10:35 AM
Admin
Here is a HUGE issue as of late that is extremely frustrating to deal with, the AH Glyph bot. I have just recently started "fighting" with one, and regrettably, I have very little defense. I am working on finding ways to work around them, and as of yet, I have found little that works, other than using....cough....blizzard tickets, which I have seen absolutely nothing in return.
This bot, well, they are undercutting me (every 10 minutes to be exact), are hard to fight....if you are in the same situation, you know what I mean.
I first hoped that I just had a wow addict on my hands. Then I realized there must be some automation involved. I did not see this toon show up anywhere. Really. No where. Gone. Cancel their auctions, repost undercutting me. Jeeezus. Talk about total frustration......
So after some "homework" to find out more about how they work (so I can decipher how to beat these things), I got some information, and what I found was disturbing. Here's a few clips from an article on them...
" It provides automatic buying, bidding, selling and undercuting for the World of Warcraft auction house. On top of providing a quick easy way to buy and sell items, it includes a method called "baiting" which will take advantage of undercutters to net you more items at the prices you want!"
"XXXXXX runs without the use of the World of Warcraft client, it is nearly impossible for the program to be detected. The program uses your browser to navigate the Remote Auction House the same way any human would. Since the program started there have been no bans as a result of using this software, and it is unlikely there ever will be." Those are fairly huge claims, huh? Now a fellow blogger (remind me if it's you) posted a while back about getting a "AH botter" banned, but in that case, they were using a toon in game, which is another program all together. The part that gets me is.....this is all done by remote. You don't even have to be in the game. So therefore no "watch" by Blizzard.
Now before I toss my laptop across the room, I am going to calm down. I am still getting sales here and there, but..... I am losing. It's extremely hard for me to say this as I feel that no matter what I have seen on the market, I have prevailed in one sense of the word or another. But I am losing. There. I said it again.
I am going to keep diving deeper into how I can beat these, and you can bet that when I find something, I will holler. For right now, I have to say our only defense is offense.....
And one last thing on this.....a quote from the author of one of these hated programs.
Great.....other features? Blizz, if you somehow read this, please do something, this can and will destroy your game. Not only for me, but others as well. Just read your forums:
Glyph Bot Strikes Again
You Win Auction House Bots
26 comments:
Just because the 'bot' is using the remote AH website, doesn't mean there's not a toon associated. There is still an account with a toon attached to it that is posting those auctions. So, there can still be a ban of the account. Detecting that it is actually a bot may be harder though.
Very true spleen. I might not have explained it right when I spoke of the "toon". Basically, when logged into the remote AH, when posting/canceling/etc, you don't "appear" in game to other players. That's where I was going with that.
Yeah, blizz can still see you posting, The Undermine Journal and even searching the AH will see the item/auction posted, but you can't physically "see" the player in pixels in the game.
I at least want to do a simple /spit or something on them...do you blame me? =)
It can't be that bad - 200 transaction limit - that's, what, 2 cycles of posting before they are neutered, unless they have multiple toons with multiple sets of profitable glyphs in their bags - a tall order to get set up, not not beyond the realms of possibility I guess.
Unless they've gone to those lengths, play them at the undercut game for half an hour and you'll have written them off as competition for the rest of the day.
I've used this program in the past for purchasing materials while at work, back when buying was all it did but it seems to have developed way beyond that since my last experience.
Is there not a way for force them quickly to their 200 transaction limit?
You could post at levels you know they will buy at (hopefully at a minimal profit) early on in the day and cap them as early as possible to have the rest of the day to yourself.
I know from very limited personal involvement on the Glyph market that I can comfortably post 200 Glyphs at a profit (especially considering current prices for Ink).
There is a 200 transaction a day limit on the Remote Auction House. If you run them out of transactions, they wouldn't be able to post anymore. You may already know this, but if you can find a way to force them into hitting their transaction cap, you may be able to best them.
I'm pretty sure the 200 transaction limit was implemented to stop bots of this nature from completely controlling the Auction House. Blizzard had to have known this was going to happen. The bots they have in game are much more sophisticated than ones that use the mobile auction house.
For what it's worth, if they are botting the RAH, you can "lock" them out of profits by forcing them into the 200 transaction limit. Take 1 or 2 glyphs and 1c it to the ground. That should leave the rest of them open for the rest of the day.
Unless I misunderstood what you were saying...
Alto, You can work around this. Remember remote AH has a limit of 200 transactions per day. So if you can force the account to utilize all those transactions early on with either a cancel/repost of lots of glyphs or buying 200 of your items you want to sell then you get the AH to yourself the rest of the day :).
Sure its a pain and hopefully Blizzard fixes it but in the meantime don't let him win.
Wow. Those were insanely quick answers!
Thanks folks! I don't use the Remote AH, so I was unaware of this situation....
What I do see is that this single toon is on 18 hours of the day, not ever showing up "in game", and constantly posting/reposting. So either they found a glitch (possible), or there is another bot that I just haven't found yet...hmmm...
I think I gotta keep looking and dive a bit deeper still.
You could try actually posting this on the official forums instead of hoping someone from blizzard will accidentally see this...
I doubt they will see it, and there are quite a few other posts on this topic already, so I feel like I would be beating a dead horse on this.
I have opened a ticket a day now for the last week, and they respond with the same "generic" answer, the cut and paste. So I will keep doing it until they decide different.
You know, this might explain the guy I've been fighting with on my server... Great.
They strike again. If this gets to be a widespread problem, expect Blizz to kill the RAH - which wouldn't be a huge loss. Keep your tickets open, Alto.
Forcing the bot to the transaction limit only works in certain markets. Glyphs would be easy. Gems, or belt buckles, or PvP gear, or epics would be very different.
Yep... they suck. That was my post about the AH Bot that I managed to get banned. Since that time, four more lvl 1 bots have shown up in the same guild doing the same thing. Tickets have produced no results.
As many others suggested, you can try pushing them to their 200 limit, but that won't help much if they can just switch to other toons. Still, that would require that they shift all inventory to the other toon, or keep two toons full of inventory at the least.
I think that the issue with tickets is more along the lines of how many people submit tickets about the same character. Also, having tickets submitted by people who are not in the same guild would probably make a difference as well. I'd suggest having a bunch of friends on your server (including some of your competitors who you know are real people) all submit tickets at the same time on this bot. That could help you out.
Something you could try to push the 200 post limit per day as well, Find said botter's name, organize your search in the glyph category by name, and Specifically target the glyph's he sells in higher volume so he is forced to cancel/repost 3 or 4 at a time rather than a gylph where he only has 1 available to cancel/repost.
TWO HUNDRED TRANSACTIONS.
Sorry, everyone else was saying it, I felt obligated to as well. =P
I almost hope this gets wildly popular. Just so Blizz gets right on it and develops technology to crack down on this whenever someone starts.
Oh, BTW, that was probably me who posted about getting a bot banned. Yeah, he was using an in-game toon. I just ticketed to report it twice a day for a few weeks. Also, sometimes I'd open tickets for other small issues while putting "stuck" in my ticket (Guaranteeing a fast response and usually a GM would talk personally to me.) and then when they asked if there was anything else they could help me with I personally explained the entire scenario to the GM myself. I think this might work for you; find a way to talk to a GM, such as opening up another ticket with a question for them to answer and with the word stuck in it (I'm stuck without a way to _______) then when they ask if there's anything else put up exactly what you've put here.
Figure out the threshold price of the bot. You can do it by posting for lower and lower until he no longer undercuts.
If this threshold is above profitability, post below it. If it's below, post 5 glyphs of each 10s above his threshold. Let him lose gold with every sale.
If it is a WoW Remote bot I am intrigued how they are getting around the 200 auctions per day limit that Blizzard have imposed (http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&tag=REMOTE&rhtml=true) as I do occasionally run into this cap myself through manual means no shenanigans from me.
I saw this coming the moment I read about introducing of remote AH.
I fought an in game bot in multiple markets for over 2 years. This guy was never offline for more than a few minutes at a time in over 2 years. He did a cancel/repost every minute or two 24/7 of virtually everything worth selling and almost never ran out of anything no matter how fast it sold.
Tickets didn't help at all. One time a GM told me "The fact that he hasn't been offline in over 2 years is not sufficient proof of botting to action.".
The one thing that worked at all was to drive the price of everything he camped (and that was a lot of items) into the ground and keep them there. He finally quit a few months back after I did that for 2 months straight.
Many (probably most) of these auction bots are gold sellers too, if you can keep them from making much of a profit for long enough they'll give up. The one that was on my server is probably working another server now but at least he's finally out of my hair!
Your post reminded me that I needed to cancel my remote auction house. It also made me think I should have been using the web interface to post. I still like to do the majority of my posting and collecting gold in-game but the web might be a way to post and watch the market while doing other things.
You write a gold blog and dont know how remote AH works?
@ Anonymous,
I do now! Nah, don't use it. Don't need it. I make enough gold and know my market well enough for posting times that it just doesn't make sense to have it. I didn't use it for my gold cap, so I guess in my eyes, it's worthless. =)
I had a look on their website and I have to admit the program is pretty neat. You could have a look on their forum and see the technical flaws the program has and perhaps exploit it that way? Just a thought.
After a 1-2 month hiatus my AH bot nemesis is back and he's worse than ever now. :(
His primary accounts with all the crafters on them haven't been banned either.
It's completely ridiculous. The only time the bot goes offline is when ALL major competitors are offline too... Usually that's for about 4-6 hours between 2 and 11 am. Even then he'll log right back within minutes of someone on his blacklist posts. If you get up in the middle of the night to take a piss, decide to check the AH, see he's not on and post a few things... 5 minutes later there he is again and he doesn't leave until you do whether that's 1 hour or 30+ hours later.
Yeah, the AH bot is great, I use it regularly to sell mats. I don't use the undercut feature and I don't bait either but it is nice to have it post my stuff when the price is what I want to get. There isn't much room for abuse now that the author is attempting to limit it. The undercut feature will now only check hourly rather than every minute to keep from impacting non-botters too much. And as everyone has pointed out, the bot is limited to 200 transactions per day. From what I can tell, the subscription base for the AH bot is pretty low so I'd be surprised if it is a big enough problem for Blizzard to worry with. Even if they did, it would be damned near impossible to catch since it uses the RAH which is completely legit.
All in all, no one should even notice it now with the 1 hour undercutting limit.
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