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Trade bots legal?


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Hey, i was just wondering if trade bots are legal?

 

I encountered so many situations where i misclicked one number and before i was able to undo the auction it was already sold.

So i believe it is quite sure that some people programmed a bot to buy those cards when they see a misclicked card in the auction house.

I was wondering if this is a legal thing to do because it somehow prevents normal players from sniping such misclicks(time frame was about 10 miliseconds after misclick till it was bought)

 

So to come back to my question is this allowed?

(sorry if this is the wrong channel)

 

Best Regards

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Hmm, since the API is public I wouldn't be surprised at all if there are trade bots.

Thinking something akin to the bot scanning the API for certain buyout thresholds and when something pops up, it automatically uses the in-game AH to search for the card and buy it.

Would definitely not be allowed as per rule 7: "Being a robot - Do not use any kind of bots on our Forums or in-game."

An automated bot like that would definitely create some transaction patterns on an account that are abnormal and could be tracked by the dev team.

But I do wonder if trade bots could actually be as fast as to instantly snipe an underpriced auction. I would assume that would have a negative impact on performance. Can't entirely rule out the chance that someone just so happened to search for a card at that precise moment.

Edited by Cocofang
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Is the API public? The trade data is, but actual trade commands aren't as far as I know. Last time I asked, it wasn't even planned, so either I am missing something or you might be confusing it with the history charts.

IF the API is actually public it wouldn't be hard to make a bot and it could be quite profitable, but I'd guess the devs are aware of that. Some measures sure could be put in place to prevent that. Tell me more if you find any references to the aforementioned API.

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I was thinking of this:

Confused it with the trade data. In any case a crafty person could surely write a bot that looks at the data output directly on the website to then automatically make AH purchases, no? Wouldn't even need a high success rate or short response time. I imagine if even 1 in 10 or even 20 transactions goes through you'd make more than enough bank each day.

But sites like Skylords Marketplace Journal scan the trade data in real-time too, right? The website catches all the outliers and generates graphs from them. So I imagine anyone else could do that for private use as well. Catch the outliers and then have a bot automatically act on it in-game.

Edited by Cocofang
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Public API doesn't provide a way to interact with Auction House other than literally just displaying the live listings. Bids, buyouts, or botting is not possible with it.

Proper, in-game bot that emulates our client and network architecture is hard, almost impossible to make (if you're not using one that scans the screen and use OCR to make mechanical clicks, i.e. literally move the mouse over the button and click it).

TL;DR: There is no such thing as trade/AH bots here, and if there were, they would not be "legal".

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That's what I am talking about though. A bot can just interact with the game like a human would through inputs and screen scans. Navigating the AH isn't that complex. Would need a way to watch the important listings on the provided website and act on them, which would probably be the more difficult part. But I wouldn't put it past people to make one happen. It's something to be mindful about.

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There are a few dozens of people browsing the marketplace all the time and looking for nice deals.

Probability that you come across one of them immediately after you put card on auction is pretty high - even some less popular cards sometimes are sold very quickly.

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12 hours ago, Cocofang said:

That's what I am talking about though. A bot can just interact with the game like a human would through inputs and screen scans. Navigating the AH isn't that complex. Would need a way to watch the important listings on the provided website and act on them, which would probably be the more difficult part. But I wouldn't put it past people to make one happen. It's something to be mindful about.

What you described, is entirely possible and most likely done already to some extent, somewhere, from someone.

What I was refering to (the complete emulation of our client so you get literal, proper programmatic bot), is almost impossible.

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13 hours ago, Cocofang said:

That's what I am talking about though. A bot can just interact with the game like a human would through inputs and screen scans. Navigating the AH isn't that complex. Would need a way to watch the important listings on the provided website and act on them, which would probably be the more difficult part. But I wouldn't put it past people to make one happen. It's something to be mindful about.

Scraping the web with some sort of prediction algorithm would likely be easier than the OCR part of that particular project lol, the API requests are not protected nor encoded, no cookies or headers required, and the data is very readable... you could theoretically make a reader that would notify you for you to then make the trade yourself, which I'd say is legal, since you are using existing tools without automating any ingame processes themselves.

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On 1/31/2021 at 2:10 PM, Dallarian said:

There are a few dozens of people browsing the marketplace all the time and looking for nice deals.

Probability that you come across one of them immediately after you put card on auction is pretty high - even some less popular cards sometimes are sold very quickly.

exactly this.  If I see a good deal I turbo-click buy without thinking to beat someone else to it.  If you're missing a decimal point, someone's going to see it very quick and purchase it before you can do anything about it.  Best to be careful and doublecheck your listing before putting it up.

The only reason your normal auctions don't go as fast is because those same people looking for deals aren't interested in your reasonably priced auctions.  But they're getting viewed just as frequently.

 

Dallarian likes this
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On 1/31/2021 at 7:39 PM, fiki574 said:

Proper, in-game bot that emulates our client and network architecture is hard, almost impossible to make (if you're not using one that scans the screen and use OCR to make mechanical clicks, i.e. literally move the mouse over the button and click it).

I know someone who would accept that challenge :D

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