TP - buggy, botted, or..?

[culturespy.1324]

Search for armor, lvl 55, blue, any class. Sort by price. Say the first thing in the list is going for just under 4s, and there's 5 available at that price. Buy all 5. You get them. But they're still there. Buy them again. And again... Maybe 5 or 6 cycles later, that price is no longer available.

 

What just happened? I can think of two possibilities at least: My first thought was bots. I don't know how they could make more money like this than by just listing their items, but I'm not good at markets so maybe they know something I don't. The other possibility is that the TP could be suffering from the deficiencies of "eventual consistency". That is, different database servers have different ideas of what the order book looks like, and my view of the book is coming from a different server than the one fulfilling my orders. But in that case, it's allowing me to buy items that don't actually exist, and I think that's probably bad for the market but again I'm not good at markets.

 

Oh, and this wasn't a one time thing. It happens with several different low level armor and weapon items.

 

Any other explanation?

[Dante.1508]

I don't know but i'm pretty sure the AH is completely botted.. like infested these days. I've never seen that happen but i don't usually search for those things.

[TheWaternymphHC.1847]

57 minutes ago, culturespy.1324 said:

Any other explanation?

It's most likely a market making system that ANet runs for certain items like low level armor and weapons since it's unlikely that the player base supplies enough of those kind of items regularly across a wide range of levels.

Personally I never did proper modelling for those types of items, but I'd assume the offers on the TP will almost always be above the salvage value of those items to avoid players buying them in bulk for their mats.

1 hour ago, culturespy.1324 said:

The other possibility is that the TP could be suffering from the deficiencies of "eventual consistency".

No idea how ANet set the TP backend hard- and software up. However if it was some sort of cache/sync/consistency issue, I'd assume that you would only be able to buy stuff twice in a row and it would probably affect other types of items as well. 

1 hour ago, culturespy.1324 said:

My first thought was bots.

Don't underestimate the overall stupidity of TP users. As someone who sells stacks of mystic coins and a ton of T3/4/6 fine mats regularly in bulk, I can assure you that there are quite a number of people on the TP that have no clue about daily and weekly price-cycles or the typical supply and demand of certain items, are not paying attention at what price-level they are actually posting, or are just trolling.

[Rogue.8235]

Sigh, more TP conspiracy theory threads...

2 hours ago, culturespy.1324 said:

Search for armor, lvl 55, blue, any class. Sort by price. Say the first thing in the list is going for just under 4s, and there's 5 available at that price. Buy all 5. You get them. But they're still there. Buy them again. And again... Maybe 5 or 6 cycles later, that price is no longer available.

There really are that many players on the game interacting with the TP at once.  There is only one TP, and it is for both NA and EU servers.  

2 hours ago, culturespy.1324 said:

My first thought was bots. I don't know how they could make more money like this than by just listing their items, but I'm not good at markets so maybe they know something I don't.

Again, there are that many players on the game.  A lot of players just list the items at the current lowest sell price, as it requires less clicks than setting a specific price.  It's also usually more gold than selling to the highest buy price.  If the margins are decently wide, most players tend to just list at lowest sell.  What you witnessed were players listing at the (roughly) same time you were buying, because there are that many players in the game.

2 hours ago, culturespy.1324 said:

The other possibility is that the TP could be suffering from the deficiencies of "eventual consistency". That is, different database servers have different ideas of what the order book looks like, and my view of the book is coming from a different server than the one fulfilling my orders. But in that case, it's allowing me to buy items that don't actually exist, and I think that's probably bad for the market but again I'm not good at markets.

There is only one TP and it's accessed and used by both NA and EU regions.  There is a bit of refresh lag though, as the TP doesn't update in real time.  I don't know the update cycle (in seconds), but there is lagtime with refreshing the current listings.

 

1 hour ago, TheWaternymphHC.1847 said:

It's most likely a market making system that ANet runs for certain items like low level armor and weapons since it's unlikely that the player base supplies enough of those kind of items regularly across a wide range of levels.

Personally I never did proper modelling for those types of items, but I'd assume the offers on the TP will almost always be above the salvage value of those items to avoid players buying them in bulk for their mats.

You vastly underestimate how many players exist in the game, how much loot gets generated, and how easy it is to just list an item at the current lowest sell price (not buy price).    Remember, there is only one TP used by Both (NA and EU) servers.  There is no "market making system" as that would have crashed the economy during the 3rd month after the game released in 2012.  

The reason those prices don't collapse below material prices is because players like you and I will immediately snatch those bad boys up.

1 hour ago, TheWaternymphHC.1847 said:

Don't underestimate the overall stupidity of TP users. As someone who sells stacks of mystic coins and a ton of T3/4/6 fine mats regularly in bulk, I can assure you that there are quite a number of people on the TP that have no clue about daily and weekly price-cycles or the typical supply and demand of certain items, are not paying attention at what price-level they are actually posting, or are just trolling.

Very true.  The business cycle is roughly one week, there is a seasonal cycle for most commodities (though these are becoming more stable, i.e., less profitable).  However, I would replace stupidity with apathetic or impatient.  A lot of players don't care to do any level of market research and are just happy getting whatever they can off the TP.  Others, with much higher time preference, just want the gold now and don't have the patience to optimize income.  It is because of these two groups of players why there exists a weekly cycle (and a slight daily for some commodities), and why you are able to profit with some day-trading activities.

 

[culturespy.1324]

1 hour ago, TheWaternymphHC.1847 said:

It's most likely a market making system that ANet runs for certain items like low level armor and weapons since it's unlikely that the player base supplies enough of those kind of items regularly across a wide range of levels.

 

Plenty of supply above 4s for the items in question. Is it all "organic" supply, idk. If this is the explanation, then anet is undercutting players.

 

1 hour ago, TheWaternymphHC.1847 said:

However if it was some sort of cache/sync/consistency issue, I'd assume that you would only be able to buy stuff twice in a row and it would probably affect other types of items as well. 

 

Not necessarily. Eventual consistency would by definition have no guarantee of how quickly it would converge.

 

Only reporting on the items I noticed doing this. Haven't checked for how widespread the issue is.

 

I did find a reddit thread about someone having a similar issue on the selling side - an order that could seemingly never be filled.

 

1 hour ago, TheWaternymphHC.1847 said:

Don't underestimate the overall stupidity of TP users.

 

I'm in this photo and I don't like it. *buys instantly*

[Labjax.2465]

2 hours ago, TheWaternymphHC.1847 said:

Don't underestimate the overall stupidity of TP users. As someone who sells stacks of mystic coins and a ton of T3/4/6 fine mats regularly in bulk, I can assure you that there are quite a number of people on the TP that have no clue about daily and weekly price-cycles or the typical supply and demand of certain items, are not paying attention at what price-level they are actually posting, or are just trolling.

Too many times I have to remind people who say nonsense like this that if most players sunk the kind of time and effort they did into playing the TP, all but the most creatively niche TP baron profits would dry up overnight. Anything remotely obvious would be overwhelmed by too many people trying to profit off of it and it wouldn't work. Worse still, much of the supply that fuels your profits would dry up because of people spending so much time trying to play the TP instead of playing the game.

So if anything, you should be thanking the people who allow you to flip because they are essentially playing the game for you, so you can get away with not playing it. Looking down on them is just mind-boggling. Without them, you have to actually play the game to get the rewards.

[Galmac.4680]

Yep, can confirm that. Sometime when I want to sell a stack of something to the highest bidder,, there is a single offer for one piece. So I have to sell one item of my stack. And immediately there is the same single offer for one piece. And I sell another single piece of my stack. And right after that there is again a single offer for one piece. Won't do this 250 times, so I wait and sell it another day.

[Rasimir.6239]

29 minutes ago, Galmac.4680 said:

Yep, can confirm that. Sometime when I want to sell a stack of something to the highest bidder,, there is a single offer for one piece. So I have to sell one item of my stack. And immediately there is the same single offer for one piece. And I sell another single piece of my stack. And right after that there is again a single offer for one piece. Won't do this 250 times, so I wait and sell it another day.

You can just increase the price by one copper, increase the amount to full stack, and list your whole stack. Odds are you'll sell it in a matter of minutes. Most (if not all) fast-moving goods like basic materials even sell at lowest sell offer price in a matter of minutes (unless lowest sell offer is at vendor price, in which case just dump them at the next vendor).

[Danikat.8537]

It's important to remember that unlike most MMOs trading system the TP is universal. All players on all servers across both NA and EU use the same trading post, so you're seeing activity across the whole game. When you take that into consideration I don't think it's too hard to believe there were 5 people selling the same item at the same time you were buying it.

But if you think there's a problem the best thing to do is submit a bug report so Anet can investigate. They can see a lot more info than we can, I think including things like the names of sellers, so it's a lot easier for them to work out if something is going wrong than for a player who can only see the end result. And if it's all ok the worst that will happen is someone wasted a few minutes checking the bug report.

[Gibson.4036]

10 hours ago, Labjax.2465 said:

Too many times I have to remind people who say nonsense like this that if most players sunk the kind of time and effort they did into playing the TP, all but the most creatively niche TP baron profits would dry up overnight.

There is "playing the TP" and there is using it sensibly as part of play, but there is also wildly strange choices people make. You don't have to be a TP baron to not do things like drastically undercut the previous lowest offer on frequenly trade items.

6 hours ago, Danikat.8537 said:

It's important to remember that unlike most MMOs trading system the TP is universal. All players on all servers across both NA and EU use the same trading post, so you're seeing activity across the whole game. When you take that into consideration I don't think it's too hard to believe there were 5 people selling the same item at the same time you were buying it.
 

This is such a good point to remember. Even though I've been selling them for a while, I'm still sometimes amazed by how quickly things you only really use once per account will sell. There are so many players out there, someone needs those things today, if not this hour.

[DD39C89C-1C46-4F28-BDB7-49]

15 hours ago, culturespy.1324 said:

Search for armor, lvl 55, blue, any class. Sort by price. Say the first thing in the list is going for just under 4s, and there's 5 available at that price. Buy all 5. You get them. But they're still there. Buy them again. And again... Maybe 5 or 6 cycles later, that price is no longer available.

Yes, there are bots on TP.

There are two ways how they work: keep a price low or high. I earlier posted example.

Some will try to ridicule that, but you're right. Bots are set on less popular items - many users interacting with TP has nothing to it. There are clear limits which those bots have set, there is no mistake, usually it's 5 or 10 pieces at a given price, bought instantly, after that nobody will buy it at that price.

If you see a bot which keep a price high - check on gw2efficiency how much crafting an item takes, craft to that price and feed a bot with it, so he loses gold. You need to list it many times by 5 pieces or so at each price within set limit, you need to guess, but when you get that limit is ex. 5, then at every price it will be the same.

When bot keep a price low, buy it few times at that price, to clear his stack.

[Labjax.2465]

1 hour ago, Gibson.4036 said:

There is "playing the TP" and there is using it sensibly as part of play, but there is also wildly strange choices people make. You don't have to be a TP baron to not do things like drastically undercut the previous lowest offer on frequenly trade items.

You can frame it however you want. The fact is this "using it sensibly" is to your benefit and it would be much harder to "use it sensibly" if most people were. That's how it works, fundamentally, you can use whatever words you want to describe it, it doesn't change the reality.

[Cuks.8241]

1 hour ago, DD39C89C-1C46-4F28-BDB7-49 said:

Yes, there are bots on TP.

There are two ways how they work: keep a price low or high. I earlier posted example.

Some will try to ridicule that, but you're right. Bots are set on less popular items - many users interacting with TP has nothing to it. There are clear limits which those bots have set, there is no mistake, usually it's 5 or 10 pieces at a given price, bought instantly, after that nobody will buy it at that price.

If you see a bot which keep a price high - check on gw2efficiency how much crafting an item takes, craft to that price and feed a bot with it, so he loses gold. You need to list it many times by 5 pieces or so at each price within set limit, you need to guess, but when you get that limit is ex. 5, then at every price it will be the same.

When bot keep a price low, buy it few times at that price, to clear his stack.

Why would anyone do that though? What is there to gain? It sounds like bots for purposely loosing gold.

[DD39C89C-1C46-4F28-BDB7-49]

26 minutes ago, Cuks.8241 said:

Why would anyone do that though? What is there to gain? It sounds like bots for purposely loosing gold.

If nobody disrupt a bot, then obviously it can buy cheap or sell expensive. That's why they have buy limits, so you can't easily make them lose. And are set on less popular items. If a bot keeps a price high, then it has limit to instantly buy only ex. 5 pieces, if you list more then of course it stops, not to lose. To make it lose you need to keep listing many times by few pieces each time slightly lowering a price.

So with normal usage, when you list few pieces and go away, then probably it may be profitable to instantly eliminate cheaper listings. Similar with keeping a price low, that's why it lists only ex. 5 pieces or 1 piece, so you can't buy its whole stack at once, you need to buy few times, and it also has a limit there, it stops listing if you buy too many.

Those bots are present for a long time, so probably it's profitable, but of course I don't have data - maybe they lose this way, but in case they don't, when I spot one I try to disrupt it.

[TheWaternymphHC.1847]

15 hours ago, Rogue.8235 said:

You vastly underestimate how many players exist in the game, how much loot gets generated, and how easy it is to just list an item at the current lowest sell price (not buy price).    Remember, there is only one TP used by Both (NA and EU) servers.  There is no "market making system" as that would have crashed the economy during the 3rd month after the game released in 2012.  

The reason those prices don't collapse below material prices is because players like you and I will immediately snatch those bad boys up.

Where did I say anything about systems that were around in 2012? I'm talking about today.

Please explain to me how I was just able to buy ~450x Strong Iron Axes (lvl 54) when there were only 177 available according to the TP interface? Unless the TP allows going into negative amounts of items, which would be quite stupid to allow from a design PoV, I should have gotten all of them for ~15g. There are still some 4 pieces available at fairly high prices (~50s to ~1g) that get instantly refilled if I buy them out over and over. Interestingly enough after relisting 25 axes at a few silvers, they magically got bought out instantly with a single trade despite everything happening within one update cycle of the API. Interestingly one of the external TP sites only reports 185 sales.

Since GW2 is a top heavy game, it's quite unlikely that many mid-level items actually get listed in vast amounts, even if you assume a fairly high amount of loot creation. Also keep in mind that max-level characters typically get tokens and not actual items. Therefore me and the OP encountered either a fairly wonky transactional system of the TP or there actually is some sort of market making system working in the background.

[Freya.9075]

1 hour ago, DD39C89C-1C46-4F28-BDB7-49 said:

If nobody disrupt a bot, then obviously it can buy cheap or sell expensive. That's why they have buy limits, so you can't easily make them lose. And are set on less popular items. If a bot keeps a price high, then it has limit to instantly buy only ex. 5 pieces, if you list more then of course it stops, not to lose. To make it lose you need to keep listing many times by few pieces each time slightly lowering a price.

So with normal usage, when you list few pieces and go away, then probably it may be profitable to instantly eliminate cheaper listings. Similar with keeping a price low, that's why it lists only ex. 5 pieces or 1 piece, so you can't buy its whole stack at once, you need to buy few times, and it also has a limit there, it stops listing if you buy too many.

Those bots are present for a long time, so probably it's profitable, but of course I don't have data - maybe they lose this way, but in case they don't, when I spot one I try to disrupt it.

They definitely lose this way. With taxes most items are a loss this way. That’s why flipping items is so difficult to do unless you research first. And even then it’s difficult to flip cause so many players overbid you as you try to get the item you want. And when you want to sell it and it fails, the item stays there for a year. (Looking at you the minstrel in my sell list that I tried to flip and failed 👀)
 

it seems like an odd conspiracy theory to me. The game has too many players and one tp for the whole game which makes the market quite stable when it comes to players bidding and listing items for sale. 

[DD39C89C-1C46-4F28-BDB7-49]

@Freya.9075 Well, I checked many times, those buys and sells are for sure artificial, number of transactions is constant and always instant. Who runs those bots and why is another thing.

In long term - it's very unlikely to have an item with sell price a lot above of crafting cost. But somehow some items have that. When I quickly disrupt a bot with listing more pieces by crafting cost - it stays like that for some time, but after longer time, someone comes again, clear cheap sells and set a bot again.

For some items I took time and listed a lot sells with slightly lower price each time, down to crafting cost, so a bot instantly bought them all each by each, then I listed those again and someone gave up, the price stayed down for months.

Also you can easily check it with buying cheap items as mentioned above with axes, an item is in low number, but you can keep buying it by each price with some limit. It's unnatural that count stays the same and low, but exactly when you buy, someone lists it again.

[Danikat.8537]

Is opening champion bags on a mid level character still part of maximising profit from Silverwastes and other metas? Because if so that could explain a regular supply of lower value mid-level items. Players looking to maximise profit and taking the time to devote a character to it will almost certainly have worked out which items are worth salvaging and which they're better off selling.

I know it's possible to write a bot to list items on the TP, or to buy from it, and if someone got it right they could use a bot to control the price of certain items. But the question is why do that with cheap mid-level equipment? (Especially one to sell items, because then the player - or another bot - has to farm a supply of them to sell.) The point of bots is to benefit the owner - make a profit or get them something they couldn't reasonably get themselves (e.g. a bot that farms a rare drop) and I can't see any benefit that comes from doing this.

Admittedly I could just be missing it, but if anyone can explain what the point would be I think that would clear a lot up for this thread.

[DD39C89C-1C46-4F28-BDB7-49]

15 minutes ago, Danikat.8537 said:

But the question is why do that with cheap mid-level equipment?

With common items it's impossible as transactions count is high, so a bot won't keep up in any way. So only unpopular items are for them.

15 minutes ago, Danikat.8537 said:

Because if so that could explain a regular supply of lower value mid-level items.

Maybe, but the problem is that supply is not regular, it appears instantly only when you buy.

Edited June 17, 2022 by DD39C89C-1C46-4F28-BDB7-49

[Cuks.8241]

3 hours ago, DD39C89C-1C46-4F28-BDB7-49 said:

If nobody disrupt a bot, then obviously it can buy cheap or sell expensive. That's why they have buy limits, so you can't easily make them lose. And are set on less popular items. If a bot keeps a price high, then it has limit to instantly buy only ex. 5 pieces, if you list more then of course it stops, not to lose. To make it lose you need to keep listing many times by few pieces each time slightly lowering a price.

So with normal usage, when you list few pieces and go away, then probably it may be profitable to instantly eliminate cheaper listings. Similar with keeping a price low, that's why it lists only ex. 5 pieces or 1 piece, so you can't buy its whole stack at once, you need to buy few times, and it also has a limit there, it stops listing if you buy too many.

Those bots are present for a long time, so probably it's profitable, but of course I don't have data - maybe they lose this way, but in case they don't, when I spot one I try to disrupt it.

I just dont get how could anyone profit from this. 

If the bot tries to keep the price high by buying items at a certain threshold. How does this help the botter? And you say this is done for not popular items where the market flow is low. So its not like the guy behind the bot will suddenly dump a few stacks of those items and expect to sell them at high price (items he was just buying, thats just straight loss right there). So he turns off the bot, dumps a stack of not popular items and what? Three people buy and he gets undercut because the equilibrium is high and demand is low. So he ends up with a loss from the bot and a stack of items on TP that wont sell because the listing price is high and demand low.

The same thing with keeping the price low by buying. 

This just seems like a lot of hassle and betting on luck.

If anything its probably much more effective to do a bot that buys low and sells high by setting certain thresholds for buying and selling within the normal expected market fluctuations. As long as you overcome the TP tax. And it makes more sense that you do it for the most fluent materials on the market and do it in high quantities with low profit.

[TheWaternymphHC.1847]

1 hour ago, DD39C89C-1C46-4F28-BDB7-49 said:

Also you can easily check it with buying cheap items as mentioned above with axes, an item is in low number, but you can keep buying it by each price with some limit. It's unnatural that count stays the same and low, but exactly when you buy, someone lists it again.

If you are referring to my post above, I hate to break it to you, but I was able to buy 400+ axes within roughly 5 to 10 seconds since I spam-bought that specific randomly dropped loot on purpose. It's a low volume item without any buy orders in the system. I pretty much bought more axes in seconds than are usually bought within months.

Personally I don't see how someone is able to post 220+ unpopular items within such a short timespan, but stops posting once I bought out all items below 50s. Also keep in mind that there is typically a slight delay between a sale and the notification to the seller that a sale occurred. If you have alt-accounts, you can easily reproduce that behavior of the TP system.

58 minutes ago, Danikat.8537 said:

Is opening champion bags on a mid level character still part of maximising profit from Silverwastes and other metas? Because if so that could explain a regular supply of lower value mid-level items.

There are still a few bags that scale with character level. I haven't checked the ones from Silverwastes lately, but for example the ones you get from the personal story still scale. People can also park mid-level characters at the end of core Tyria JPs to farm chests for mid-level items.

However I doubt that people waste time with working out which items to salvage and which ones to sell since anything that can give T3/4 leather and ore is pretty much always better salvaged than sold.

29 minutes ago, Cuks.8241 said:

If anything its probably much more effective to do a bot that buys low and sells high by setting certain thresholds for buying and selling within the normal expected market fluctuations.

This and sniping for materials that are used for value added sales seem to be much more worthwhile for any botter, if they actually exist in those large quantities as people in here believe, than running large inventories of items that might be lost at any moment once an account gets banned. 

[Rogue.8235]

2 hours ago, TheWaternymphHC.1847 said:

Where did I say anything about systems that were around in 2012? I'm talking about today.

when you stated:

20 hours ago, TheWaternymphHC.1847 said:

It's most likely a market making system that ANet runs for certain items like low level armor and weapons since it's unlikely that the player base supplies enough of those kind of items regularly across a wide range of levels.

to which I responded that such a system would have crashed the economy 3 months after release.  Such a system now would crash the economy even faster.    Ergo, there definitely is not such a system in the game.  ArenaNet is competent enough to not introduce such a harmful system into the game.  Alterations to the economy made by ArenaNet are similar to what the Federal Reserve does.  The Federal Reserve buys and sells treasury bonds to national banks to control interest rates, which in turn influences the economy.  Here, ArenaNet adjusts drop rates and loot tables to influence the economy.  They do not make bots or anything of that sort.

2 hours ago, TheWaternymphHC.1847 said:

Please explain to me how I was just able to buy ~450x Strong Iron Axes (lvl 54) when there were only 177 available according to the TP interface? Unless the TP allows going into negative amounts of items, which would be quite stupid to allow from a design PoV, I should have gotten all of them for ~15g. There are still some 4 pieces available at fairly high prices (~50s to ~1g) that get instantly refilled if I buy them out over and over. Interestingly enough after relisting 25 axes at a few silvers, they magically got bought out instantly with a single trade despite everything happening within one update cycle of the API. Interestingly one of the external TP sites only reports 185 sales.

Again, you fail to conceptualize the sheer number of players playing GW2.  In addition, I explained in my previous post that there is a lag in the display of information.  The interface does not update in real time, but in intervals.  It also updates when you directly interact with the market, such as buying or selling an item, or creating a listing.  What you are witnessing is a massive number of players interacting with the market continuously.    This kind of perception you pose is a lack of understanding of what large numbers of people can do and how it affects social systems.  You are also witnessing the concept of emergence, which requires a separate post to explain if you want to know more about it.  Emergence is one of the most complex phenomena in the universe.

3 hours ago, TheWaternymphHC.1847 said:

Since GW2 is a top heavy game, it's quite unlikely that many mid-level items actually get listed in vast amounts, even if you assume a fairly high amount of loot creation. Also keep in mind that max-level characters typically get tokens and not actual items. Therefore me and the OP encountered either a fairly wonky transactional system of the TP or there actually is some sort of market making system working in the background.

All tiers of items are relevant at level 80 because of the way the crafting system is designed.  This is intentional, as I remember the forum discussions with John Smith about the design of the in-game economy. 

 

[Rogue.8235]

12 minutes ago, TheWaternymphHC.1847 said:

Personally I don't see how someone is able to post 220+ unpopular items within such a short timespan, but stops posting once I bought out all items below 50s. Also keep in mind that there is typically a slight delay between a sale and the notification to the seller that a sale occurred. If you have alt-accounts, you can easily reproduce that behavior of the TP system.

This statement right here is where the misunderstanding is.  You see the interaction as being with a single player.  Try tens of thousands.  Again, you do not understand just how many players are in the game.

 

[DD39C89C-1C46-4F28-BDB7-49]

49 minutes ago, Cuks.8241 said:

I just dont get how could anyone profit from this. 

If the bot tries to keep the price high by buying items at a certain threshold. How does this help the botter? And you say this is done for not popular items where the market flow is low. So its not like the guy behind the bot will suddenly dump a few stacks of those items and expect to sell them at high price (items he was just buying, thats just straight loss right there). So he turns off the bot, dumps a stack of not popular items and what? Three people buy and he gets undercut because the equilibrium is high and demand is low. So he ends up with a loss from the bot and a stack of items on TP that wont sell because the listing price is high and demand low.

The same thing with keeping the price low by buying. 

This just seems like a lot of hassle and betting on luck.

If anything its probably much more effective to do a bot that buys low and sells high by setting certain thresholds for buying and selling within the normal expected market fluctuations. As long as you overcome the TP tax. And it makes more sense that you do it for the most fluent materials on the market and do it in high quantities with low profit.

Yup, I agree, it doesn't look much of a profit, but still someone is doing it.

17 minutes ago, TheWaternymphHC.1847 said:

If you are referring to my post above, I hate to break it to you, but I was able to buy 400+ axes within roughly 5 to 10 seconds since I spam-bought that specific randomly dropped loot on purpose. It's a low volume item without any buy orders in the system. I pretty much bought more axes in seconds than are usually bought within months.

It looks that you multi selected many different prices. Those bots I spotted have listed different prices. So if you want to buy cheap, you need to keep buying slowly. You buy 1 axe, it gets re-listed, buy again, finally it disappears, then you do that for next price.

If you just want to buy all fast by selecting all, then sure you'll buy fast and some get re-listed, so you will buy more then were counted at the start. I haven't checked with much higher price not to lose too much gold.

[TheWaternymphHC.1847]

1 hour ago, DD39C89C-1C46-4F28-BDB7-49 said:

It looks that you multi selected many different prices. Those bots I spotted have listed different prices. So if you want to buy cheap, you need to keep buying slowly. You buy 1 axe, it gets re-listed, buy again, finally it disappears, then you do that for next price.

If you just want to buy all fast by selecting all, then sure you'll buy fast and some get re-listed, so you will buy more then were counted at the start. I haven't checked with much higher price not to lose too much gold.

That's quite a hilarious explanation... I selected that axe for my test, because it was a low volume item. According to the external TP-related websites that use GW2s API to track prices there were only 0 to 3 listed per day over the last 3 months. Btw, I just checked, 6h after my buying spree there are still only the 4 expensive axes listed I mentioned in my previous post and it doesn't look like there were any other trades since then. Go ahead and waste some hundred gold on those 4 axes and see how long it takes until you completely buy the item out.  

Anyway, I either found (and reported) a way to dupe items, which isn't supposed to be possible according to ANet or it's an indicator that a lot of those suspected bots are actually part of a market making system run by ANet.

2 hours ago, Rogue.8235 said:

This statement right here is where the misunderstanding is.  You see the interaction as being with a single player. 

Go ahead and enlighten me about how many "Strong Iron Axe"s of fine quality with a level requirement of 54 are generated by GW2's loot system per day. And while you are at it, explain to me, why those large amounts of those axes only get listed when I decide to try to buy them out completely. As mentioned above, according to the websites that track the TP via the API, only 0 to 3 axes of that type have been listed per day during the last 3 months.

2 hours ago, Rogue.8235 said:

Try tens of thousands.  Again, you do not understand just how many players are in the game.

Okay, log into your official ANet forum account and post for example the MAUs of May, yesterday's DAUs and/or the peak concurrent users of yesterday.