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Auto-overcutting scripts


sfpt

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Buy orders on backpack.tf are fundamental to how the site works. But some people who make buy orders (namely sprekt lol) just have a script that automatically overcuts buy orders you make 30 minutes after you make them. it's bullshit and unfair to those who don't use bots. plus, he got someone banned for abusing his script, which is bullshit because he was the one who made the script. nobody should be banned just for taking advantage of someone else's malintent. sprekt needs to be banned from making buy orders temporarily so he shuts off his damn script and i can actually make buy orders again

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Yep, already tried reporting them myself but nothing happened. shrug.

 

Also I got the same bullshit excuse of "abusing" scripts despite the fact that I ended up buying something for over 40 refined his buy order, realising didn't have enough pure to do other trades so wanted to resell it. got blocked and ghosted, confronted them on marketplace pm's got the shit excuse, then got ghosted.

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I’m just curious why these super high volume traders are still here to begin with. Economy seems super sketchy even since the crate depression and no updates ever. I’m not putting thousands of dollars worth of keys into this game

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I literally can’t use buy orders. They were supposed to be useful for users, now they just make money for the same 3-5 people.

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Buy orders are a joke now lol. Everyone just adds "I can pay more than the rest!!" to their buy order. Fucking hate those overcutting bots.

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 Oh look, its this thread again.

38 minutes ago, Goliac said:

I literally can’t use buy orders. They were supposed to be useful for users, now they just make money for the same 3-5 people.

By "usefull to users" you mean making profit for yourself. Regular user wanting do buy or sell some items fast and easy actually benefits from bots. Those complaining about bots are not "users", they're profit whores just like bot owners. If you can't "make money" without a bot, get a bot instead of whining, you only need a couple of brain cells for that nowadays. This site is obviously pro-bot, bots probably make a decent chunk of money for site owners through donations/premium since they use up a lot of listing space, won't be surprised if some admins run bots themselves. And then you guys show up and ask site owners to cut their own profit so you can make more profit on their resource. Hilarious.

On a side note, sprekt isn't even a good target for OP whine, he doesn't have auto accept. I doubt most sellers going to choose his listing over autoaccept bot that buys unusual hat 1 ref lower.

4 minutes ago, MFB Goobie said:

Everyone just adds "I can pay more than the rest!!"

This doesn't work as good as you think either.

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29 minutes ago, Chuck said:

 stuff

I have no problem with people owning bots, people writing autoprice scripts, and people owning hundreds of thousands of dollars in unus with a monopoly on items. I've owned a bot myself in the past, and it is incredibly helpful and fun to own. I do have a problem when people get banned for abusing scripts. You want to get ahead of the market with your scripts, you should have to pay the price with bad deals and people potentially abusing your scripts. Can't have the best of both worlds.

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27 minutes ago, Crazyy Cow said:

I have no problem with people owning bots, people writing autoprice scripts, and people owning hundreds of thousands of dollars in unus with a monopoly on items. I've owned a bot myself in the past, and it is incredibly helpful and fun to own. I do have a problem when people get banned for abusing scripts. You want to get ahead of the market with your scripts, you should have to pay the price with bad deals and people potentially abusing your scripts. Can't have the best of both worlds.

It's not how business works. If abused bot owner brings admins more money (including potential money) than abuser, it's in their interest to side with bot owner.

What's wrong with this situation is the fact that abusing bots is not included in the site rules as bannable offence. Rules should be clear. But then again I'm not making rules here and site owners can do whatever they want with their site.

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then this shows a need for the rules to change. clearly there is a problem: admins siding with the side who makes them more money, not the side that is correct. I don't even necessarily agree with your sentiment - i think admins try their best to apply the rules, but the only reason that person got banned is because it was "clearly done on purpose." at no point in the rules does setting buy orders and selling to whoever overcuts you is not allowed. it's not even price manipulation, because you aren't attempting to change the price of the item. it's taking advantage of something that shouldn't be there. it's frustrating. and the reason I am complaining about sprekt is that I am human as well. I make a buy order for certain hats, say the stormy storm boxcar bomber (which, thankfully, i got one of, from someone else), and sprekt overcuts me. I overcut him, he overcuts me. now the buy orders are higher and I didn't even intend for them to be.

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32 minutes ago, Chuck said:

It's not how business works. If abused bot owner brings admins more money (including potential money) than abuser, it's in their interest to side with bot owner.

What's wrong with this situation is the fact that abusing bots is not included in the site rules as bannable offence. Rules should be clear. But then again I'm not making rules here and site owners can do whatever they want with their site.

It is how business works. Being a corrupt site does not bring long term viability to the site, regardless of the profit it may bring to them in the short term. 

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35 minutes ago, sfpt said:

now the buy orders are higher and I didn't even intend for them to be.


I know people who create buy orders for an item they own knowing bots/overcutters will overcut them. They then delete their buy listing, and can now sell the item for more because pricing apparently revolves around buy orders nowadays.

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I'm absolutely not buying your bullshit regarding genuinely caring about this banned folk. You just use him as an excuse to start conversation about restricting bots so you could make more money (or perhaps so you could try to scam bots yourself and get away with it). Imagine calling someone corrupt because they care more about their profits than some random dudes profits. And even if you were genuine, even from morals standpoint your arguments are questionable at best. Allow robbing someone because they're making more than you and you found opportunity to rob them? What is this, fucking Sherwood?

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FYI the decision where admins sided with users of autopricing scripts was in August 2019 in report against DX

 

Interestingly, at first admin wrote something that made total sense:

Quote

It's not the same thing as exploiting bugs in bots, which we have punished for before. This isn't a bug, it's what your bot is designed to do.

[...]

The fact is, you use this feature because it nets you profit, so whether or not that profit is worth the occasional loss is your choice to make as a person running a bot.

 

But then instead of saying that autopricing scripts are okay to be taken advantage of, which could eventually fix this situation in a more or less fair way, they apparently decided that autopricing scripts users are somehow sacred and protected.

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Realistically those using bots already have an inherit advantage over non-automatic users, the over/undercutting scripts just seem to amplify it 

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56 minutes ago, Chuck said:

I'm absolutely not buying your bullshit regarding genuinely caring about this banned folk. You just use him as an excuse to start conversation about restricting bots so you could make more money (or perhaps so you could try to scam bots yourself and get away with it). Imagine calling someone corrupt because they care more about their profits than some random dudes profits. And even if you were genuine, even from morals standpoint your arguments are questionable at best. Allow robbing someone because they're making more than you and you found opportunity to rob them? What is this, fucking Sherwood?

jesus christ you're mad. I do care about DX, because I don't want to get banned for similar shit, and I feel his ban was unjust. I don't get why you're questioning my compassion towards another individual who got banned for something that is not against the rules. This isn't robbing someone. This is simply using their bot for it's intended purpose :)

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12 minutes ago, ⇄ | Pollen said:

Realistically those using bots already have an inherit advantage over non-automatic users, the over/undercutting scripts just seem to amplify it 

agree with this completely

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40 minutes ago, sfpt said:

I do care about DX, because I don't want to get banned for similar shit, and I feel his ban was unjust. I don't get why you're questioning my compassion towards another individual who got banned for something that is not against the rules. This isn't robbing someone. This is simply using their bot for it's intended purpose :)

You literally just confirmed every word I said without even realising it. Guess disputes aren't your thing

40 minutes ago, sfpt said:

jesus christ you're mad.

Ah I see, being good at disputes is hard if you're like 15.

 

I think I'll just stop wasting my time trying to make proper argument here.

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I very much agree. 

 

I made an API call on every unusual a couple of months ago, partially with the intention of exposing how bad the overcutting problem is. Here are the results.

 

There are 19, 038 unique unusual hat combinations.

 

Here are the top 10 buyers buy number of unusuals that they have the highest buy order on and whether they have an overcutting script.

1. Rubi 2,659 YES

2. Killua 2,098 YES

3. Thundacat 1,920 YES

4. Sprekt 1,725 YES

5. Zol 1,615 YES

6. Itrem95 1,256 YES

7. Julia's Pet 1,154 YES

8. Toad 598 NO 

9. Yurchik 560 NO

10. Juice789 464 YES

 

As you can see, 8/10 the top 10 have overcutting scripts. The 2 that don't have are easy to explain; both are because they have buy orders on primarily rare hats with few in existence. Most of Toads are generic buy orders, where Yurchik's are on hats the have not sold for years.  You can also see that there is huge drop off for the top non-overcutting buyer, showing that it is impossible to hit the critical mass of top buy orders without a script. 

 

The top 7 buyers have control of 12,457 hats, which is a total of 65%!!! of all hats. This number gets worse when filtering by > 10 in existence, since it buy orders are more effective the more of a hat exists. It then becomes 5,019/7,179 or 70% of all hat listings. Wow.

 

Looking at the top 20 buyers overall (not necessarily all overcutters) the numbers become

16,702/19038 (all hats)  = 88%

6556/7179 (>10 in existence) = 91%

 

The top 20 buyers control almost 90% of all buy orders... Let that sink in...

 

The problem with overcutting scripts is that they are impossible to beat as a normal buyer; even if you updated listings 24/7 you would still be beat by overcutters. You could make the argument that "if you can't beat them, join them" but lets be real, most people do not have the skills to program and host a overcutting script. This is in the same vain as Amazon pushing out physical stores; and its not like you can just "become like Amazon" because it clearly doesn't work that way.

 

As far as the DX situation goes, while what he did was incredibly scummy and unethical, I really don't think he should of been punished for exploiting someone's script. All it takes is 1 if statement in the code to prevent shenanigans, and someone who does not have a script that protects them against that really has no excuses for that happening.

 

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If bp.tf banned or blocked overcutting scripts, they'd also have to ban bots that auto-generate buy orders, because they also have overcutting scripts built into the bots themselves often times.

 

It'd honestly be kind of nice if they full blocked/banned that shit so that buy orders become a lot less "can I beat the bot?", because even if you put "I'LL PAY MORE THAN THE OTHERS!!!", a lot of people are gonna ignore it because 1 extra key isn't worth waiting 12 hours for their trade offer to finally get accepted, since most of the time when you sell an unusual to buy orders, you want your keys immediately so you can either cash out if you need emergency cash or buy something that you need pure NOW for.

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12 hours ago, Vagisil said:

I’m just curious why these super high volume traders are still here to begin with. Economy seems super sketchy even since the crate depression and no updates ever. I’m not putting thousands of dollars worth of keys into this game

because there's still money to be made and tf2 is still a popular game despite lack of real updates and sure, you don't have to put thousands of dollars into the game, but people already have thousands of dollars invested into tf2 trading so why not keep making money while it's there

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4 hours ago, Xergoyf said:

nice research

 

Competely agree with that. Also want to say that DX's case was a bit different. He owned both of the items in existence that he had a buy order up for. That way, there is very little chance that his own buy order even gets filled, since it was a limited effect, with only the chance that a private inventory has another one. That was scummy, but at the same time, backpack has to take a stand on autopricing.

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9 hours ago, Xergoyf said:

I very much agree. 

As I am one of the developers, I would like to say I haven't used overcutting until 3 months ago. I have not seen much difference in my trades as a result. I just don't see much of a reason not to when about literally every other trader (bot or not) will list over you. You can see these strategies being used on the Steam Community Market and Marketplace.tf, except on those platforms the difference of 1 cent makes all the difference. Being 1 scrap over the next buyer does not guarantee you a purchase over every other buyer like it does on those platforms. I have bought so many things where I was not the highest buyer (yes, even when other bots were higher).

 

I wouldn't mind getting rid of auto overcutting as it's never been integral to my trading. This sort of pricing drives up competition and cuts margins (often to the point where certain items are no longer worthwhile to buy). This is very good for those that just want to buy hats and dump it when they don't want them anymore, but not as good as those out for profit.

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