Botting Is Out Of Control and Ignored

I needed some chromes yesterday so I hit the trade site to find a trade partner. I found someone with enough chromes at a decent price, so I sent them a message. Within a millisecond of messaging them, I got an invite to the party. I visited his Hideout, and by the time I loaded 3 other people had joined the trade game. The chrome seller opened trade with me, and in under half a second filled the entire screen with stacks of chrome. We did our trade, and before the trade window even disappeared from my screen, he whispered me "TY for the trade!". By the time I left his Hideout, it seems like he had completed trades with 2 other people as well. Probably 5-10 exalts traded, and likely flipped for profit, in under 3 minutes, at a speed no human could ever hope to achieve.

This is my story from yesterday, but far from unique to Path of Exile; we've probably all dealt with trade bots frequently. What surprises me is how easy these bots would be to flag, and yet they remain trading without problems every league. No human on Earth could fill an entire trade screen with individual stacks of orbs in under half a second. A simple script written by any college-level coding student could easily detect when items are being moved that rapidly and flag the account for mod observation. But here we are, starting to talk about Path of Exile 2, and the problem is likely as bad as ever.

Some of us enjoy trade league, and we already know we'll never compete with legal, human flippers in terms of profits. But we shouldn't have to fight against bots that are clearly breaking the rules, day in and day out, without consequence.

i want more bots not less mby we can trade every 10th message then instead of every 30th

While I agree with the sentiment, I don't think that encouraging bot use to put a band-aid on another problem is a good idea.

Are you just visiting 2021 from 2015 and plan to return? If so, could you tell a younger me to plan to retire in January of 2020?

Well theres a first someone mad how fast there trade went. Usually its the guys who have supposedly msged 30 people still not being able to trade.

jazz hands Auction House! jazz hands

But you know, we'll just keep pretending the game would implode if people had access to items easier, which bots already attempt to enable now and dictate prices on bulk trades.

Oh and of course because as we have seen from the recent podcasts, Chris equates wasting someone's time in the game as an 'opportunity cost' to the player necessary to heighten their experience.

yes please keep botting and heightening my experience by putting overinflated prices on items like Sacred Blossoms for 50ex. That is just awesome stuff there.

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Ageless_Emperion wrote:

jazz hands Auction House! jazz hands

But you know, we'll just keep pretending the game would implode if people had access to items easier, which bots already attempt to enable now and dictate prices on bulk trades.

Oh and of course because as we have seen from the recent podcasts, Chris equates wasting someone's time in the game as an 'opportunity cost' to the player necessary to heighten their experience.

Auction house + bots is a recipe for disaster. The manipulation would be off the charts.

But I'd still like a league with an auction house, just as an experiment to see the effects.

I think a relatively easy fix would be to give us a vendor conversion for chaos. We can swap every other low level currency, and I think at this point chaos can be considered low level with how much other good stuff has been added.

Haven't heard of any solutions from anyone.