though. People often filter the list of products by lowest price. So they will buy the lowest priced item on the list as long as it's not too far away. It's pretty much the same as people selling objects for 9.99 dollars instead of 10 dollars in real life, virtually the same price but one looks smaller. In EVE because of how people filter items, the item that is the lowest price, even if it's just by a few cents will appear first on the list and thus be more likely to sell.

Intentionally buying one item for a higher price than what's available is just ridiculous. Your not saving money and chances are you probably aren't hurting a botter either. It's a lose lose.

The only reason why I can see you doing this is that if you are cleverly manipulating the market by causing people to think that a certain item that you stocked up on to the point of ridiculousness is worth more.

As an example if you bought 20 and there were only 3 cheaper it would select those 3 and remove 17 of those selected.

Irrespective of wether its a bot or a player they will both try to move prices towards an equilibrium based on supply and demand.

Bots react just as much to this as players do. Though if they are station trading they will operate on margins and thus may not drive the prices closer to equilibrium if not deemed profitable. That can be due to costs associated with buy/sell orders but also whatever margin of profits they wish to achieve with the process. Players will likley operate in a similar way but can probably operate a bit better within margins to get a trade even if at slightly reduced profit.

As such botting can be helpful with shifts close to equilibirium in prices assuming the supply is there.

But Bots are also much perceived to be more competative to other genuine station traders who may smilarly operate around the buy low sell high operations.

Hard to say if it's a lose/lose as a result from botting.

Also if set accordingly I could imagine that botters can be used to drive price around whatever figures if wanted, by keeping stocks at a certain price long wnough for the change to take effect with everyone trying to operate with that good/item. This assumes there may be the capital to do this, whilst waiting to see the buy/sell prices shift higher for future subsequent gain due to it being a popular trade item. This kind of price fixing for future profit could be easily assisted with botting use.

Let's say you ran a party store, and two suppliers offered you their services. One sells you an item for 10.00, the other sells it to you for 9.99. Which are you more likely to buy from if all other things are equal? You'll buy the 9.99 and sell it for 29.99. It's no different in the eve market. The only thing you do by buying the 10.00 is give him part of your profits. The people that 0.01 isk prices are trying to keep as much profit to themselves, which is pretty much the goal in any business.

No he doesn't. The sale always goes to the lowest sell order in the station. If you click on a higher priced order you pay more, and the lowest sell order gets the extra isk. (Every once in awhile a trader will have a large chunk of isk magically appear because of this).

That sucks. What if I don't want to buy crap made in China?

Let's get this out of the way ...



With ya 100% on that, I do not like cheaters in my markets or anyone's markets.
I didn't bring up the article in support of bots, just that it is interesting and seemed germane.




Yeah the Eve market bots are pretty stupid, but they do not have to be very smart to play the simple spread game, which is all high frequency trading is really doing anyway.

Bots don't break the market mechanic from a Mengerian perspective, as the article describes, but they do steal game play opportunity from players and circumvent the time and effort values in the economy, and that is more than reason enough to burn them all.