How is the Community Market feeling (8)
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@manu__sds_mlbts Seems to be alright so far- haven't experienced the "Market Verification" request though. Is that just at random? Or will this be something we all eventually have to deal with every 24 hours if we want to use the app?
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@manu__sds_mlbts market felt great from my experience last night. This morning I can tell the bots are back and have changed their approach. On a lot of player cards with margin the bots will slowly put in multiple orders anywhere from a quantity of 11-18. They do this slowly as to not get detected At an interval of every 30 seconds or so. Every time they are outbid the same process happens, every thirty seconds the bot will delete their old order and create a new one that is exactly one stub above/under the buy now/sell now price. This would not be suspicious with one card, but this same exact behavior is prevalent on at least 20 cards that I’ve witnessed and likely much more.
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Unbelievable that this keeps happening. Guess with that much money at stake is inevitable.
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@Manu__SDS_MLBTS last night was giving the same feel the market has when there has been an app update forcing people to update before using the app again. I didn’t notice any dramatic drops or rises in prices, which is something I’d expect to see if the bots currently manipulating prices were gone. I made lots of bids last night to see how they played over night and I’m not seeing any difference between now and a day ago or a week ago.
I’m def not a recapcha expert, but it seems to me the way v2 is being used atm, is not even evaluating an accounts usage in the mlb companion app? It’s going off the app to a webpage which needs to be clicked on, then a token good for 24 hours is granted? From there a bot can make countless interactions on the app. Requiring a human for 5 seconds every 24 hours will not prevent bots. I have been aware of these bots lots enough to know 1000% that whoever is operating them is much faster to respond to any changes or situations needing human attention then sds is. Days or weeks faster… maybe this is the first layer of a multi layered approach and it’s just getting started? I’ll keep my eyes open for any changes and will give my honest feedback. I don’t think whatever is happening atm is helping much.
I thought the last test using v3 did a tremendous job of getting rid of bots. Yes, humans were running into blocks but there wasn’t enough time to tinker with those parameters to try and find a balance were humans weren’t getting caught up and bots were still being blocked. I’m not sure why more time wasn’t spent testing that? I know some people reported timeout issues, including myself, but there wasn’t even enough time given for my timeout to be over to see if I could avoid it again. I didn’t notice people asking for v3 to be removed though. I suggested that using v3 without timeout restrictions might be enough but I don’t think that was even tried. The proof will be in the numbers you collect and I believe v3 was blocking bots. I could see it on my end using the marketplace and your numbers supported that as well. Right now, I don’t see anything telling me bots are gone… I hope you are allowed to continue working on this. -
@TripleH-4481_PSN definitely true
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Howdy,
As always, our measures are met with counter measures, but this time we have the upper hand and we'll squeeze them out and make it unsustainable to keep coming into the Community Market
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I’m not sure how closely the market is being monitored or if it is being monitored at all. The only difference I notice since doing a captcha verification twice is that many cards are being kept at price points that don’t reflect recent completed orders and pending bids. As I’ve said before, I’m not an economist but I’ve been playing around in this marketplace to know when something is off. For example Yordan alveeez postseason card buy bids are at 67k, 65k the. 57k. Every few minutes one sells at 67k and instead of going down the list of bids and naturally going down to the 57k range, a new buy bid is made at 67k again. Is someone watching 24/7 to make a new bid 12k above the highest bid? Over and over and over again? Maybe. Probably not tho. Many cats are being artificially kept at bids way above were they should be according to market demand. I hope you keep squeezing so there can be more signs of prices reflecting market demand instead of bot demand. I am hopeful this method can be effective but since being put into action yesterday I’m not seeing it. I wanted to make sure that some response is recorded because I haven’t seen feedback from any other players this afternoon. I’m rooting for you
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@manu__sds_mlbts I think for next year you should do random email verification multiple times a day while using the app. Appreciate your communication and what your trying to do.
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@DEF266_PSN I like that idea. But instead of just doing a verification only by email, maybe do verification via google authentication too.
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Bot currently active on Ryan Braun card. Instantly outbidding by 2 stubs on a buy order.
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There’s bots active on everything with the potential for profit. Some are more aggressive than others. I’ve had bids sitting for a few days now that aren’t getting filled. There’s stub transferring going on with multiple cards and past event reward cards have been made impossible to get unless paying 30k more then they should be. Bots are instantly outbidding to buy all inventory on market and anything listed below the price they’ve set is instantly bought up and added to their overpriced inventory. It’s total market manipulation. See egg series Colson Montgomery, negro league biz markey, vintage gleybor torez, mural mike moustakous.
It does not feel like there are less bots since last weeks update. If anything, the bots have a stronger influence over the price that items are at and keeping sell prices artificially high. I don’t know what this last update entails but there was mention of it being a long and bumpy process. Now that everyone has seamlessly updated the app and the new sign in process, etc seems to be working without issue - maybe the squeezing the bots out of the marketplace phase can begin. -
Is there anyone that pays close attention to the market that tried to invest over the weekend that can provide feedback about the market? Does buying and selling feel “fair”? Do you feel like you are on an even playing field versus other humans? Do you feel like you can succeed in the market if you tried? Do you think there are bots? Some bots? Lots of bots? Do you know there how? Are there predictable patterns? Do you feel safe or protected using stubs in the marketplace? Do you resent having to spend any amount of stubs on anything because there’s no trust or integrity in the marketplace? Is it possible it’s just me and thousands of bots left I’m using the market?
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I would say I pay very close attention to the market, so I will try to answer your questions/observations to the best I can. Feel free to reach out/DM (if that's an option here, or on discord) if any of my answers need more explaining.
Event cards have typically gone up on weeks where the event rewind isn't a reward. It's been one of my better ways of making stubs, buying the dip at 12-15k then selling for 25-35k. This one is higher because this event lasted 10 days instead of 4 days or a week, the last event rewind pack being 3 weeks ago, and the legend collection coming up. Egg series Montgomery and then Biz Mackey I would expect to be higher than the Vintage and Mural ones listed, since you have to have every Egg Series card for Beltran/New Legend and then the negro league baseball series the number required for each legend has increased. Plus with Events, less people are playing multiplayer modes, so for offline players/people who don't play events there are less of those cards available to them.
To your other questions, I have made nearly 250k this week flipping, so would be interested in which cards you've specifically been targeting, since I would say it's been successful for the cards I'm targeting. Yes, there are still bots active, they just aren't doing the 300+ orders anymore to make it obvious. I know you mentioned the bots now moving to doing the orders by every 30 seconds in another thread, and I agree with that and have seen it on cards as well. I called out the Postseason Victor Martinez as being a stub transfer card yesterday (I know there are more, but that one I easily noticed) so you are right again on that. I have never spent money on stubs, and have built myself a great nest egg of stubs spread between roster updates, flipping, and holding onto cards, so it’s been fair in that I’m making stubs in multiple ways. To answer your 'resentment', personally I would only say I hate headliners and chase packs being so bloated, so when I buy those cards those are the only ones I hate the market for, but chase cards have been inflated for the last few years so am trying to get used to it. Maybe I have just accepted the market for how it is, since it's kind of just been inflating each year since '24, but I've definitely noticed patterns the last few years on which cards or series are safe investments and ones to avoid because of volatility.
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To add to that, I do silver to gold exchange packs. It's pretty profitable that is how I managed to get all four major collections completed. I also do some passive flipping on targeted cards that move quickly so I don't tie up stubs. I also have done investments for the first time ever, the last two roster updates I made 215k stubs on the one before and just under 200k on this one. I am trying my hand at investing this upcoming collections, I bought a lot of former WC cards when they were lower and few other lower risk cards that historically have done well just before a big collection drop to see if they pan out. I may skip out on this collection if it's a pitcher, since I don't play multi-player. It's not all that important to me to have a meta pitcher playing offline DD. I skipped out on John Donaldson last year and just went after position players I wanted.
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Howdy and Happy Sunday!
I have now tighten up the rules and we should probably see a significant impact...
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Indeed, seems better
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Much better!
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Glad to see someone working on this and providing updates, kinda wish this was more of a thing Months ago but, is what it is. But this is one of the single worst things about this game this year for sure. Hopefully for 27 we can use the market without bots, or at least no so many.
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These actions have renewed by confidence for MLB The Show 27
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Looks like the Brice Turang WBC card (earned through event rewind packs) was active earlier today for stub swapping/selling. So September 14th from 10:45AM PDT to 10:56AM PDT is where I'm seeing nearly 100 orders completed in a small window. Also seems to have been active late last night. Hope this information helps so you can keep banning these bozos purposefully and willfully breaking ToS. Is this the best place to report these types of issues Manu? Or should I be doing tickets.
