New Bots/Farming...??

Today while I was hunting in a UW group as usual, people were chatting about how hard it was getting shards/ectos and the like. Amongst the group were most typical replys about getting money and shards.. yet one stood out in an alarming way.

One member of the group boasted he had bought out the Rare Material Merchant of all Shards and Ectos, and that he had Bots(yes more than one) farming/camping the vendor even as we spoke. His bots would buy any shards and ectos sold to the Vendors(which he could buy for 2-3k a shard and 3-6k a ecto) and sell them afterwards for 3.5 per shard and 10k ectos. His intentions it seemed was to give people no other choice but to buy them from him. How successful he is, he would not comment on it. But the fact that hes doing it makes me thinks hes doing pretty well.

To a certain point it is a first come first serve when it comes to buying things, but this just seems a bit wrong to me.

Comments?

Nothing a nice banning can't take care of...if he is actually doing it.

And how exactly do you "catch" a bot when they dont say anything or move?

So that's where all those shards and ectos went...

Did you take his name down? And screenshot where he boasted to using bots? The use of Bots is banned by the EULA as far as I know, so if you make ANet aware of him, he will most likely be banned.

Using bots NEVER pays off.

Concerning him buying out the market ... if he brought ALL stock from the vendor, then as soon as 1 was sold, the price for that would be sky high would it not? On the Euro servers, Ecto is ~10plat per piece and thats IN stock - with only 1 stock, the price would be too much for 1 person to be able to drain the market and still make a profit from them - besides, not everyone sells to vendors.

If you took a screenshot of him bragging, you could send it to anet and they would probably take action.

I was wondering when some douchebag would figure that one out. I hope you sent screen-shots and a report off to ANet.

Half expecting to see groups of mobs guarding the traders now.. ;P

Yes I did take some screen shots... and did report it like 5 minutes ago.

I even have screen shots of his bots too. He went so far as to say the name of one of his bots and say what district/town it was in(in a very "matter of fact" way), so I went to see myself. And true enough, the bot was there besides the Rare Material trader in an almost empty district.

As for the price. He swore that hed bought the shards as low as 500 gold and Ectos for 1k. Since I cant find any vendor with either for sale I cant really check how true this part is.

Its a lie, ecto and shards prices are simply too high in the trader to anyone corner the market in such way, he (and the bots) would run out of money trying.

Well just managed to buy not 1 but 2 shards for 1.7k. So I can imagine there could be some truth to this all. Still checking to find ectos tho.

A bot standing is as easily detected as a bot farming (i.e. monitoring merchants and purchases by a single account, same was monitoring areas where 1 member groups are zoning/rezoning repetitively)

not true if he has used a bot for this he would have used a bot for farming

this also explains why there is no black too maybe

Plus, wern't the prices of ecto and shards reset at the last patch? I remember hearing people buying shards for like 100 gold and ecto for like 400 gold or 1 plat.

There was a poster on this fourm a while back that thought it would be fun to buy all of one Item (steel ignots or something like that), and corner the market in order to cause the economy to crash. His idea was for him to either make some type of profit (dont know how) or attempt to ruin the economy becuase he was bored or simply thought it sounded fun to do.

Well I just have to say if he really uses bots or not is irrelevant. The idiot is stupid enough to say "i use a bot" therefore im sure he will be banned come the next time they post one of those "anet has taken action against (xnumber) of accounts" on the home page.

I hope the cheater gets whats coming to him. Good job on screenshots and sending it in.

I got really bored and curious one day and camped the Rare Material Trader for about an hour while i tried to sell stuff. Ended up buying about 6 shards for 400-500 gold a piece, so it's totally possible to do what this guys saying.

It is possible.. I was at the rare trader the other day and I saw Shards for sale for 946g. Sadly I keep all my gold in storage, so I ran over to grab gold quick, ran back to the trader, but when I went to select the Shards, it said it was out of stock.

Depressing.

By the way, am I the only person that sees that 90% of the Ember Light Camp population is BOTS? I'm getting sick of seeing bots like 'Angel Re' and 'Di Moon' running to the merchant then to the portal all the time. It's all randomized names of the same words too. Keep an eye out for that, Anet!

Your not the only one... and its been going on for a long time really...

just out of curiosity, say ANet has thier eye on someone who is possibly botting, as picked up by thier constant zoning/re-zoning in thier solo party blah blah etc etc. how would they tell the difference from someone whos using a bot to do it, and someone whos doing it manually (and thus abiding by the rules, assuming they arent farming an exploit)?

as many people as it seems use bots, there must be twice that doing it "legit" and a ton of people must set off ANets sensors in this way. a TON of people have legit runs for farming runes etc.

hell, even i have worked out an excellent legit farming run i use to get rare crafting materials(and quite a chunk of cash) but now i worry im about to be warned by ANet because what im doing is simply repetative.

and please dont PM me asking what my route is, ive had this before on this and many other forums, and i dont want my route being mass-used and insta-nerfed. i will share builds in PM though.