So this means that a trading bot instead of printing ingame money. It actually removes gold from the economy. 15% at a time. So a trading bot is in a weird way actually HELPING to fight inflation. Also I would claim, that the casual regular player, likes to buy items when they need it from the trading post, and sell items right away to sb who offered to buy it.
That’s not the most efficient way, but the most comfortable way. And so a bot, who is constantly trying to overbid on items so they get buy orders filled raise the price a casual player can sell an item for right away, and at the same time try to undercut when listing the item, so their sell listing is sold quicker. Which pushes the price down for casual players that just want to buy an item https://rideroftheyear.org/. So it even has another positive effect. However there are also two major negative points. A trading bpt is competing with all the players who would like to maximize their profits, or engage in trading too. The undercutting and overbidding minimizes the profit a regular player can have. It also lowers the bots own profit, but a bot can obviously do a lot more trades than a human and can thus justify lower profit margins. And another issue is, that if players feel like there are bots trading it can have a very negative emotional effect. A feeling of unfairness and so forth - even though maybe objectively a trading bot is not bad, regular players will not see it that way. So I believe a trading bot is unfair, though it’s not bad or dangerous for the game, as long as players don’t see them. So let’s have a look at the data I have collected. I’m using a jupyter notebook to work with the data and used it to create all the graphs. The code is terrible, please ignore it. I have not included the API keys so you can’t find out which players were doing this, but you can find all graphs in the description below and so you can have a look yourself. First of all, over the roughly three months of collecting data, I have seen 94 unique Guild Wars 2 API keys. So I guess almost 100 people have downloaded the bot, executed it and entered their API key. However when you look at the graphs you will see that many have not actively used the bot. Next let’s look at the activity graph. At the bottom you can see the time span of the data collection. It started on 12 of november and went up to the 7th of februrary. My crawler checked the API every hour, so each point represents a bot being registered online and having some sell or buy data. You might wonder why there are only 76 bots and not 94. That’s because 18 people basically didn’t do ANYTHING. These 76 however started the bot for a brief period. But even though they used it, there are still several that were basically never reallya ctive. So for example user number 72 downloaded and ran the bot for a couple of hours on the 23. November. After after that, never again. In contrast to that user 25 has basically a bot running 24/7 for the whole period. BTW this gap over here was my fault, my crawler died and I didn’t realize it quickly enough. And then there is user 55, who used it fairly actively, but then stopped in december, maybe went home for christmas without their PC and then restarted the bot again when they returned in january. These graphs tell a lot of interesting stories. Now let’s have a look at individual bot graphs. I think number 25 is awesome, it’s a really active bot. I think it’s actually the most active one that I have recorded. So You can see here dots with several colors. Orange is the gold they have in their wallet or inventory. Blue is the gold trapped in items they have listed for sale. So blue is a theoretic gold value they would get if they would sell the items. But now that I think about it again, I think I forgot to deduct the 10% trading post tax from that. Anyway, blue should be a bit lower overall. Red are the buy orders they have, so that’s money that is waiting in the tradingpost for somebody who sells the item for this price. And black is the “net worth”, basically it’s just the sum of gold, value of the items listed for sale and the buy orders. It’s the theoretic gold wealth of this account at that moment in time. So if we look at the start of this graph we can see that the bot has constantly 400 to 1300 with up to 1700g in buy orders. So hoping to get cheap items. And blue are the items being sold. So these items wait for a buyer. And as you can see their price is always going up and down meaning that new items are being listed for sale and that people buy items. Now I think that there is always a dip down on weekends? Which could mean that because on the weekend more players are playing, more items are being bought from this player. So the money in listed items goes down. But I can’t really explain myself those big jumps. So black is the overall “net worth” and I think there are clear upward trends visible here, with around maybe 750 to almost 1000g per week? But remember a lot of the wealth is kept in items that might never get sold, so it’s not all just raw gold. But here with those big jumps I think maybe my calculation fails a bit and actually the user cancelled all buy orders and so forth and then moved gold away. Also there is a fairly sudden drop in value of listed items, so maybe the person even cancelled a lot of listed items and relisted them lower or just outright sold them to the highest bidder? Maybe? Well i don’t know, speculating here. This trend here I think is awesome. The listed items are slowly being sold off, which increases the available gold. However the gold is immediatly put back into ordering new items, so more and more gold is now in the ordered items. Overall, because by selling those items and ordering new ones, the bot made a profit and thus the overall net worth is slowly increasing. But the trading strategy during this time is also ineffective, because ideally the listings wouldn’t go down, they should be at least stable or rising with the wealth. But like I said, that’s a very active bot and probably the most successful one. We can also use gw2efficiency with the API key to spy a little bit what this player traded. So here they are, these are the secret items that apparently are very profitable to trade. The most money was apparently made with the black Poly-luminescent trinket. The War God skins are also good. BTW if you are wondering why the listings are flatlining starting around the 9th of january, this can be seen also on other graphs. Unfortunately this is an issue with the guild wars 2 API. The listings are not updated, so the data there is faulty. Another very active bot, number 3, seems to be less successful. Here the networth is pretty constant. So kinda useless to let the bot run. Bot 30 looks awesome, but don’t get fooled by the slope and look at the y axis steps. Here the bot started with around 200g and made maybe 500g in about 3 weeks. That’s also not very great. And those drops look really like the person pulled out winnings into another account. Unfortunately this user’s API key is invalid. Maybe they got banned? Or maybe they just removed the API key because they stopped using the bot. So is this bot worth it? I’d say clearly no. A lot of the graphs are pretty much just a flat line, so they users don’t choose good items to trade. And you have to include the electricity cost, hardware cost and game key cost PLUS the subscription for the bot. I think it’s a complete waste of money and is better spent on buying gem cards. Also should the average Guild Wars 2 player be outraged over these unfair bots? No, absolute not. Those are small fish, they don’t really make a lot of gold, always risk getting banned and it’s just a handful of people. This is not a problem you should worry about and like I outlined earlier I don’t think it has any negative effects on to the game. And as long as you don’t cause an unjustified player uprising, this is just fine. Btw. if sb from ArenaNet wants the API keys to hand out some 7 day warning bans, send me an email.
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