Vlad the Bot

Yesterday I said I'd disclose the name of a market  botter in my next post. Here it is, the botter's main character in Genesis is Vladimir Vladimirovitch Putain

I've been watching this guy (or more precisely his orders) for a long time now. Over 2 years though I didn't know his name at first. Another player contacted me in private telling me he'd had the exact same problem with the same character over a year earlier (more 3 years from now). In fact that player told me the botter's name before I'd figured out who the botter was myself.

Vlad the bot is virtually always online other than once or twice a month when he goes offline for a couple hours. He responds to cuts on any of his hundreds and hundreds (more than one character's worth for sure) of orders within a few minutes... No matter what time it is or how long it's been since the last time someone cut him. Three minutes or 3 months, it doesn't matter, he'll nearly always respond within about 5 minutes at the most and often much quicker than that.

Here's an example from today. I logged in and raised my buy price on PLEX. Less than 4 minutes later he'd raised his buy price to exactly 0.01 ISK higher than mine.

The next cut took even less time for him to respond.

I waited more than 15 minutes before cutting again, it only took 58 seconds for him to respond this time. That's pretty much standard operating procedure for him, the first cut might take 4 or 5 minutes before he responds but subsequent cuts are responded to even more quickly, usually less than 1 minute, regardless if I wait 5 minutes or several hours between my own cuts.

I could put buy orders up on many other things, many different faction mods (sisters launchers for example), most popular ships (including almost any T2/T3 ship) and the same thing will happen. Practically anything that's worth very much, is popular and sells reasonably well. He'll cut it within minutes.

To put it all into perspective, in Genesis roughly 20 PLEX sell every day. That's 600 PLEX a month and the bot gets virtually all of them. Sell orders are generally at least 20 million over buy orders and sometimes 30, 40 or even 50 million higher. With half decent faction standings that's at least 10 million profit per PLEX. 600 PLEX at 10 million profit each is 6 billion ISK.  Even if half that 600 is buys and the other half sales, that's still 3 billion a month profit.

And that's just the minimum profit on only one of the many hundreds (possibly thousands) of items his bot has been controlling for years.