News GPU Bot Battle: Average Gamers Turn to Bots to Score an RTX 3080

[Admin]

An arms race is developing in the tech buying world, as Redditors make purchasing bots accessible to the average person.

GPU Bot Battle: Average Gamers Turn to Bots to Score an RTX 3080 : Read more

 

[hotaru.hino]

If it becomes like this going forward, then I look forward to getting a video card +1 year after it launches.

But hey, at least all of those people beta tested the product for me. 🙃

 

[Meticulotron]

"When everyone's super....no one will be."

I haven't even tried to find one yet. I keep thinking, why can't the retailer prevent the bots? They could see the bot continuously checking and simply put temp blocks on those IP's. How is the bot getting away with buying multiples if orders were said to be limited to one per person anyway?

• the bot could change IPs? The block should still work unless the bot is changing IPs for every check.
• potential false positives for humans checking manually but too frequently? An unfortunate price to pay to level the playing field.

Maybe not the best solution or even a good one, just thinking out loud.

 

[neojack]

2020 is definitely a new decade huh.
when humains can't compete with machines...

here it's just about a GPU, but for some serious stuff, it would be an ethical problem.

exemple :
- for immigrating to canada from france, i had to signup to a special program called "PVT". about 15000 slots availlable once a year on the french governement's website.
I had mine easily but a few years after me, i heard all slots were full just minutes after they were put online.
that's the kind of situation were a dedicated person can write a bot wich would give an unfair avantage.

- imagine for same situation for limited-supply vaccines or other life-treatening purposes ?


well, i guess in a world where everything is managed on internet, developpers have more power than ever.

 

[csm101]

what needs to be done is that law should be passed to make is illegal to sell new items such as new graphics cards, cup's etc, above the max price stated in the original retailer site. when that is in place selling to high prices at sites like ebay become illegal' and in turn those sites will also put a ban on those products. so that will get rid of these scalpers for good. i personally trolled some of the listings in the ebay by putting bids so that the price goes high where no one will be paying that amount to get a new RTX card. sometimes you do need to fight fire with fire.

 

[JamesSneed]

If it becomes like this going forward, then I look forward to getting a video card +1 year after it launches.

But hey, at least all of those people beta tested the product for me. 🙃

I'm just going to wait for Navi read reviews and buy something November time frame once I decide on Nvidia or an AMD card. I'm in no hurry to be first. I did the same when I built a Ryzen 1800x machine 3 months after launch. Was nice most of the BIOS kinks were resolved.

 

[digitalgriffin]

I noticed the same situation for the coolermaster NR200P and NR200 series cases. Ever since reviewers have praised this case, it's been impossible to find at less than $159. Some are $179 which is twice the MSRP. I found some for $10 over MSRP, but that lasted quite literally < 1 hour before they sold out. They are also advertising middle of October as a delivery which means they are full of @#$#@.

I'm not paying that price. For that price I can get a boutique brand all aluminum case that is of higher quality.

 

[treeface]

I know and realise I'm just stating the obvious, but if no one bought the cards at hiked up prices from Ebay or 3rd party sellers at Amazon then these scalpers would be less inclined to do this activity. I get that people are impatient and want to get their hands on the card for their new builds, but participating in spending 15-40% over the stock prices is perpetuating the greed by the scalpers.

 

[bigdragon]

I agree with the whole "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach. A bot is now required to get tech toys like high-end graphics cards, game consoles, and certain other products. I had to use one to buy a Quest earlier this year (during the lockdowns, before the whole Facebook account thing). The idea of running a purchase bot on my personal server seems inevitable given all the market manipulation going on.

 

[Exia00]

Times like these i am glad that there are local PC shops that doesn't do deliveries and when they bring out new items it is always 1 per customer/household and there are some sites as well that does prevent the use of bots to get items.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I find all of this very entertaining actually because early adopters are, for the most part, the biggest NOOBs on the planet. Guys like me who have been around awhile know that it's the worst thing that you can be. We don't like flying blind because we've seen the results of it either first-hand or we've read enough about it to avoid it like the plague. Never be an early adopter and never buy something when something else is just around the corner unless you have no other choice (that can happen sometimes, like if something fails out of the blue).

Now just imagine...

• Scenario #1 - You've already gone through hell to get this shiny new piece of engineering and discover that the first set of drivers are awful and the card is more or less unusable. You're stuck sitting there with a rather expensive paperweight until better drivers are released and can't play the game that you've been dying to play.
• Scenario #2 - You've bought a new card only to discover that it's too low-end for its ray-tracing to really work and then, a few weeks later, your card's competition releases products that delete your card.
• Scenario #3 - You bought an RTX 2080 Ti in the past six months.

Knowledge is power and people who go nutz to get the newest thing on the block when something else is coming out soon after have no knowledge and no power so they get screwed more than anyone else. If they're lucky, they eventually learn not to do this but not all are smart enough to learn life's little lessons.

Even if I did want an RTX 3080, I would wait for the RX 6900 XT release because there's no way that it would cause the price of the RTX 3080 to go up but there's a very good chance that it would make the RTX 3080's price go down. Seeing something like this is like watching a flat-Earther trying to fly. It's puzzling yet hilarious at the same time and always ends with me saying "WELL, DUHHHH!"

 

[lordhenry85]

"When everyone's super....no one will be."

I haven't even tried to find one yet. I keep thinking, why can't the retailer prevent the bots? They could see the bot continuously checking and simply put temp blocks on those IP's. How is the bot getting away with buying multiples if orders were said to be limited to one per person anyway?

• the bot could change IPs? The block should still work unless the bot is changing IPs for every check.
• potential false positives for humans checking manually but too frequently? An unfortunate price to pay to level the playing field.

Maybe not the best solution or even a good one, just thinking out loud.

I can tell you that from what I've read the scalper bots are a lot more advanced in that they usually run multiple instances of the software with multiple IPs either through proxies or VPNs. They are tough to detect. But that's why my Twitter bot tries to give people a chance to know when it will be in stock without been a nuisance to the websites by only checking every 2 minutes. Furthermore by not sharing the tool publicly I make sure that I am the only one running the script and as such only one request from me every 2 minutes shouldn't bring down any server. In contrast scalpers run their scripts in a loop usually every second.

 

[Avro Arrow]

If it becomes like this going forward, then I look forward to getting a video card +1 year after it launches.

But hey, at least all of those people beta tested the product for me. 🙃

Sage Advice: Always have this attitude and you'll never get screwed.

"When everyone's super....no one will be."

I haven't even tried to find one yet. I keep thinking, why can't the retailer prevent the bots? They could see the bot continuously checking and simply put temp blocks on those IP's. How is the bot getting away with buying multiples if orders were said to be limited to one per person anyway?

• the bot could change IPs? The block should still work unless the bot is changing IPs for every check.
• potential false positives for humans checking manually but too frequently? An unfortunate price to pay to level the playing field.

Maybe not the best solution or even a good one, just thinking out loud.

I think that the only way to stop the bots is to force voice phone ordering. It would definitely work because it would be slower and IPs wouldn't matter. Only one card per person would be enforced. Sure, you could get several people trying to order at once collectively but they couldn't do the same damage as the bots.

2020 is definitely a new decade huh.
when humains can't compete with machines...

here it's just about a GPU, but for some serious stuff, it would be an ethical problem.

exemple :
- for immigrating to canada from france, i had to signup to a special program called "PVT". about 15000 slots availlable once a year on the french governement's website.
I had mine easily but a few years after me, i heard all slots were full just minutes after they were put online.
that's the kind of situation were a dedicated person can write a bot wich would give an unfair avantage.

- imagine for same situation for limited-supply vaccines or other life-treatening purposes ?

well, i guess in a world where everything is managed on internet, developpers have more power than ever.

I had no idea that so many people in France wanted to come to Canada.
Bienvenue, mon ami!

what needs to be done is that law should be passed to make is illegal to sell new items such as new graphics cards, cup's etc, above the max price stated in the original retailer site. when that is in place selling to high prices at sites like ebay become illegal' and in turn those sites will also put a ban on those products. so that will get rid of these scalpers for good. i personally trolled some of the listings in the ebay by putting bids so that the price goes high where no one will be paying that amount to get a new RTX card. sometimes you do need to fight fire with fire.

I would support a law like that but unfortunately, that would never work. It's because, you know, the many different countries thing. No matter where the law is passed, most countries won't have said law and thus the law is rendered powerless. It's like when the USA tried to stop torrent sharing. It was a pathetic attempt by the government to act on the side of the rich and powerful but the average person just laughed at them.

Millions were spent and...torrents still exist. They had no chance but still wasted tonnes of resources trying to get countries on their side. Since there will always be countries who are willing to tell the USA to "get stuffed" when the USA tries to pressure them to enact laws that they want, laws like the one you thought of, will never work. For better or for worse.

 

[Gurg]

Hopefully the scalpers will get stuck by either increased shipments by Nvidia or Nvidia releasing higher memory super models that are being rumored about.

Just like the scalper that bought up $40,000 of TP, was selling on Ebay and tried to return it once the shortage was eclipsed by supply. He was arrested and charged with hoarding/profiteering during a national crisis.

 

[spongiemaster]

Wouldn't something like 2 factor authentication work? During the order process, you have to enter a phone number and a code is sent to that number that needs to be entered. Even if they could script that, the goal in the end is to slow the order process down, so delaying the code being sent by a couple minutes would mean the script couldn't get 10 orders in at a time, and that delay could give the system time to check for duplicate phone numbers, so the scalper would need 10 different phone numbers and 10 different credit cards which really starts to complicate the process.

 

[lordhenry85]

Wouldn't something like 2 factor authentication work? During the order process, you have to enter a phone number and a code is sent to that number that needs to be entered. Even if they could script that, the goal in the end is to slow the order process down, so delaying the code being sent by a couple minutes would mean the script couldn't get 10 orders in at a time, and that delay could give the system time to check for duplicate phone numbers, so the scalper would need 10 different phone numbers and 10 different credit cards which really starts to complicate the process.

The problem with that is VoIp, it's actually pretty easy to get an internet phone number for texts, and then it will be slow only for you, because for them they will just copy paste with their script.

 

[TStevens]

An arms race is developing in the tech buying world, as Redditors make purchasing bots accessible to the average person.

GPU Bot Battle: Average Gamers Turn to Bots to Score an RTX 3080 : Read more

I think this is just the beginning of a new form of inflation based on the online model and just in time inventory and the power of advertising to drive consumers all after the "next thing".
It used to be that box stores had to keep extra inventory to keep customers coming and that is one of the factors that kept prices down. Now new inventory goes straight out to the middleman and into the consumer in much shorter time periods. This also allows the manufacturer to only create and distribute just the optimum inventory at the best price point.
There will be lots of challenges. Just like what happened with highly desired items in the pandemic, now the entire world competes online.
And it doesn't seem like more competition for complex consumer items will come online in the immediate future (they just get bought out by semi-monopolies).

 

[bollwerk]

I feel like a lot of the botting could be slowed down by having a limit of 1 card per: shipping address, billing address, IP, email, credit card, etc... (meaning each order has to have a unique version of ALL these items)

 

[vinay2070]

If it becomes like this going forward, then I look forward to getting a video card +1 year after it launches.

But hey, at least all of those people beta tested the product for me. 🙃

4 to 5 months are good enough. I ll be getting mine in Feb/March. There will be RDNA2, probably 3000 Tis, high memory config cards, user reviews, time for companies to fine tune thier products and finally, lower prices!

 

[Executor Omega]

Yes, let's fight fire with fire, and maybe someday there will be enough people using bots and spamming requests from websites that the servers can no longer handle it. Let's waste resources to make the problem worse.

 

[escksu]

"When everyone's super....no one will be."

I haven't even tried to find one yet. I keep thinking, why can't the retailer prevent the bots? They could see the bot continuously checking and simply put temp blocks on those IP's. How is the bot getting away with buying multiples if orders were said to be limited to one per person anyway?

• the bot could change IPs? The block should still work unless the bot is changing IPs for every check.
• potential false positives for humans checking manually but too frequently? An unfortunate price to pay to level the playing field.

Maybe not the best solution or even a good one, just thinking out loud.

WEll, why should retailers prevent themselves from having more business??

 

[domih]

The gods of consumerism are laughing.

 

[HC1Gunner]

WEll, why should retailers prevent themselves from having more business??

1. Because people using Bots to just line their pockets are not the loyal customer that has been purchasing from their favorite e-Retailer for years. You have to treat your "real" customers properly.

2. If Bots could not be used, and scalpers were unable to be any cards, retailers would still sell out, but at least actual gamers would have purchased the cards!

 

[hannibal]

what needs to be done is that law should be passed to make is illegal to sell new items such as new graphics cards, cup's etc, above the max price stated in the original retailer site. when that is in place selling to high prices at sites like ebay become illegal' and in turn those sites will also put a ban on those products. so that will get rid of these scalpers for good. i personally trolled some of the listings in the ebay by putting bids so that the price goes high where no one will be paying that amount to get a new RTX card. sometimes you do need to fight fire with fire.

Mod Edit - G.R.A.P.E.S. violation - No Politics/Economics
Bot can use Many computers with Many Ip, so shutting down does not help.
Capha and similar helps, Until bots get better and can recognice complex objects... I am quite sure that that can be done allready...
... maybe we have to go back, when you have to use phone and actually talk to some one to get order done... not gonna happen, but one posibility.
other is to make autenthication harder. Is is possible to make it so complex that a Computer can not do it... I don`t know but it is the only way I can see this happening, or we just lost the war. We now that coverments allready use image recognition softaware to recognice humans. I am sure that it is even easier to recognice forms from the pictures that capha use... just see what google can do allready. Without Human intervention in the shopping event I can not see easy way to solve this problem.

 

[hannibal]

Hopefully the scalpers will get stuck by either increased shipments by Nvidia or Nvidia releasing higher memory super models that are being rumored about.

Just like the scalper that bought up $40,000 of TP, was selling on Ebay and tried to return it once the shortage was eclipsed by supply. He was arrested and charged with hoarding/profiteering during a national crisis.

That is the only working way... nobody buy scalpers and so scalpers have an inventory of GPUs that he has to sell below msrp... but too Many people Are willing to pay above msrp, so this is just as good as peoples willingness to not to buy...