Rip mug bots?

• [INTERNAL] Implemented tracking of potentially illicit Item Market websocket connections that assist mug bots

New update logs. So... ched finally does something? Is this the end of mug bots, is mug bots legal now?  

Previous discussion on mug bots:

Item Market Mugbots - An Inside Look

Mugbot that bypasses 30s item market cache

Chedburns last comment on the subject

By: Chedburn [1]

Posted on 10:28:41 - 08/06/25 (5 months ago) 

 

This is something we've been discussing internally for the last few weeks, and I agree something needs to be done, however, there really isn't a simple solution. It'd be good to have a conversation about it.

 

Discussions are ongoing with developers who're more knowledgeable than I am, but here's my understanding...

 

Websockets update the listings live in front of all viewers, the change in stock or the disappearance of a listing indicates a sale - money entering the seller's wallet. In the early days after the Item Market's release I believe we limited how many market connections each user could 'listen' to in order to prevent a player listening in on the markets of many different items - but anyone can still listen in on a particular item for live updates. There is no benefit to anonymizing these socket updates, because the random key still has to be linked to the listing and seller of course.

 

So this is just how live updates work. If you can watch market updates live, scripts can too, and there's nothing we can do about that. We can certainly ban that activity, but how do you ban an activity that's impossible to observe?

 

There are a few solutions I can think of, but they're all disruptive, and none of them are great I don't think...

 

•     Remove all live updates from the Item Market. Scripts could still illegally reload pages and scrape this data, but we'd be able to track anyone doing this automatically. This may make using the Item Market quite tedious - as players will continuously be attempting to buy listings that have already sold, and they won't see any new/better listings without reloading the page.
•  Mitigate buy-mugging on the item market by offering anonymity by default or for a cheaper price.
• Mitigate buy-mugging by delaying the deposit of sales to the seller by a random number of minutes.
• Mitigate buy-mugging by protecting those Item Market sales, or even any recently received sums that have been applied to the user without their own direct action, from being mugged for a while. Similar to how slowly decaying protection on wallet funds is applied after a recent mug.
• Eliminate buy-mugging by having funds go into cashiers checks, or more likely, stored in the market itself similar to how Bookies handles funds.

Would be good for some clarification on what's "illegal" vs not here. Or if it's simply that they plan to make it illegal IF they found good tracking methods.

So valid questions are how is/isn't it allowed to be used going forward as it seemed to be technically allowed, but frowned upon before.

I suspect as with most things someone went too far with dedicated multis/hiring people dedicated to feeding data into a bot across several accounts creating a network to track everything, which is the obvious outcome of allowing it. But again, AFAIK this is all technically allowed minus the multis part.

I suspect this is just step 1 testing what they CAN reliably track before setting standards they can't enforce. Still, I'd be nervous if I were someone running it. DA toyed with the notion of one and decided it was unethical regardless of the rules.

Btw in russian roulette there is a similar “mechanic”, via websocket you can tell if lobby is closed either because someone joined it, or because it expired after 15 minutes. If it expired (or was closed by the creator, I don’t remember), you know the money stays in lobby creator pocket 100%

But our gamblers are so tough and active that this rarely happens, though it does happen

Wouldn't using websockets (as scripting or something described as 3rd party to Torn) for any purpose be illegal? I really thought it always waa

It's a bit more technical, but this is targeting a specific kind of mug bot users afaik. Not all websocket bots. So no, it's not the death of mugbots.

For now. Ched didn't seem too keen on it so I'd lean more towards what I said where if they feel they can get solid tracking THEN they can make a ruling potentially. We'll see where it goes. Personally I'm pretty against stuff that gets too heavy on the technical end giving advantages, but there are ways to protect ones self from the defensive end even if offensive is limited to very technical organized groups.

We totally thought it was too unethical ched

[image: media1.tenor.com]

OT: Why would they announce this in the patch notes and just not have it running to actually catch people cheating it.

Remove, mitigate or make but mugging harder and your ruining the mug element of the game even further, The agility to self hosp has already done this, these plans will be the final nail in the coffin. 

Cheaper anonymous listings could have the same affect just on a softer level but this could be explored to maybe have the anonymous listing price (as a %age) based on the TOTAL sale value of the listing (not per item)

500k and Less is 5%

500k-2m is 6%

2m-5m is 7%

5m-10m is 9%

10m+ is 10%

These figures are just an idea.

Out of the options proposed by ched the best imo is the removal of the live update. Let's face it, you buy something online, marketplace, online auctions or global distribution.. you can sort by cheapest but that doesn't mean there are not better deals oit there

0.001% of the mugging playerbase would notice if bots using the websockets were removed.

My gripe is specifically about accessibility not "making it harder" unless you got someone sticking DN in a Websocket it's not accessible right now.

Anonymous listings are free with certain jobs. A change to anon listing fees would be a slap in the face to anyone who gave up on their progress elsewhere to get free anon listing. Plus individual item prices can be in one price bracket but the item is being sold as a stack for much more money. Bulk is a service that people pay good money for. Selling stacks as single items would ruin entire markets as people start selling singles.

oh. that why i always get mug offline.  so that legal for market tracking mug bot ? , just 8 sec when item got sold .. so i just keep a pc to keep it online then ez by pass this bot XD
09:14:48 - 14/11/25 You sold 1x ArmaLite M-15A4 on the Item Market to Bat_Out_of_Hell for $30,400,000 after $1,600,000 in fees.
09:14:54 - 14/11/25 MBS mugged you and stole $4,021,335 [view]
09:19:41 - 15/11/25 You sold 1x ArmaLite M-15A4 on the Item Market to LuciusCeasar for $33,440,000 after $1,760,000 in fees.
09:19:50 - 15/11/25 BiiGz (and 2 others) mugged you and stole $3,201,687 [view]
01:32:47 - 18/11/25 You sold 1x ArmaLite M-15A4 on the Item Market to heyDxn for $33,250,000 after $1,750,000 in fees.
01:32:55 - 18/11/25 Someone mugged you and stole $3,905,244 [view]

https://www.torn.com/loader.php?sid=attackLog&ID=4f174e0f33921cb3ddf16ccf76452e42
3 ppl in same faction try to mug me at same time lol


so i think their faction create a mug bot and push to faction discord channel for all member can farm ez mug. and when i report to staff they said that is legal script. If some one can confirm this is legal script i can write one and give it out for free XD Load image
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Staff telling you it's legal wasn't enough for you? 

Hello. Staff confirmed it’s a legal script in ur screenshot. Best of luck <3

I'd argue the mugging playerbase would notice but positively in that the playing field is more evened making people benefitting from bot alert traffic actually need to work for their dinner like everybody else.

i'm not sure, because it seems like the staff just sees me as a crying baby when i get mug. and they use the company special to see the money in my hand, not the mug bot (only 8 seconds). and in my opinion it doesn't seem very legal XD.

So what you are really looking for, is someone to agree with you. Gotcha

Womp womp

I am surprised bots monitor non-rw armalites, surely this is at most 3-4m mugs for most of them? barely keep up with merc profits with the risk of having your mug sniped.

This must take a lot of api keys to gets good coverage (<10s)  in these low value areas and manual work to update. Imagine clicking through every single listing to scrap names, I would have gone crazy. Or scripters have already developed a new method to scrap maybe.

wait for abuse from those using illegal scripts

When I first joined Torn the game was great, you had to work at it to achieve goals, sitting up till 1am to buy WLT then sitting for another hour to sell to make $20m !

Now it seems half the live community or more sits in Discord scripting. What is the use of scripts other than reducing Torn into an automated game played elsewhere.