The market is filled with bots and it’s quite annoying. Where can this be reported? I tried a support ticket already but I was told they do not deal with “in game mechanics”. I am looking on one right at this moment.
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proof?
PROOF?! LOL!!! Bro, do you never watch the BOTS over bid AND under bid everything by $0.01 for HOURS straight, 24/7, within seconds of us posting a new item or submitting a buy order? It is 1,000% Bots. All day, all the time, every time.
I have tested it hundreds of times. Once the bot countered everything I did WELL over 100 times in hours. I tested one item for WEEKS. The bots NEVER stopped. Does not matter what time of week. Does not matter what time of day. The bots counter in SECONDS every, single, time.
The only time they “stop” is when the buy offers and sell offers are within 10%-15% of each other, because then they cannot make “profit” anymore. They are coded to buy items super cheap, or sell items super high, and flip the split between the buy and sell offers. It is 100% automated scripts. Anyone who does not think there are bots on the market is either blind or complicit.
And since they made all the bidding anonymous by default, the only conclusion is that they wanted it hidden so that no one can see exactly which accounts are doing it. It would be extremely easy to ban all the bots. Their activity is wildly beyond what any human can do. But they don’t ban them 🤔
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Even in low volume items that sell maybe 1 unit per day, they outbid in under a minute, no human being would ever do something like this.
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Are you talking about every single item?
also this could be easily bypassed if gaijin did a are you human test per every login and before every purchase
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Effectively, yes. It is maybe … only 1 in 50, or 1 in 100 items where there are not constant $0.01 under cuts (for items you/we are trying to sell), or over bids (for items you/we are trying to buy.)
I am being 100% literal. I am not exaggerating even slightly. Anyone can test this for themselves. The bots bid within seconds of your activity on the marketplace.
Eh, the captcha stuff isn’t really that effective. Even the “advanced” ones. Minor slow down, minor hiccup. Only keeps out the most novice script kiddies. But even then there are readily accessible scripts/lines of code to easily get past all modern captchas.
But that really isn’t even necessary. Again, the absolutely massive amount of activity that these accounts are generating is beyond easy to spot. Like, you could just do “search for any account with over 1,000 bids in a 24 hour period”. And then, even if you wanted to do a slight manual step further, you could see how long they have continued that level of activity. No human, I don’t care how little you sleep, can keep up activity for literally 24 hours straight. And that’s what is happening on the marketplace. It is sooooo beyond blatantly botted.
(For what it’s worth, it IS totally possible for a human to do 1,000 bids in one day. I used to do crazy nonsense like that on WoW. HOWEVER, it is IMPOSSIBLE to keep up that sort of pace for TWENTY FOUR HOURS a day, NONSTOP.)
Here is a vivid story from one of the players, read it translated into English.
1757/2024
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(A small note, his reply is actually post #1895, the side bar shows 1757 because that is how many replies remain, after ~75 have been removed 😉 The URL shows the “real” reply number.)
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Very interesting…I am not sure if there is something lost in translation, but it appears that he is claiming that HE was punished for “scalping” the bot. While the bot remained active and unpunished. Very interesting if that is what he is claiming he experienced.
This is all very interesting when combined with the knowledge/information that all bids and activity are hidden by default now (it did not use to be anonymous in the past, for anyone who does not know.)
Google Translate:
This translation seems to make a little more sense, compared to what my browser automatically produced:
Putting this one behind spoiler as I think the GPT translation below is better:
“I want to share a story that happened to me yesterday and gives me some food for thought… Yesterday, as usual, while placing bets on the exchange hoping to earn a couple of coins, I discovered that one of the bots on one of the lots had gone crazy and was buying and selling at any price with a reaction speed of about 5 seconds. So, rubbing my hands together and anticipating revenge for all my overridden bids, I sold him the same lot about 50 times. That is, having two units of the item, I put one up for sale at the minimum price, almost like in the left column, the bot outbid me, and I bought it from him for 0.90. Then I put it up for sale at 2. The bot outbid me again by a penny and bought it from me again. Through such manipulations, in an hour I managed to extract about 50 coins from him until that guy came to his senses and turned off the crazy bot. And everything would be fine, but in the morning my account was completely frozen! So, it turns out you can’t cheat the bot, they sit on all the lots for years without punishment, and then a ban… Haha”
GPT translation:
Ok this is even better, ChatGPT translation, with instructions to translate the MEANING, rather than just strict word for word translation:
Prompt I used for GPT
Please translate this forum post from Russian into English, as a native English speaker living in The United States would write. Please feel free to use slang or anything else appropriate to maintain the original meaning, regardless if the translation is “perfect” for an individual word or sentence:
I wanna share a story that happened to me yesterday that gives you something to think about. Yesterday, like usual, I was shuffling my bids around on the exchange, hoping to make a couple coins. Then I noticed that one of the bots on a certain listing had gone completely off the rails — it was buying and selling at literally any price, with about a five-second reaction time.
So I’m sitting there rubbing my hands together, already dreaming about revenge for all the times my bids got instantly outbid. And I ended up selling this bot the same item about 50 times. Basically, I had two units of the item. I’d list one for sale at the minimum price, pretty much right at the bottom of the list. The bot would outbid me, then I’d buy it back from him for 0.90. After that, I’d list it again for 2.00 — the bot would outbid me by a penny and buy it from me again.
I kept looping this, and over the course of about an hour I squeezed roughly 50 coins out of him, until the owner finally woke up and shut down the busted bot. All good, right?
Yeah… except when I woke up this morning, my account was completely frozen.
So apparently you’re not allowed to outplay a bot. They can sit on every listing for years doing whatever they want with zero consequences — but the moment you turn the tables, bam, ban. 😂
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Oh my, I didn’t pay attention to that. By the way, the addition to the anonymity mode was introduced some time after the level 18 bot was caught selling a coupon for E100. It was a long time ago, so I don’t remember well)
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this game has over a million users so the possibility of a lot of people being logged on to the market trying to sell the same thing you are is likely. Are their probably some bots on the market? yea probably, since its a free to play game and a lot of people try to sell accounts on the black-market. Its hard to spot player and market bots though.
i REALLY doubt that this is the case
hard to imagine there being 100 people trying to outbid me on a merkava 2d skin at every time of day
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It’s not even just the market.
The cheaters were gone for a couple days, post the mass ban.
But then the new event started and they all came back swinging.
Of course so did the spam of corner campers, and spawn rushers.
The game is in a sorry state, and it’s very irritating.
I’ve gotten thanked for reporting 3 cheaters in the last day.
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that’s why hardware ban is needed which wt don’t have yet.
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Or a simple I.P. Ban
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I wish i hope a dev or someone in gajin team tell us if they gonna do something like this.
would be best thing ever and also help the game masters imagine the amount of reports that game master have to deal with in daily bases.
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I hope the also ban turret wigglers.
That crap is mad annoying.
People need to take it like a man when they mess up their shot