OK so this is some very weird behavior that IMO can only be bot software at work.
Step 1: Post a particular pet for sale, making sure to undercut the existing sellers.
Step 2: Immediately perform an undercut scan to check I have not been undercut.
Step 3: See that I have been undercut by 2 people immediately.
Step 4: Cancel the auction and re-scan for the same pet and see those 2 people have immediately canceled their auctions.
Step 5: Post the pet for sale again at the previous price now that the other 2 undercutters have cancelled their auctions.
Step 6: Get immediately undercut by the exact same 2 undercutters at the same odd prices (not prices near mine but much lower).
Step 7: Cancel my auction and re-scan for the pet again.
Step 8: See that the 2 under-cutters have immediately cancelled their auctions again.
Step 9: Repeat steps 2 - 8 at least half a dozen times with the exact same results.
Step 10: Now that I know the exact prices the 2 undercutters will post at, I post at a lower price of one of them.
Step 11: After re-posting at the lower price, see that the one I undercut has immediately re-posted for the exact same amount, thus ignoring the fact that his price is now higher than mine.
I’ve been undercutting for a long time and this is the first time i’ve ever seen this kind of wonky behavior. The speed and predictability and odd behavior of this scenario can IMO only be explained by a couple of AH botters. Thoughts?
Report the behavior. The email is in this support article:
We’ve already seen on this forum and CS someone who claims using the AH API in ways it’s not meant to isn’t cheating/botting— after they were perma banned on more than one account. So we know it exists. Blizz can look into it.
They probably have the Reins of the Mighty Caravan Brutosaur, and is near a mailbox. Not to mention they probably have addons to help them. Just saying.
Couldn’t Blizzard just monitor traffic volume between AH and any account. Those that seems to continuously scan, undercut, buy cheap, relist high nonstop gets a closer look to see if they are using illegal software to game AH market or just someone who is bored and really fast on their keyboard.
They really can’t. That’s an insane amount of monitoring of so many AHs. That’s why reporting exists and their own Warden system to scan for certain types of automation.
I would like to point out that all behaviors you mentioned can be attributed to an addon, such as TSM or Auctionator. It doesn’t necessarily mean that cheating is involved. Still, if you feel there is something going on, feel free to use the link Sendryn provided.
Warden can be bypassed. Those bot programmers know what they are doing and when there’s update to warden, they stop using the program until they figure out what changed and revise the bot program to evade warden.
This is why there’s usually no obvious botting shortly after some patches. Regardless they will be caught sooner or later and get banned.
I have both these things and cannot perform what these 2 bots can.
Nope.
I’m not doing anything near what they are. I cannot perform actions that fast and even if I could, there is no logic in it based on their ignorant pricing levels that point to a very obvious pre-programmed amount.
The game needs a kernel anti-cheat to detect injected inputs.
Blizzard has made it very clear they will not do this. Hence, you will get botters that try to avoid triggering server side hidden bot achievements to bot until the end of time, since client side is freelo.
Here’s the thing. These AH bots spell their name weird. ŴĩŽarD. You can’t copy paste sellers name in AH, I’m not about to spend an hour of my time researching how to type their name to report.
