Monday 3 November 2014

Market Bots

Something I've not mentioned much in the past because it's so hard to prove anything conclusively but Eve markets are thoroughly infested with bots. Cheaters using automated market posting software to constantly, perpetually undercut your sell orders and overcut your buy orders.

It's very difficult for us non-cheaters to prove anything especially since we don't know who's posting which orders unless we play into their hands by buying and selling to their orders just to get a name. Even then in a busy market with multiple orders around the same size it's nearly impossible to keep track of specific orders to figure out which ones are being updated too quickly/frequently and therefore must be bots.

Sometime it's a bit more obvious though. Like very large orders on the main hubs that continually get updated like clockwork all day, week, month, year long. But those are mostly big botters, the experienced "pros" who've been doing it for years. They aren't stupid enough to update too quickly, too frequently or leave any one bot logged in for too long so it's nearly impossible to prove they're bots.

Or even more obvious the obsessive cutter on some backwater station far off the beaten track in one of the less populous regions who's always there cutting your prices within seconds. You can log off for hours, days or even weeks but as soon as you log back in and modify a few prices he'll already be cutting the first ones before you finish the last ones. He'll easily go through 305 orders much faster than humanly possible.

Many of the bots are set so if they cut 3 times in row 5 minutes apart they'll take a break for 3 hours before cutting again. At least one of the Eve bot sellers mentions a feature where it "can tell when someone is screwing with it" and stop cutting for a while (default 3 hours no doubt).

Today I found a very obvious bot working out of Malma I - TransStellar Shipping Storage in Genesis region. I've been wondering for a while why I hardly get any ships from my buy orders on Apanake and Tar, especially since it's mostly just me and one other player buying them... I guess he ran all the rest of the competition off with obsessive, perpetual cuts.

I did have some minor problems with an obsessive cutter on other items in Genesis for a while until he finally realized he wasn't running me off that easy... Especially not on core items I've been working for a long time and know the markets for extremely well. Ships are a bit of a different story, my business in ships is very sporadic, so I didn't realize I was dealing with such an extremely persistent obsessive undercutter in the ship markets.

I finally got around to checking what was going on with my ship buy orders there today. I logged in and updated buy orders for 22 different ships (Mostly T2 and T3) then immediately double checked those same orders. It only took a minute or so to update them all, yet the first ones had already been cut again before I even finished. Long before the 5 minutes when I could modify my orders again was up, every single one of my orders had been cut.

I modified again as soon as possible. Once again the competition had most of them cut by the time I finished. I continued doing this 4 or 5 more times just to see if he'd stop after a few. No such luck, the cycle repeated multiple times over the rest of the day. After the first 5 or 6 times I didn't cut every 5 minutes, I mixed up my timing quite a bit, but I did cut 30 or 40 times in total throughout the day. Every single time, the bot had already cut the first orders before I finished and all of them within a minute or two.

At one point I logged out for 1.5 hours, logged back in, redid the same orders again and got the exact same too quick, too efficient response from the competition again... 3 times in a row 5 minutes apart. It's just not humanly possible to update orders as quickly as he does or to respond as consistently, efficiently and immediately as he does, especially not over long periods of time the way this guy does.

I've no doubt there's a market bot on Malma and he's so obvious about it even CCP should be able to recognize it this time. Hopefully he'll be gone shortly after CCP finally gets around to reading my ticket about it!

20 comments:

  1. Good detailed analysis. I would have held off on naming the system until CCP has had a chance to investigate but it's probably not likely he reads this.

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    1. Actually I was thinking others might read this, go there, post a few buy orders to see if the same thing happens to them and when it does they might report him too.

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  2. How about you send him a mail, like "This is a bot test mail, answer in 1min or be reported as bot". If he answers than he is just a obsessive EvE player :p

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    1. I know the difference between an obsessive real player and a bot. The main observable difference is the bot *always*, without fail responds to your moves in very little time.

      An obsessive human on the other hand still, no matter how much of a no-lifer he is, has to do things like sleep, eat and go to the bathroom. He simply cannot respond to events within a minutes or so every time no matter when they happen or how far apart they're spaced.

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    2. And if you think it's impossible to make bots that can respond to mails or conversation requests then you're dreaming. They aren't going to carry on much of a conversation but it's pretty simple to reply with a "Fuck off, I'm busy!" or something like that.

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    3. The problem is what you describe is still not proof of anything, since none of the activities you describe are "impossible" for a human, its simply unlikely for a single human playing EvE.
      If the person in question did change 20 orders in under 5 seconds, that would be impossible for a human using the default interface.

      The problem is that without having access to the client mouse movements, which often reveal bots/scripts all you have is a very strong suspicion.

      Maybe thats enough for CCP and they have more tools to investigate further.

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    4. Exactly. Like I said in the very first sentence "it's so hard to prove anything conclusively".

      CCP however does have access to client mouse movements, datestamped logs and such that can prove it... If they bother spending the time it'll take to investigate properly.

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    5. Problem: "You may not use your own or any third-party software, macros or other stored rapid keystrokes or other patterns of play that facilitate acquisition of items, currency, objects, character attributes, rank or status at an accelerated rate when compared with ordinary Game play."

      This means they do not explicitly forbid macos and couple it with the "accelerated rate" phrase. This means setting up a macro to-do stupid stack splitting is fine, while setting up a macro to help creating a bot that mines is not.

      I also could not find any specific passage in the terms of use, that allows CCP to monitor client inputs. The problem here is they would have to ensure to only monitor and capture client input related to EvE and not as example windows or your browser. While this is technically possible, its "tricky" in practice and i'm not aware of any company that goes down this slippery road. This means you basically agree to allow a game to record and analyst your keyboard/mouse inputs. So this is often done on a server level, which complicates this type of search even more, since latency is so high.

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    6. CCP has (or can infer) mouse movement from the commands sent to the server. That might not give them movement arcs but it does give them timing and positioning.

      If it's too quick or too precise then it's almost certainly a bot. Add that to other data CCP has like online time, how quickly and consistently he responds to cuts and such and it's not hard to prove one way or another... Provided they bother to even investigate properly.

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  3. Yeah ive noticed a huge huge increase in amarr since the manufacturing changes. Consistantly whem refreshing orders a large proportion will be undercut by 10+ orders.

    in fairness though having checked my rates of return im not really seeing a reduction in voluke when I leave them undercut, so fortunately the market is coping with it so far and rather than update every half week or so im just relaxing on updatong orders.

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  4. Here is what I typically do to detect and report a market bot:

    1) Identify the player by selling or buying different items to/from the suspected bot, then add the player to your Contact list and your Watch List. Check what times of day that he is online; ask a few other players, in other timezones, to also check for you. A bot, as you know, will be online too often - typically 23.5 hours per day, 7 days per week.

    2) A sophisticated bot will only log on when an order needs to be updated, so update your orders frequently, and ask a few players in other timezones to do the same. Also, don't update by 0.01, but rather update by a random amount, such as 135.23. A persistent human *can* update 0.01 in less than a second, but only a bot can update that quickly for random changes. You'll need to identify several items which the player is botting, in order to determine how fast the bot is updating each order.

    3) Push the price abnormally high or low. The bot usually has an upper/lower limit for automatic updates, and then the player needs to manually check the updates. You can tell when the player is doing the updates, when the speed of the updates drops back to "human" levels. Set the price back to normal, and watch to see if the updates speed back up to "bot" levels.

    4) Report the bot via the Report Bot option on the Character Information panel (drop down menu item, when you click on upper left corner).

    5) Send a mail to the suspect player, informing him/her that you have informed CCP. Even if CCP does not get right on the ball to investigate, the player will probably turn off the bot, in order to avoid a ban. If he/she is not actually using a bot, then he/she should not care anyways.

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    1. Mostly good advice there with a few caveats.

      I refuse to buy from or sell to the competitions orders just to get his name. That's just playing into his hands and giving him ISK (most of the stuff I deal in isn't cheap either).

      Of course if his sell price is too low or his buy price too high that's another story, then I'll take advantage of his mistake and buy out or fill his order. If he leaves the bot running unattended with poor settings it's easy to manipulate him into doing that too. But that usually only works a few times before he catches on and fixes the settings.

      So I don't have his name to use the report bot feature and I don't ask other players to check on him either.

      Also I don't send mails to obsessive competitors, regardless of whether they're bots or no-lifers. That's counter productive more often than not. About all it does is convince him his strategy is working great and he's winning at "market PvP" with you.

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    2. Regarding point "2): While a human using the default interface is impossible, a human using a manually triggered macro is not. So you can have someone with normal human behaviour, but using macros to simplify the crazy clickfest the EvE interface often needs.

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    3. Macros don't make it so you always without fail respond to cuts in less than 1 minute 23.5/7 no matter how far apart those cuts are.

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    4. Then again, since you logged on at those times, then you are evidence yourself that logging on at exactly those intervals is possible, so perhaps he is simply active at that particular time. If he's serious about it, he'll be pulling in market data at nearly real time too, which will alert him when he's undercut. I can tell within 60 seconds when an order gets undercut using just the API and freely available 3rd party apis.

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    5. @Ralph he's active 23.5/7 hours a day?

      There's a very tiny possibility that when I woke up at 4 am to take a piss and did a quick check while I was up he responded in under 1 minute because he was doing something similar but the chances are extremely remote. And when he *always, without fail* responds that quickly the chances of it being coincidence are so small they aren't even worth considering.

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    6. He could just be a nolifer. You can't really say for sure he's there 23.5/7, since you aren't there 23.5/7 to constantly monitor him. It's very possible that his playtime simply lined up at a point where both during your playtime and during the times you checked ad-hoc, he was available. With good intel he doesn't even need to be actively playing EVE, he can be alerted to any change in a very short time.

      I'm not saying he's not a bot, I'm just saying that people should be given slightly more benefit of the doubt than has been shown here. CCPs reaction time to bots is pretty good as they have some pretty powerful ways to root them out, but the power of some nolifers has no bounds.

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  5. I never had problems with bots or nolifers. I just drive the prices down. They may send a tear mail, may not, but they were always gone in a week.

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    1. I do the same though In this case, since it's buy orders, I drove the price up, not down. Now I'll let him overpay slightly while I ship in cheaper stock purchased elsewhere to undercut his sell orders.

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  6. I've received an eve-mail from another player who's reported this same bot in the past. He includes a number of details matching what I've seen (including several things I never mentioned here). I'll post his mail later but first I'm waiting for a response from him if it's ok to post his name (for credibility purposes).

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