I also immediately thought of that. He's obviously moving the cash to a different account in case the bot gets banned, so he does not lose all the wealth. Either that or he's real world trading it on a gold selling site for $.
It's super easy to track this stuff. But at the end of the day, they won't. There are loads of games where the information is very clearly logged and traceable but the admins don't do anything because it'd be seen as unfair or too much effort.
This is the best channel I ever viewed in reversing subject, really. You are doing so many different things, open our eyes and teach us to think in a different ways on reversing because you come up with a challenges and other stuff like MMO Game which when I been 16 ~ 17 yrs old I done some stuff for Silkroad which was fun :) That's not all, you are editing those videos so professional, you like just drew a players and a map lol ;D Thanks for that, you are doing a FUCKING great job with this channel. I get excited each time you release new video :)
About the jumps in the graph, if you look at the gold, it goes down significantly at those steep drops, but the buy orders and the sell listings are basically unchanged. I think those dives are due to this account being a "mule" and the owner sends the gold from the trader to their main account at regular intervals. That's why the drops are so evenly spread as well. If you were to make a separate graph checking only the blues and reds, you'll see a much steadier curve and if you lined the gold, instead of just plotting it, you'd see the variations a lot clearer.
Unless I set my bot to buy all stacks of cloth from the trading house if it's less than 50 gold, and then list stacks of cloth at 50 gold. Thus, if anyone wants to sell cloth, it either has to be 50g or more, or I will immediately buy it, and anyone who wants to buy cloth, has to either buy it from me, or pay more (by buying it from someone else). This is only a big problem if before I came along the stacks were selling for 5 or 10G - thus, casual players are not getting a lower price before of me (my bot) existing.
If someone is running 24/7, they probably have several accounts. I've been in the botting scene of WoW and it's extremely common to have "botting account" and "legit account". I would never ever bot on my original account since I wouldn't want to get banned, but I had up to 4 bots running 24/7 doing whatever I wanted. They all work in conjunction and can semi-interact with each other. This bot was cancelled and now there are extremely few or maybe even no working bot in WoW. Found your channel today and it's amazing, I'm amazed with how far you go and it makes me *very* motivated to do something similar. Or at least, I would *want* to haha
Oh yeah I’m sure many use a second account. Though a lot of them look really legit. Or were legit accounts at some point. Aww thanks for the kind words! Go and do awesome stuff!
Niosus actually bots in wow have surged since wowtokens have been released. Before that I didn’t see a single bot out in the world(besides honor bots and even then that was a handful) but come legion and i see 20-30 bots on my server (hyjal a mid-high pop server) At launch of legion i saw this guy bot herbs and skins in highmountain. Then there was this other guy selling 5000 obliterum within the first 2-3 days of launch which at that time they were being sold for 7-12k each. He would undercut within minutes of putting up some up for sale. Then a few weeks later flying bots came in the herb scene and crashed the market hard. Like 70-80% hard. There was a point when i would farm fjarnskaggl in stormhiem and see 3-4 bots battling it out for the nodes, flying all over the place(btw this was before the flying patch) I do believe i have a video or two on my channel on a some bots. This all said, idk if its still a problem. I quit wow may last year. I believe i remember hearing about blizz suing some bot creators last year.
Matthew Harrington Okay, interesting. I haven't played WoW seriously since WotLK, but from my experience it was pretty bad in TBC. More often than not you'd see some guy spamming in the cities, eventually getting kicked or banned only to be replaced a few minutes later. You also had a lot of level boosting spam. It never really bothered me all that much, but it was definitely noticable
Eve is a good example of where trading bots have been somewhat allowed while other bots are often banned. Without the trade bots half the of the economy and items available on demand would be gone and the ecnomy would be less stable on things like basic minerals would be able to be controlled more by a few players if they did not have 40-50 bot traders to compete with.
wow you are good, the most resourcefully person i see on youtube. i have experience working with some game developer. and most of them implement antibot after the game final version, so they are screw after game release.
The large jumps in the player's net worth can be explained by them buying large items. This is a sum of their gold in their inventory (but not the items in their inventory) and the items listed for sale/purchase on the exchange. But it does not include items held by the player or in the player's bank. So if they bought an expensive item, or exchanged it for gems (and then bought something on the gem store) you would see a huge drop in your net worth metric because it doesn't continue to include the value of purchased and held items. And you probably see it every weekend because that's when that player signs on and spends their earnings on luxury items or equipment.
I don't play GW2, nor do I play any video games actively. However, I watched part 1 and part 2 in one go. Thanks for making great content, you attracted random people who has no knowledge about coding or whatever this "grass" is. +1
I did botted A LOT many years ago on a private server of Ragnarok Online were botting was allowed (auto kill mobs and other stuff). Compared to the official game economy, our server showed that all bot-farmed items (lets call them commodities) dropped A LOT their prices, but impossible to bot-farm items (lets call them rarities) became extremely expensive (in terms of gold/zeny). What is not fair is that those players who didnt botted would never be able to buy rarities with the gold/zeny they got from commodities. But this encouraged them to go to dangerous places were bots couldnt go in order to farm rarities. IMO from my experience in that game, botting removed a lot of boring content of the game (grinding in 0 difficulty levels during hours) and also those commodities allowed players to enjoy the parts of the game that presented real challenges.
This is true only true for old players or if you can farm rarities that people want as a new player. If new players can't farm any rarities then they join the game forced to compete with bots in order to get their first gear upgrades and can have a hugely negative affect on the game's retention rate.
I think the best in game economy I've seen is from "realm of the mad god", where people just yelled in the chat what they were buying and selling. There were bots there, yes, but nobody would ever go to them because they were always buying too low and selling too high. only if people needed something at that moment would they usually go to the bots.
The jumps down on the weekend is most likely him dumping his gold/assets on his personal guildbank, you can have multiple guilds so most people have a personal guild for extra storage, the API just sees it's no longer in your personal wallet or bank so it thinks it's gone from your account.
I think I was a bit unclear in the video, I meant the rapid jumps up, just before it dips down. I know that the dips come from moving the gold away. But why does it jump just before it?
If you're counting profits as losses it's easy to conclude this bot isn't worth it.. This guy is offloading 500g a week, that's a lot of gems my friend...
Ah sorry I misunderstood you, as for your question, I think the rapid jumps before the dips seem to go along with his buy orders, so I assume he flips things until he has enough gold to make a big buy order (the poly luminscent thingy), then unloads it when he flips it, there's always a yellow dot right after the red dot when it's spiking up. so he flips skins until he has enough for the poly thing, then flips that, then unloads his net profits to his guild bank, then starts over. That's why it builds up slowly, then spikes, then dips.
10:34 - i would guess those jumps are somewhere between 1000 and 1200 gold, which would be the price of legendary crafting / buying legendaries from the AH. Legendaries are the most prestigious items in the game and have to be soulbound before use.
Hey, so I read that ecto gambling is predetermined once u enter the map, could u make some add one which would show what u get if u open it up in one map or another?
Haha now I want to decompile and hack around every bot softwares on the internet, this is so cool ! Your channel is awesome man, I've always wanted to get into decompiling stuff and reverse engineering but never knew where to start, now I know :)
Ich finde es erstaunlich. Und ich beneide dich um deine Fähigkeit. Mich interessieren Zahlen (Tabellen) und Statistiken (Graphen). Jedoch habe ich kein Ziel und auch keinen Anstoß welche Daten ich sammeln könnte. Auf jeden Fall zwei schöne Videos. Sie werden mir in der Zukunft vielleicht helfen können.
I think the big drops in net worth could be related to items owned, but not listed for sale. Your "net worth" line takes into account gold, listed items, and buy order gold, but not value of unlisted items owned by the player. Also, you see a large spike in the red dots right before these anomalies, which means he put a money in buy orders up, then those orders are filled, resulting in valuable items being held, yet not listed. The thing I can't really explain, is that you don't quite see a commensurate drop in gold to allow for the large buy orders being placed. The only thing I can think of is some shenanigans related to premium (real money) currency. For instance, maybe the player buys Gems, converts it to gold, and immediately puts that gold into buy orders for something like a monthly time credit or rare mount or something.
You forget gems and account upgrades (that are bought with gems) are included into "net worth". Gem price fluctuates heavily with new shiny stuff dropping into gemstore thus jumps in networth.
I am playing GuildWars2 myself from time to time and I am very curious to see that the Items you mentioned are supposedly bringing the most profit. Would be interesting to know if the bot really has a strategy there or if its just randomly buying items that look "good" in his eyes. Also: Did ArenaNet contact you about the API Keys? :P
The net worth graph showed the max potential value which to me seemed to drop over time. With every reset, the slope up never getting higher than the previous one
The drops are gold being removed from the bots inventory you can confirm this by looking at the yellow dots dropping from 1000+ gold to the next day where the gold drops to 400 again without having a increase in items being purchased meaning that the wealth is being removed from circulation of the bots inventory a second idea could be that the bot is failing to properly identify the value of an item purchasing it thinking that it is a profitable flip and being stuck with that item after over paying for it.
The net worth dips because GW2 allows players to trade gold for gems (gems are the premium currency). The player likely used it to buy cosmetics or other such things in the shop hence the steep loss in net worth.
Those spikes at week ends I think are from dumping any remaining items that have not yet sold & then immediately real world trading the gold causing the dips in net worth. I don't play GW2 but I did run a gold farm in Runescape for a number of years and part of the gold farming consisted of interchanging items using a GE bot and I used the same strategy. Dumb items on Sunday & sell the gold to minimize losses in case the bot gets banned. Those GE bots didn't make a lot of money relative to say dragon bones bots but they required no skills so if a bot got banned you just simply made a new account (which I used a bot for as well).
That is the most likely conclusion. Most likely these are either gold farmers or players looking to inflate their accounts. So this would be the farming account with funds then moved out to gold selling accounts, or legit accounts for own use. Large jumps in net worth are probably explainable by the player finding high priced loot and moving it into the bot account for selling off.
as someone who plays with the market in gw2: prices in general change a lot on the weekend. likely buying items is more expensive and the money is invested in buy orders.
The spikes could be explained, that the used the available gold on the weekend and spent it? Because as i understood, the yellow one was free gold on the account.
These results are pretty surprising to me. I mean when I'm actively flipping stuff manually, I make about the same amount of gold as the most successful/active bot #25. And even then I usually have peak times where I make almost the entire gold within like 3 hours so it's not like I'd sit there the entire day clicking. On the other hand a bot obviously has the advantage of being fully automatic so if you can run several bots 24/7 your profit will be much larger of course.
A problem in gw2 is that all prices are extremely bloated due to bots and players playing the market and that some skills, items and quests are locked behind a (gold) pay wall.
Did someone come up with solution about net worth's trend? I haven't played the game, but if I understood the listed graph correctly, nowhere in the graph is presented value of items players have bought and want to keep. Primary gear that is. High spikes during weekends and massive crash to next week sounds like raid to me, don't you think? Active raiding through weekend and then making huge investments in gear, player isn't listing anytime soon and therefore isn't visible in tracked graphs. Please, inform and correct my assumptions! I'm very eager to know, what causes this. By the way, fantastic work with video! Easy to watch and follow and very well explained. A++ material!
Those big drops in net worth are probably gold transfers to their main account. It would be interesting to see a cumulative graph of gold generation, and whether or not your opinion changes at all.
this exactly proves that bots don't harm an economy as many complain about. More items sold trend to a lower average price. Players don't realize all items are a gold sinks. All the auction items will eventual return zero value as it is a bound item or is consumed. What it does prove is by bolstering supply it lowers median prices. The idea of inflation(to much much cash in an economic system and the expectation of a high cost of those goods) and what effects it has on a economy. Bots here are a stabilizing factor. MMOs also have a secret. Each time an item is in the auction and is traded, the actual global value of the item has fallen. Even if it it then crafted into a more expensive item its global value also diminishes with each trade of this high priced item. Finally with a closed economy there will eventually be a equilibrium reached for each active bot.
Hi LiveOverflow, do you know if GW2 keep track of players who illegally bought gold from third party websites? I spent about $500 buying illegal gold, but also about $500 buying legal gold (through in game cash shop), but I never got banned. My guess is that ArenaNet knows that I'm a bad player, but because I've bought from cash shop, they don't want to ban me as I may buy something again in the future
The fact that GW2 has a buy/sell order system is a large part of what makes bots less harmful to the game, because it effectively lets everyone act like a bot in some caliber, which creates more price competition and is beneficial for consumers, unlike MMOs like Black Desert and Blade & Soul, which require people to be online and standing at the trading post to use it. Another, albeit significantly less efficient, way to do this is to have no trading post, and require all trading to be done through a dedicated global chat, like Warframe. This has the effect of artificially raising prices and producing very unstable prices due to the full supply of any one item never being available, which is beneficial for producers. It also allows developers to increase drop rates for rarer items which keeps players happier with their grind, while still maintaining an artificial sense of rarity due to the full supply of the item not being available or known.
Awesome video. I have some thoughts about that weird buy order pattern, like you say you'd expect it to be constant for an optimised bot right? And what about those big spikes down in net worth? Well, my guess is that the bot is designed to run 24/7 and doesn't really work if it doesn't, number 25 must be aware of that - perhaps they're the person behind the bot? Anyway, I wonder if ArenaNet are watching for bots with some simple algorithms. Amount of gold in account? I bet it's a well studied area where they could borrow tips and tricks from other MMO developers, I'll even bet that they have developers who have worked on the same problem on other MMOs - "amount of gold in account" is an easily transferable metric. I bet if it rises steadily or stays high too consistently you'd be able to pick the bot operators out of a list of normal accounts a mile off. Also it makes me think that the bot programmer might have built a bot before. Those huge downward spikes in net worth? Well, is this account an account that someone plays or just an alt account? They could be making big purchases of soul/account bound items, or guild items in the former case, and in the latter case they could just be transferring the money out to launder it for another account or even exchange it for real world money. In any case it makes sense to me - no point earning all that money just to have it sit there right? Also, notice how the total value of listed items becomes huge before a downward spike but then it somehow all goes away again really fast? Any way if you can tell what items were listed? I'm guessing a small number of high value items being used to pump up the amount of gold really fast - sort of a short sharp spike in gold to move very very quickly rather than having it slowly ramp up over time.
Is it possible to manipulate their bot's trading strategy? If yes, I would've instructed those cheaters to buy everything they can for the highest price possible and then selling everything they have for the lowest price possible.
As Somebody who has played Guild Wars 2 since day 1 and has also played a ton of other MMO's. I have played other free MMO's witch are taken over by bots and yea you could not buy anything and i just stopped playing them. I am happy to know that the trading bot you talked about was not that effective. If you just played the game instead of botting i know you would make more money.
Couldn't the games also throttle the rate of trades with cooldown periods once they hit a certain threshold? Something that lets a real person do a burst of trades without [normally] being impacted (since they would tend to do other things afterward), but that a bot would far more likely trip. Such a system could even have increasing cooldowns times if they are triggered often, which even punishes a "slower, but steady bot".
There is just one single flaw in your assumption trading bots doesnt hurt the game. They devalue items faster than players by undercutting which results in less gameplay for players since its not worth farming certain items or processing these items. In WoW for example, you cant make any gold with some crafting professions because the materials for crafting a certain item are more worth than the crafted product. For example, a cutted (ergo processed) gem is less valueable than a raw gem.
As I see it if trading bots are just doing arbitrage, then this is good because having sell orders and buy orders really far apart makes it hard for normal players to determine the real price of things.
The large drops in net worth are (probably) the person trading their stuff to their real account, the idea being their main account is less likely to get banned (it's a bit like money laundering)
In this case, it wouldn't be close to money laundering. They'd have to "clean" the money, and going one step is a bad way of doing this. If they wanted to do that effectively, they'd need to introduce to "dirty" money back into the economy, and purchase items, which their main could get if dropped, which they could sell on their main. That way, it's unlikely to be tracked, especially if their main also does a decent amount of trading. Wouldn't be suspicious if they bought items from the same person every few weeks, unless of course that was the only thing they did.
I think what happen when the Net worth dropped. When you look closely the Account Money had Skyrocketed so it could be the drops are the points where he removes a given ammount of money from the account and sends it over to ther accounts ... maybe making real money from that, or in use for his own account.
I'm not a guild wars person (i have the game, have played the game but I'm not that much into it) but looking at this and comparing to what people suggest as farming methods (I took this as an OK rate:th-cam.com/video/9jBHkiqEvhE/w-d-xo.html). The most successful botter you had, @ 11:02, is making approximately 2k gold over 2 weeks during the uncertain phase. The farming method I found gives 32-37 g/hr. So pessimistically translated to playtime the bot was equivalent to 54 hours of playtime. And that's basically someone working on the edge of part-time in GW2 on the account. 1000 gold goes for $35.65 on this one site i found. So sure, it's a pittance in real world money (from a western perspective), but consider the in-game situation. You've got a serious leg up on actual non-cheaters in terms of loot acquisition. On top of that this is an exponential growth situation because what limits the size of trades is gold availability. Assuming volume trades aren't inhibited in some way you'll have the bot trader earn more and more while being a bigger and bigger impact on the game economy. I'm assuming the botter here is likely taking out the money to place into other bot instances to not keep all eggs in the same basket. 2000 gold is clearly a sufficient seed for this kind of trader. It's also worth considering that the bot devs sent all the api keys to clients. Are they really good bot traders if they make such design decisions? This isn't necessarily the most impressive bot. The most successful case could be on the lower end of successes for a stronger bot. And it may be my personal preference but I much prefer inaccurate markets. It feels good being able to go look at items and find their price vary from what I consider a good value estimate. With automated traders you end up with a very static pricing situation. We like to find 'deals' and selling things for way more than expected. Likewise i find it a fulfilling experience to be on the other end. You don't get highs without lows. It's a problem with auction houses in general but bots exacerbate the issue. But I love the breakdown of measures taken to counter inflation in games. It didn't strike me how effective these must be to counter bots actually. Trading with a 15% sale tax is an obvious problem for people who participate a lot in trading. And for humans it's not that big a deal.
Because he's using illicitly acquired API keys to access other people's accounts. The problem isn't cheating, it's hacking. The fact that by using the bot those people are breaking the game's TOS, doesn't make it any more legal.
The huge drops that you see are account cash-outs. They're transferring funds to a safer/legit account that's not used for botting.
I also immediately thought of that. He's obviously moving the cash to a different account in case the bot gets banned, so he does not lose all the wealth. Either that or he's real world trading it on a gold selling site for $.
Money laundering i guess? :D
It's super easy to track this stuff. But at the end of the day, they won't. There are loads of games where the information is very clearly logged and traceable but the admins don't do anything because it'd be seen as unfair or too much effort.
@@haroerhaktak2613 they do track they an account I used back in the day was banned for 2 months
Or just selling gold, before drops there are few yellow dots very high on the chart.
Using games and software we interact with every day makes topics so much more approachable
Let's all use trade bots! 😁 It helps the game actually, it removes the gold from the economy and controls the inflation.
nah
@@drugsilove2364 for real
Someone posted your last video on Reddit and then I stayed up until 4AM watching your stuff.
Good shit.
on which subreddit? It sounds interesting if this video is posted there
That's exactly what I'm doing right now. lol
3:58AM here now, lol
Those graphs tell a better love story than twilight
twilight was one of the rather more valuable items in the game so i had to giggle heh
nakami I guess its a pun then xD
Rage the url to this video tells a better story than twilight
Dang gottem
You need to get some danker memes there friend. That shit be stale.
This is the best channel I ever viewed in reversing subject, really. You are doing so many different things, open our eyes and teach us to think in a different ways on reversing because you come up with a challenges and other stuff like MMO Game which when I been 16 ~ 17 yrs old I done some stuff for Silkroad which was fun :)
That's not all, you are editing those videos so professional, you like just drew a players and a map lol ;D
Thanks for that, you are doing a FUCKING great job with this channel. I get excited each time you release new video :)
Drops in graphs - items transfer between bot and player account
This is really unique series on youtube. Please continue. I would love to see move tytorials about bots re.
About the jumps in the graph, if you look at the gold, it goes down significantly at those steep drops, but the buy orders and the sell listings are basically unchanged. I think those dives are due to this account being a "mule" and the owner sends the gold from the trader to their main account at regular intervals. That's why the drops are so evenly spread as well.
If you were to make a separate graph checking only the blues and reds, you'll see a much steadier curve and if you lined the gold, instead of just plotting it, you'd see the variations a lot clearer.
I've always appreciated trading bots in MMOs - it drives prices lower such that the market is positive for consumers.
11:00 dont you think the drops are when the player sold some of his wealth? or moved it
drops down, sure. But I'm confused about the large jumps up.
It seems like when the player bought something for himself (so he's not listing the item) or when he transfered money to his main.
Could it be when a player transfers a high-valued item to their trading account and puts in a sell order?
Maybe the player sees that the bot is successful, so they transfer more gold to it so it can then do more buying/selling?
skep, that might help explain why the base gold level jumped so high up...
OMG, so much good info dude, nice work showing this, people like you motivate me, thanks!
Love the storytelling and illustrations.
So, did ArenaNet ask for the keys? :)
Asking the real question
Dang I only came down here to find out if someone asked this question xD So sad to see it wasnt answered.
bump
i would assume that the hard drops in "Networth" come from either the bot or the player stuffing their gold into their guild bank.
Super interessanter "Bericht". Wirklich sehr gut geworden. Erinnert mich stark an das SpiegelMining von David beim 33c3 ;)
März
Unless I set my bot to buy all stacks of cloth from the trading house if it's less than 50 gold, and then list stacks of cloth at 50 gold. Thus, if anyone wants to sell cloth, it either has to be 50g or more, or I will immediately buy it, and anyone who wants to buy cloth, has to either buy it from me, or pay more (by buying it from someone else).
This is only a big problem if before I came along the stacks were selling for 5 or 10G - thus, casual players are not getting a lower price before of me (my bot) existing.
If someone is running 24/7, they probably have several accounts. I've been in the botting scene of WoW and it's extremely common to have "botting account" and "legit account". I would never ever bot on my original account since I wouldn't want to get banned, but I had up to 4 bots running 24/7 doing whatever I wanted. They all work in conjunction and can semi-interact with each other. This bot was cancelled and now there are extremely few or maybe even no working bot in WoW.
Found your channel today and it's amazing, I'm amazed with how far you go and it makes me *very* motivated to do something similar. Or at least, I would *want* to haha
Oh yeah I’m sure many use a second account. Though a lot of them look really legit. Or were legit accounts at some point.
Aww thanks for the kind words! Go and do awesome stuff!
The lack of bots in WoW, is that because Warden catches most of them or because gold has relatively little value and people can buy it legally?
Niosus actually bots in wow have surged since wowtokens have been released. Before that I didn’t see a single bot out in the world(besides honor bots and even then that was a handful) but come legion and i see 20-30 bots on my server (hyjal a mid-high pop server)
At launch of legion i saw this guy bot herbs and skins in highmountain. Then there was this other guy selling 5000 obliterum within the first 2-3 days of launch which at that time they were being sold for 7-12k each. He would undercut within minutes of putting up some up for sale.
Then a few weeks later flying bots came in the herb scene and crashed the market hard. Like 70-80% hard. There was a point when i would farm fjarnskaggl in stormhiem and see 3-4 bots battling it out for the nodes, flying all over the place(btw this was before the flying patch)
I do believe i have a video or two on my channel on a some bots.
This all said, idk if its still a problem. I quit wow may last year. I believe i remember hearing about blizz suing some bot creators last year.
Matthew Harrington Okay, interesting. I haven't played WoW seriously since WotLK, but from my experience it was pretty bad in TBC. More often than not you'd see some guy spamming in the cities, eventually getting kicked or banned only to be replaced a few minutes later. You also had a lot of level boosting spam. It never really bothered me all that much, but it was definitely noticable
RIP honorbuddy
Eve is a good example of where trading bots have been somewhat allowed while other bots are often banned. Without the trade bots half the of the economy and items available on demand would be gone and the ecnomy would be less stable on things like basic minerals would be able to be controlled more by a few players if they did not have 40-50 bot traders to compete with.
wow you are good, the most resourcefully person i see on youtube. i have experience working with some game developer. and most of them implement antibot after the game final version, so they are screw after game release.
You absolute have to do a series on where you dismantle MMORPG bots like this. I would subscribe right away if you did this.
your channel is awesome man, thanks for the video. Even though i don't play GW2 anymore, it is one of my all time favourites.
The large jumps in the player's net worth can be explained by them buying large items. This is a sum of their gold in their inventory (but not the items in their inventory) and the items listed for sale/purchase on the exchange. But it does not include items held by the player or in the player's bank. So if they bought an expensive item, or exchanged it for gems (and then bought something on the gem store) you would see a huge drop in your net worth metric because it doesn't continue to include the value of purchased and held items. And you probably see it every weekend because that's when that player signs on and spends their earnings on luxury items or equipment.
This was unexpectedly a brilliant video. *thumbs up*
I don't play GW2, nor do I play any video games actively. However, I watched part 1 and part 2 in one go.
Thanks for making great content, you attracted random people who has no knowledge about coding or whatever this "grass" is.
+1
This video definitely earned my sub. Great video, great information! Keep it up!
I did botted A LOT many years ago on a private server of Ragnarok Online were botting was allowed (auto kill mobs and other stuff). Compared to the official game economy, our server showed that all bot-farmed items (lets call them commodities) dropped A LOT their prices, but impossible to bot-farm items (lets call them rarities) became extremely expensive (in terms of gold/zeny). What is not fair is that those players who didnt botted would never be able to buy rarities with the gold/zeny they got from commodities. But this encouraged them to go to dangerous places were bots couldnt go in order to farm rarities.
IMO from my experience in that game, botting removed a lot of boring content of the game (grinding in 0 difficulty levels during hours) and also those commodities allowed players to enjoy the parts of the game that presented real challenges.
This is true only true for old players or if you can farm rarities that people want as a new player. If new players can't farm any rarities then they join the game forced to compete with bots in order to get their first gear upgrades and can have a hugely negative affect on the game's retention rate.
I think the best in game economy I've seen is from "realm of the mad god", where people just yelled in the chat what they were buying and selling. There were bots there, yes, but nobody would ever go to them because they were always buying too low and selling too high. only if people needed something at that moment would they usually go to the bots.
could not agree more. also being able to filter chat by star rank. we had that shit locked down lol.
The jumps down on the weekend is most likely him dumping his gold/assets on his personal guildbank, you can have multiple guilds so most people have a personal guild for extra storage, the API just sees it's no longer in your personal wallet or bank so it thinks it's gone from your account.
I think I was a bit unclear in the video, I meant the rapid jumps up, just before it dips down. I know that the dips come from moving the gold away. But why does it jump just before it?
If you're counting profits as losses it's easy to conclude this bot isn't worth it..
This guy is offloading 500g a week, that's a lot of gems my friend...
I'm not sure I follow what you try to tell me
Ah sorry I misunderstood you, as for your question, I think the rapid jumps before the dips seem to go along with his buy orders, so I assume he flips things until he has enough gold to make a big buy order (the poly luminscent thingy), then unloads it when he flips it, there's always a yellow dot right after the red dot when it's spiking up.
so he flips skins until he has enough for the poly thing, then flips that, then unloads his net profits to his guild bank, then starts over. That's why it builds up slowly, then spikes, then dips.
great channel and content man, keep it up!
10:34 - i would guess those jumps are somewhere between 1000 and 1200 gold, which would be the price of legendary crafting / buying legendaries from the AH. Legendaries are the most prestigious items in the game and have to be soulbound before use.
WOAH! That Christmas break thing is really cool! :D It is funny to see into human actions like that... :)
this is pure statistics porn, ty for video. as a hobby programmer, maths lover and gw2 player this feels good on so many levels!
Hey, so I read that ecto gambling is predetermined once u enter the map, could u make some add one which would show what u get if u open it up in one map or another?
user #38, he is a man of focus commitment and sheer will
Haha now I want to decompile and hack around every bot softwares on the internet, this is so cool ! Your channel is awesome man, I've always wanted to get into decompiling stuff and reverse engineering but never knew where to start, now I know :)
These videos are brilliant.
Wow, I feel like I can learn a lot from you! All that data analysis is very usefull for me
Ich finde es erstaunlich.
Und ich beneide dich um deine Fähigkeit.
Mich interessieren Zahlen (Tabellen) und Statistiken (Graphen).
Jedoch habe ich kein Ziel und auch keinen Anstoß welche Daten ich sammeln könnte.
Auf jeden Fall zwei schöne Videos.
Sie werden mir in der Zukunft vielleicht helfen können.
Gotta love the leet damage in the beginning!
GUILD WARS 1 >*1000 GUILD WARS 2!!111!!1! 🙌🏼🌝
Sau geiler Kanal 😅❤️ Hätte nicht gedacht, dass soviele Leute die Themen überhaupt jucken.
You have my sub. You are a genius - looking forward to see more videos
Beautiful video!
Love your German accent, as soon as I heard your accent, I was like " this video should be good".. haha
Super interesting, while a little bit controversial given how you got the API keys, still extremely neat to be able to look over.
I wish you would look into OldSchool RuneScape botting Clients.
Writing Scripts for OSRS is like jacking off, it cums easily..
Also the part at 8:47, this data also shows behaviour of the person
I think the big drops in net worth could be related to items owned, but not listed for sale. Your "net worth" line takes into account gold, listed items, and buy order gold, but not value of unlisted items owned by the player. Also, you see a large spike in the red dots right before these anomalies, which means he put a money in buy orders up, then those orders are filled, resulting in valuable items being held, yet not listed.
The thing I can't really explain, is that you don't quite see a commensurate drop in gold to allow for the large buy orders being placed. The only thing I can think of is some shenanigans related to premium (real money) currency. For instance, maybe the player buys Gems, converts it to gold, and immediately puts that gold into buy orders for something like a monthly time credit or rare mount or something.
11:00 Probably gold selling, you can see most of the user's net worth is in raw gold (rather than buy/sell orders) before it drops.
I guess you could say you are the David Kriesel of youtube lol
nice work
This an the last video are great! Thanks for uploading.
@LiveOverflow So did arenanet ever ask you for the apis?
You forget gems and account upgrades (that are bought with gems) are included into "net worth". Gem price fluctuates heavily with new shiny stuff dropping into gemstore thus jumps in networth.
I am playing GuildWars2 myself from time to time and I am very curious to see that the Items you mentioned are supposedly bringing the most profit.
Would be interesting to know if the bot really has a strategy there or if its just randomly buying items that look "good" in his eyes.
Also:
Did ArenaNet contact you about the API Keys? :P
The net worth graph showed the max potential value which to me seemed to drop over time. With every reset, the slope up never getting higher than the previous one
Such an interesting and fun video to watch ; )
The jumps down might be when the player went on a spending spree, like visual items with low re-sale value and such.
The drops are gold being removed from the bots inventory you can confirm this by looking at the yellow dots dropping from 1000+ gold to the next day where the gold drops to 400 again without having a increase in items being purchased meaning that the wealth is being removed from circulation of the bots inventory a second idea could be that the bot is failing to properly identify the value of an item purchasing it thinking that it is a profitable flip and being stuck with that item after over paying for it.
The net worth dips because GW2 allows players to trade gold for gems (gems are the premium currency). The player likely used it to buy cosmetics or other such things in the shop hence the steep loss in net worth.
Those spikes at week ends I think are from dumping any remaining items that have not yet sold & then immediately real world trading the gold causing the dips in net worth. I don't play GW2 but I did run a gold farm in Runescape for a number of years and part of the gold farming consisted of interchanging items using a GE bot and I used the same strategy. Dumb items on Sunday & sell the gold to minimize losses in case the bot gets banned. Those GE bots didn't make a lot of money relative to say dragon bones bots but they required no skills so if a bot got banned you just simply made a new account (which I used a bot for as well).
I love the ending :P
Could the account be selling their gold every weekend hence the weekly drop in net worth?
That is the most likely conclusion. Most likely these are either gold farmers or players looking to inflate their accounts. So this would be the farming account with funds then moved out to gold selling accounts, or legit accounts for own use.
Large jumps in net worth are probably explainable by the player finding high priced loot and moving it into the bot account for selling off.
as someone who plays with the market in gw2: prices in general change a lot on the weekend. likely buying items is more expensive and the money is invested in buy orders.
large jumps seem obviously from putting up expensive offers, you can see the black jumps heavily correlate to the red jumps.
3:50 heh Molten Furnace Fractal end chest used to have this problem.
My guess would be that the 3 large jumps before the dips are due to people being on holiday. Thanksgiving, Christmas, new years.
Did they actually send you an e-mail for those API keys back then? I'm dying to know.
The spikes could be explained, that the used the available gold on the weekend and spent it?
Because as i understood, the yellow one was free gold on the account.
Pretty sure the black drops are when the player sends the gold from the bot to his main account.
Detailed info... Very cool..
These results are pretty surprising to me. I mean when I'm actively flipping stuff manually, I make about the same amount of gold as the most successful/active bot #25. And even then I usually have peak times where I make almost the entire gold within like 3 hours so it's not like I'd sit there the entire day clicking.
On the other hand a bot obviously has the advantage of being fully automatic so if you can run several bots 24/7 your profit will be much larger of course.
A problem in gw2 is that all prices are extremely bloated due to bots and players playing the market and that some skills, items and quests are locked behind a (gold) pay wall.
Did someone come up with solution about net worth's trend? I haven't played the game, but if I understood the listed graph correctly, nowhere in the graph is presented value of items players have bought and want to keep. Primary gear that is.
High spikes during weekends and massive crash to next week sounds like raid to me, don't you think? Active raiding through weekend and then making huge investments in gear, player isn't listing anytime soon and therefore isn't visible in tracked graphs. Please, inform and correct my assumptions! I'm very eager to know, what causes this.
By the way, fantastic work with video! Easy to watch and follow and very well explained. A++ material!
7:01 A voice crack? 😄
I would love to see the reaction of User 25 if he ever sees this video lmao.
Those big drops in net worth are probably gold transfers to their main account. It would be interesting to see a cumulative graph of gold generation, and whether or not your opinion changes at all.
this exactly proves that bots don't harm an economy as many complain about. More items sold trend to a lower average price.
Players don't realize all items are a gold sinks. All the auction items will eventual return zero value as it is a bound item or is consumed.
What it does prove is by bolstering supply it lowers median prices. The idea of inflation(to much much cash in an economic system and the expectation of a high cost of those goods) and what effects it has on a economy. Bots here are a stabilizing factor.
MMOs also have a secret. Each time an item is in the auction and is traded, the actual global value of the item has fallen. Even if it it then crafted into a more expensive item its global value also diminishes with each trade of this high priced item.
Finally with a closed economy there will eventually be a equilibrium reached for each active bot.
Hi LiveOverflow, do you know if GW2 keep track of players who illegally bought gold from third party websites?
I spent about $500 buying illegal gold, but also about $500 buying legal gold (through in game cash shop), but I never got banned. My guess is that ArenaNet knows that I'm a bad player, but because I've bought from cash shop, they don't want to ban me as I may buy something again in the future
The fact that GW2 has a buy/sell order system is a large part of what makes bots less harmful to the game, because it effectively lets everyone act like a bot in some caliber, which creates more price competition and is beneficial for consumers, unlike MMOs like Black Desert and Blade & Soul, which require people to be online and standing at the trading post to use it. Another, albeit significantly less efficient, way to do this is to have no trading post, and require all trading to be done through a dedicated global chat, like Warframe. This has the effect of artificially raising prices and producing very unstable prices due to the full supply of any one item never being available, which is beneficial for producers. It also allows developers to increase drop rates for rarer items which keeps players happier with their grind, while still maintaining an artificial sense of rarity due to the full supply of the item not being available or known.
Awesome video. I have some thoughts about that weird buy order pattern, like you say you'd expect it to be constant for an optimised bot right? And what about those big spikes down in net worth? Well, my guess is that the bot is designed to run 24/7 and doesn't really work if it doesn't, number 25 must be aware of that - perhaps they're the person behind the bot?
Anyway, I wonder if ArenaNet are watching for bots with some simple algorithms. Amount of gold in account? I bet it's a well studied area where they could borrow tips and tricks from other MMO developers, I'll even bet that they have developers who have worked on the same problem on other MMOs - "amount of gold in account" is an easily transferable metric. I bet if it rises steadily or stays high too consistently you'd be able to pick the bot operators out of a list of normal accounts a mile off. Also it makes me think that the bot programmer might have built a bot before.
Those huge downward spikes in net worth? Well, is this account an account that someone plays or just an alt account? They could be making big purchases of soul/account bound items, or guild items in the former case, and in the latter case they could just be transferring the money out to launder it for another account or even exchange it for real world money. In any case it makes sense to me - no point earning all that money just to have it sit there right?
Also, notice how the total value of listed items becomes huge before a downward spike but then it somehow all goes away again really fast? Any way if you can tell what items were listed? I'm guessing a small number of high value items being used to pump up the amount of gold really fast - sort of a short sharp spike in gold to move very very quickly rather than having it slowly ramp up over time.
is it possible that the drops in net worth are from placing the gold on another account?/selling the gold?
These jumps are when the player used the gold for something.
really good video, thanks for that
"the code is terrible, please ignore it"
sounds like my usual jupyter notebook.
Really interesting video! :)
Is it possible to manipulate their bot's trading strategy? If yes, I would've instructed those cheaters to buy everything they can for the highest price possible and then selling everything they have for the lowest price possible.
As Somebody who has played Guild Wars 2 since day 1 and has also played a ton of other MMO's. I have played other free MMO's witch are taken over by bots and yea you could not buy anything and i just stopped playing them. I am happy to know that the trading bot you talked about was not that effective. If you just played the game instead of botting i know you would make more money.
Big drops in wealth may be due to moving funds to another account, but it could also be buying luxury items, like precursors, for personal use.
Couldn't the games also throttle the rate of trades with cooldown periods once they hit a certain threshold? Something that lets a real person do a burst of trades without [normally] being impacted (since they would tend to do other things afterward), but that a bot would far more likely trip. Such a system could even have increasing cooldowns times if they are triggered often, which even punishes a "slower, but steady bot".
That’s exactly what the game does! That’s also a good reason why they are not that bad for he game ;)
7:04 "belive" whoops
I make same fcking spelling mistake for years now XD Even if I'm fully aware of it it still happens... somehow it slips through.
Funny , because you've missed the s(c)anning mistake earlier in the video... Whoops
In game automated trading. Positive effects mentioned in the video without the perception of unfairness (everyone has it)
Wow! I learned so much, in so little time! You need more subscribers :O
There is just one single flaw in your assumption trading bots doesnt hurt the game.
They devalue items faster than players by undercutting which results in less gameplay for players since its not worth farming certain items or processing these items.
In WoW for example, you cant make any gold with some crafting professions because the materials for crafting a certain item are more worth than the crafted product. For example, a cutted (ergo processed) gem is less valueable than a raw gem.
As I see it if trading bots are just doing arbitrage, then this is good because having sell orders and buy orders really far apart makes it hard for normal players to determine the real price of things.
Maybe a few people were running multiple accounts and those dips are them selling the gold?
The large drops in net worth are (probably) the person trading their stuff to their real account, the idea being their main account is less likely to get banned (it's a bit like money laundering)
In this case, it wouldn't be close to money laundering.
They'd have to "clean" the money, and going one step is a bad way of doing this.
If they wanted to do that effectively, they'd need to introduce to "dirty" money back into the economy, and purchase items, which their main could get if dropped, which they could sell on their main.
That way, it's unlikely to be tracked, especially if their main also does a decent amount of trading. Wouldn't be suspicious if they bought items from the same person every few weeks, unless of course that was the only thing they did.
I think what happen when the Net worth dropped. When you look closely the Account Money had Skyrocketed so it could be the drops are the points where he removes a given ammount of money from the account and sends it over to ther accounts ... maybe making real money from that, or in use for his own account.
The jumps might be the owner of that bot siphoning the gold to their main account or to their seller account if they are selling gold IRL
I'm not a guild wars person (i have the game, have played the game but I'm not that much into it) but looking at this and comparing to what people suggest as farming methods (I took this as an OK rate:th-cam.com/video/9jBHkiqEvhE/w-d-xo.html). The most successful botter you had, @ 11:02, is making approximately 2k gold over 2 weeks during the uncertain phase. The farming method I found gives 32-37 g/hr. So pessimistically translated to playtime the bot was equivalent to 54 hours of playtime. And that's basically someone working on the edge of part-time in GW2 on the account. 1000 gold goes for $35.65 on this one site i found. So sure, it's a pittance in real world money (from a western perspective), but consider the in-game situation. You've got a serious leg up on actual non-cheaters in terms of loot acquisition. On top of that this is an exponential growth situation because what limits the size of trades is gold availability. Assuming volume trades aren't inhibited in some way you'll have the bot trader earn more and more while being a bigger and bigger impact on the game economy. I'm assuming the botter here is likely taking out the money to place into other bot instances to not keep all eggs in the same basket. 2000 gold is clearly a sufficient seed for this kind of trader.
It's also worth considering that the bot devs sent all the api keys to clients. Are they really good bot traders if they make such design decisions? This isn't necessarily the most impressive bot. The most successful case could be on the lower end of successes for a stronger bot.
And it may be my personal preference but I much prefer inaccurate markets. It feels good being able to go look at items and find their price vary from what I consider a good value estimate. With automated traders you end up with a very static pricing situation. We like to find 'deals' and selling things for way more than expected. Likewise i find it a fulfilling experience to be on the other end. You don't get highs without lows. It's a problem with auction houses in general but bots exacerbate the issue.
But I love the breakdown of measures taken to counter inflation in games. It didn't strike me how effective these must be to counter bots actually. Trading with a 15% sale tax is an obvious problem for people who participate a lot in trading. And for humans it's not that big a deal.
Out of curiosity what is you daily job (or was if TH-cam is now your daily job)?
Very interesting analysis. Anyone ever contact you about the API keys?
The police might
Michael Campbell it hasn't even been a day yet. It could easily take the developers weeks to find this video, so I wouldn't be too confident.
Kasper Meerts Why? Cheating is against no law outside of Korea.
also illegal in china
Because he's using illicitly acquired API keys to access other people's accounts. The problem isn't cheating, it's hacking. The fact that by using the bot those people are breaking the game's TOS, doesn't make it any more legal.
This guy is overpoweringly smart
the huge drop is probably over-supply and therefore price drop maybe from other bots dumping their items on weekends?