Are you selling or are you buying???
I have known for a while that there were bots on the market and I do believe that this actually hurts most of the people. The real people that actually care about the game and the cards are the ones being ripped of by a false inflated value on those vouchers.
Tonight I decided to do a few tests to see if I could identify who were the bots even if I had suspicions on some names.
I started buy selling 1 VOUCHER just under the market... I don't remember who bought it but I think that it was fair and square. So right after that I decided to put a buy order just over the highest one on the market. To my surprise, a lot of the buy orders that were just under me raised their buy orders as well...
I thought... maybe they will react even if I make a buy order for 0.001 VOUCHER... and guess what?
They did. Probably that the person who programmed those bots didn't think to include that at first.
That tiny bit of VOUCHER shouldn't affect the market at all but it did.
So I continued that game for a while and was able to raise the value of VOUCHERS for about 0.8 HIVE from where I started. While I was only trading cents on the market, it had a huge impact on it.
Eventually, another account (ntang) bought my 0.001 VOUCHER bids twice. Didn't put any sell order, was just there to eliminate my order for the list so that the bots stop reacting. I believe they were also put on halt manually at some point and at the same time, they all moved their buy orders down for 0.4 HIVE.
Should hive-engine be free?
I don't have the answer to that question.
I believe that it's a nice feature that you can cancel your order, buy, sell anytime without any fees. I wouldn't mind playing against real people on the market, but the problem also comes from that lack of fees. I believe that in the end some people are abusing the system and it's the users/players that get ripped off. What's your opinion on the matter?