How is the Community Market feeling (8)
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I’m still finding some success in the market flipping/buying, but I’m also only doing new cards since there is way more traffic there so it’s at times easier to move even with bots. I’ve also changed how I do my orders on certain cards this year, where I’m not jumping by just a few stubs every time I’m outbid. For the few cards that aren’t fast movers, I’ve tried to find the sweet spot where the bots won’t react. Sure, some cards I’ll end up overpaying for or underselling, and sometimes the bots are so aggressive that they’ll keep climbing until the buy now and sell now price are nearly the same.
There are also a couple of other factors contributing to marketplace problems besides just the bots. A example would be boss packs. Boss packs get overinflated if you don’t buy both during their inning. So that All-Star Mike Trout card is an easy target for bots because there aren’t that many available since most players locked him in collections. It would be nice if boss packs had a rewind just like events and ranked. I know we get the “second” pack when they do the final inning, but I think it’s time for SDS to think about this.
Player retention I think has also hit really hard this year. So as we’ve lost players for whatever reason, we’ve lost more cards being moved and available. On the flip side of that, the amount of bots probably hasn’t changed much. So we end up with a higher percentage of bots active in the marketplace compared to actual humans.
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@SDS_JoeK @Manu__SDS @ manus favorite people at SDS Update?
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It is definitely a shame that bots keep worming their way into the market, especially as the player count declines as @arcprime126_xbl mentions. Don't let up, devs! Keep up the fight for those of us that are still here. Maybe as MLBTS 27 development ramps up, y'all can find a way to keep the bots out from the get go. Just don't abandon MLB 26. The market has gotten better but the bots need to be stopped for good.
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Just keep this work rolling into 27! I was annoyed at the market validation thing on the app at first, but now I see it is working
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@Oliver230230230_PSN -- we did do some banning yesterday, I'm told, so hopefully that helped some. As always though, keep us posted on how things are feeling.
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@sds_joek_psn and @manu__sds_mlbts I think you should know something.
ITSA SPOOKY MONTH!
does epic spooky dance
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@SDS_JoeK_PSN Thanks for the update. Unfortunately, it hasn’t changed anything. I checked bids I placed yesterday to see what went through overnight. Most are still sitting as the 1st or 2nd bid, despite numerous sales of the same cards above my bid.
Since you’ve asked me to keep you updated, there’s another behavior I’ve been watching. MLB Draft Drew Buress is trading at inexplicably high prices compared to other mid-round draft cards. Its completed transaction history suggests it’s being used for stub transferring. I experimented by buying up a bunch and listing seven of my own between 70K and 180K. In the past, the bot buys my listings; other times it undercuts me by one stub so quickly that the activity only shows up in completed transactions, not the bid sheet. Today I realized something different going on. about 30 minutes ago, stub transferring was happening and I put my high bids to interfere with it and the activity stopped and suddenly a dozen normally priced sale listings appeared. I’ve seen this before and originally thought it was some automated, largely pointless SDS response to detected stub transferring, perhaps an attempt to make it look like something was being done rather than letting the activity happen out in the open. But it’s becoming much easier to believe SDS does nothing in that situation and the bots themselves are simply covering their tracks. Historically, the lack of normal sale listings and an absurdly high Buy Now price made these cards easy to identify. Now, normal listings suddenly appear, making the market look perfectly fine even though suspicious activity was happening seconds earlier.
As for actually addressing this, source filtering has made the biggest difference in the past, particularly blocking emulators from accessing the app. Banning accounts is fine, but not stopping the problem at all. All the accounts used are temporary and are from players buying 3rd party stubs. So actually, you’re banning accounts that may have used bots for 5 minutes while being accessed by the 3rd party stub sellers. Instead of banning accounts you need to focus on preventing access to the app by configurations used by bots, I.e, android emulators, vpn, ip addresses from Russia and China. I’m not an expert in these things but right now, I would not be surprised if validation tokens from 24 hour verification are getting recycled and spoofed over and over by multiple bots accessing the api. When reCAPTCHA v3 was introduced, the marketplace briefly felt completely free of bots. Even after switching to v2, after the first week of bots running wild, tighter restrictions and verification every six hours seemed to make a noticeable difference. Over the last week, however, the problem has become rampant again, coinciding with verification being extended back to 24 hours. It makes me wonder what other filters have been relaxed.
I think the approach of starting with loose restrictions and gradually tightening them to avoid inconveniencing legitimate users has failed. Spectacularly. Start by restricting bots aggressively, then gradually loosen restrictions if legitimate players are being caught. The reason these bots exist is to steal from legitimate players and SDS by selling the stolen proceeds through third-party stub sites for a fraction of the price.
One last thing, it’s a fact, not just my opinion. SDS’s silence has left players searching elsewhere for answers. I Googled the issue last night and as my first result found what appeared to be a gaming news article describing marketplace protection as essentially nonexistent, with players unable to compete against bots. The article even linked directly to a site selling cards and stubs that players were struggling to obtain legitimately as the only solution to marketplace corruption. Think about that for a second: third-party sellers are using the marketplace bot problem, and SDS’s apparent inability or unwillingness to address it, as SEO to reach frustrated players and sell them the very cards and stubs being obtained through this activity. They’re essentially marketing the solution to a problem they have created that’s hurting your own game. Not to mention frustrating me. -
Tl;dr gotta be way more aggressive with the tools you have to keep bots out of the marketplace. 3rd party stub sellers have created web pages explaining how severe the bot infestation has become as SEO to reach frustrated players looking for answers and present a solution to the problem in the form of buying cards and stubs directly from 3rd party sellers.
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Thanks so much for the thorough update here, @oliver230230230_psn !
I'm sure this will help inform @manu__sds_mlbts and his team as they continue to dial things in.
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@Oliver230230230_PSN Please don’t ban users from Russia. I’m a legitimate player of this game and big baseball fan that lives in Russia. You can’t paint all users from an area with a broad brush like that.
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@SiberiaTigerCub_PSN apologies. I don’t mean to sound like blocking an entire country would be helpful… It would not. I meant to emphasize that I think the most effective thing to do would be blocking unwanted traffic at the source - more aggressively.
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@Oliver230230230_PSN I agree with that, but you also aren’t wrong either. I think many of the stub transfer sites for this game and other sports titles are indeed operating out of here in Russia. There are also legitimate players like myself who earn stubs legitimately too here.
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I think bots are also finding ways to make it look like they are humans. Instead of immediately outbidding or underselling my orders, it waits 3 to 5 seconds to do so. That makes me go to some other screen and assume my order is good. However, in reality it’s not and I’m still outbid. I’ve been in amusing bidding wars with who I believe are humans, but I think bots are now making themselves look like humans with these little intentional delays.
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I have a question I haven’t been able to find an answer to anywhere. A actually solution/explanation will be very much appreciated.
I dowloaded the mlb the show companion app on my iPhone. I signed in with my Xbox account thats linked to my sds account and email is verified and everything.
My issue is that I’ve been buying and selling cards. But the app sends me to “market verification” screens every 20-30 mins, like literally I have to keep signing in to verify my account. I Recently I got locked out of being to buy or sell cards on the companion app for 5 hours because I had “too many verification attempts”
My question is, why does the app make me verify my account so many times? It always leads to me being locked out for long periods of time.
P.S: i do not buy and sell cars super fast, so I shouldn’t be flagged as a bot, that is my frustration why I don’t understand why this is happening.
