This casual player catches trade bots with one simple trick!

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DeltaWing wrote:

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suszterpatt wrote:

Let's say we have 2 players. Bob the Botter is running a fully automated trade bot. Trevor the Trader is running an indexer that lets him jump on good deals within seconds of them being advertised.

You're saying that what Bob's doing is wrong, but what Trevor's doing is fine.

My point is that to any outside observer, what Bob and Trevor are doing is completely indistinguishable. They both enable price fixing in exactly the same way, and have the exact same effect on the economy. So by what measure is Trevor in the clear when Bob isn't?

Trevor needs to think about the results of the indexer. He needs to click the copy Button for the trade text. He needs to switch to the game and paste the trade text into the chat and send it.

Bob's Computer is doing all this in milliseconds itself.

As a human, you have a chance to be faster then Trevor, but you have no chance to be faster then Bob.

Trevor doesn't need to do any of that. He can write an indexer program that plays a special sound when it finds good deals and copies the "I want to buy" message to the clipboard. He can set up a chat macro for sending that message, and bind that macro to a mouse button. All he has to do is instinctively press the button when he hears the sound, which can be done in less than 1 second. Between ping variations and server lag, that delay is indistinguishable from the reaction time of Bob's bot.

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suszterpatt wrote:

1. Put a Tabula up for sale for half the cheapest price on poe.trade
2. Wait 30 seconds
3. You won't believe what happens next!

I just did this by accident and received 3 offers before I even left my stash. Not gonna name names here, but I have a screenshot of them if support is interested.

If GGG aren't doing this at least once a day and banning the accounts that are consistently that quick to respond, they should be.

Feel free to ban me for trade botting , i'll wait .

As long as the Stash API stays public in its current state, no one can obtain legal evidence of a sniper program/bot. This assumes you don't have legal access to the suspected snipers computer.

This is a fact. Why? Without seeing what the supposed sniper is doing, the buy request is identical to a buyers request. It doesn't matter how fast they send you the request, whether it be within seconds or minutes of putting the item up for sale. All indexers use the same Stash API, so anything resulting from that access is irrelevant because all the access is the same. Some methods, such as poe.trade and poeapp.com, just perform better than others.

You can throw around guesses and assumptions all day, but in the end, you have no real proof. Screenshot of a trade message with time stamps? Doesn't make any difference whatsoever. You know who are the only group of players that complain about snipers? Poor, lazy players who can only afford cheap items, but don't want to put in the effort and research to come out ahead. You special, little snowflakes.