Instant buy bots on Trading Post

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

When listing items for sale, you can spot that some are instantly bought. Sometimes it can happen normally, but quite often it's a bot.

How to spot a buy bot:

• it's less popular item,
• there is visible difference between instant sell price vs. listing price - example: 2 silver vs. 8 silver or 20 silver vs. 80 silver,
• after listing - it instantly buys only few items at given price, usually only 5 pieces.

Sometimes you can make a profit after spotting a bot on items cheaper to craft.How to do it, on example with item for:2 silver instant sell vs. 8 silver listing and with 3 silver crafting cost:List item for:

• 5 silver = instantly bought, repeat 5 times.
• 4.80 silver = instantly bought, repeat 5 times.
• 4.50 silver = as above
• 4.20 silver = as above
• 4.10 silver = as above

If you list too much at given price, like 7 pieces, then a bot won't touch usually more then 5(this limit is probably editable as for some items it buys a few more),but list at slightly lower price and it will buy instantly again.

I'm not sure, but probably a bot is more willingly to buy if you list only one or few pieces.A limit seems to end quicker when you list a lot of pieces.It looks that there are limits for each price and also global limit for an item.There is also some limit for price difference, probably it depends on how high a price is.

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

I spotted there are also bots, which list cheap sell offers all the time. To keep a price low for some items.

It comes together with cheap buy order. Probably for normal players to sell it instantly for cheap when they see low sell offer price.

So for example there is 250 buy orders for 20c, and 5 sell offers for 30c.

If you buy those 5 items for 30c, those will be instantly listed again. So, it's for keeping a price low, and not sell to much. If you want to buyout all bot stock for 30c, you need to buy it many times by 5 items.

I wonder how those buy and sell bots work so fast, when I was trying to fight them by hand, I was getting error of too much transactions on TP, and those seem to be able list offers all the time.

This shouldn't be allowed, it changes prices unnaturally.

[kharmin.7683]

Submit a ticket to support and include screen shots when possible.  Forum thread won't help.

[Danikat.8537]

11 minutes ago, kharmin.7683 said:

Submit a ticket to support and include screen shots when possible.  Forum thread won't help.

Agreed. Even if you've identified a bot there's nothing you can do to stop them so it's best to contact Support with what you've found and let them sort it out.

They'll also have far more information than we do. I think they can see the account names on TP transactions so they'll know if it's all one account or multiple ones, and will be able to see if they've been doing other stuff as well or just buying/selling all day. Overall it's much easier for Anet to identify bots than for a player.