Mystical Posted March 29, 2020 Share Posted March 29, 2020 It has gotten to the point where trading bots take over everything, and it is hard to find good deals and make profits through trades. Are trading bots good for the economy? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vortegan Posted March 29, 2020 Share Posted March 29, 2020 Good for owners, Good for those who want convenience, not so good for those who want to make profit. Low tier trading margins are basically 1 scrap, unusual trading is still possible, but bots can bump to offer more than your buy order/sell for less then your sell order. So overall, not really. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alecto Posted March 29, 2020 Share Posted March 29, 2020 It's good for the economy - Prices wouldn't be nearly as stable without them, really convenient for users It's bad for the guy trying to compete with them - trading up to a key from 10 ref for example would be an insane amount of work for what, $1.50? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zeus_Junior Posted March 29, 2020 Share Posted March 29, 2020 Yes Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TripleMasterA Posted March 29, 2020 Share Posted March 29, 2020 Not bad at all. You can easily make alot of profit if you know where to look. Scrap.tf auctions, marketplace.tf auctions, browsing marketplace deals, putting buy orders up on marketplace to get easy profit, buying things like spelled items. You can also go into trade servers and buy steam cards, cs go cases for scrap and make some easy profit selling it on the steam community market. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
🔥Master Throne Crimson🔥 Posted March 29, 2020 Share Posted March 29, 2020 Neither bad nor good. Neutral, id call them. They are there, they exist. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
🔥Master Throne Crimson🔥 Posted March 29, 2020 Share Posted March 29, 2020 1 hour ago, Mystical said: It has gotten to the point where trading bots take over everything, and it is hard to find good deals and make profits through trades. Am i missing something, that i never understand where this part comes from in these complaints? Im literally never ever affected by bots, im so confused... Edit: I feel like people blame bots for their own lack of trading experience/success at this point Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Norah Posted March 29, 2020 Share Posted March 29, 2020 Yep. What matters the most for the economy is people buying what we're selling, and if it's easier for buyers, the more stuff is being bought. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vebster Posted March 29, 2020 Share Posted March 29, 2020 Bots are good when you need to sell non-unusual item fast for pure, also bots make a lot of buy orders for unusuals making them easier to sell. But for regural trader bots are bad, because they lower profit. So they are good for some categories of traders while for others - bad. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
w0lk Posted March 29, 2020 Share Posted March 29, 2020 Trading was fun back in a day when they didn't exist. Ever since bots started becoming a thing, trading pretty much died in my eyes. Now you're lucky to have an actual human offer on your item. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Goliac Posted March 29, 2020 Share Posted March 29, 2020 Only positive thing i’d say is they offer fast trades which lest you get rid of the items you don’t want. Other than that, they just make everything harder. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dtn Posted March 29, 2020 Share Posted March 29, 2020 they maintain item liquidity Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Flamadin Posted March 29, 2020 Share Posted March 29, 2020 Yes, they prop up quicksell prices. The more liquid your investments, the more willing you are to invest. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mb_ Posted March 29, 2020 Share Posted March 29, 2020 They are convenient, but they also make life a lot harder for beginners that want to start from wep drops and get to unusuals without investing real world currency. Using dropped metal to get into unu trading was possible years ago but today not so much. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Slam Posted March 30, 2020 Share Posted March 30, 2020 Bots are neutral for the economy. The convenience and large presence definitely has contributed to more trading overall, since obviously if you want a hat, you'd rather get it instantly from a bot than wait 8 hours for JoeMama1337 to respond to their trade offer or sit in a trade server for 3 hours spamming "wtb <hat> trade me!". - On the other hand, they completely and utterly dominate the low-end non-unusual trading scene. "Scrap 2 Unusual" is pretty much a thing of the past. However, I'd argue that they haven't killed it nearly as much as the inflation of Key-to-Refined prices have. It's odd, but it seems that everyone points fingers at the bots and not the simple fact that profit margins continuously shrink due to metal becoming less and less valuable. In 2013/2014, getting 5 refined of profit in a full day of hanging out on trade servers and posting classifieds was essentially 0.7-1.0 keys, which was great if you're trading at the low end. But now, due to the massive inflation of key to metal prices, making 5 refined of profit is less than 1/10th of a key. It's 15-20 cents of profit for hours of work. It's not worth the time or effort. When keys were single digit metal prices, you could reasonable go scrap to unusual in a relatively short amount of time, but now, you'd be lucky to go scrap to 1 key in a month of nonstop continuous trading. Even if bots were totally eliminated and banned by Valve and all trading sites, keys will stay 50+ refined and your profit margins won't be worth it. Yes, you could still make okay profit at the low end when key prices were surging to 20-40 refined and bots weren't quite as widespread, but even then, 99% of the time when you flip a hat for profit, you're only getting a couple scrap to a reclaimed at best, maybe upwards of a refined for higher-metal-value hats, but those margins never grew along with the actual metal prices of keys. Bots are here to stay. Eventually in all economies, real life or otherwise, convenience eventually takes over and leads to large changes in the way commerce operates. The rise of online shopping websites such as Amazon is evidence of this in our real world economy in the 21st century. Note that this isn't some "KEYS SHOULD BE 3 REF AGAIN" rant, because not only does that no longer make any sense, but it's literally impossible to shift the market in that way without Valve implementing an absolutely amazing refined sink (which if that did happen, idle farm bots would come back in huge numbers and TF2's pop would be 100K+ every day because of it.), but simply pointing out that there's more to the story of the death of low-end trading than just "bots are bad" or "bots are good". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leftyy Posted March 30, 2020 Share Posted March 30, 2020 I mean not really when bp.tf says your item is worth 16 keys but everyone buys it for 6 because that's what the bots decided it was worth Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toad Posted March 30, 2020 Share Posted March 30, 2020 Are they good for the economy? No idea. Did they ruin trading for everyone else? Absolutely. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vebster Posted March 30, 2020 Share Posted March 30, 2020 49 minutes ago, Toad said: Did they ruin trading for everyone else? Absolutely. C'mon, they ruin it for people with less than 10 keys, not everyone. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Avery, A birb Posted March 30, 2020 Share Posted March 30, 2020 Yes Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
creepio Posted April 2, 2020 Share Posted April 2, 2020 On 3/30/2020 at 11:09 AM, Vebster said: C'mon, they ruin it for people with less than 10 keys, not everyone. So people that are unwilling to invest real money into the game to bypass the bots are being deterred from trading. See the problem yet? Tf2 doesn't have the pull it used to, and all signs point to the game slowly dying. Automating the market that's affordable to the majority of players does not help the traders that don't sit on their thumbs waiting for trade offers on unusuals and australiums to roll in. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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