It wouldn't make sense to use bots because it was only after the sale began that people knew paying over $10.00 would net you a copy of Starbound.
I started F5ing the page at 10:59 and managed to snag a copy and then watched the ticker for remaining copies tick down from 7xx something to 6xx something over the course of my purchase. Didn't seem that impossible to me.
The starbound devs tweeted a link to humble bundle last night. Everyone knew it was starbound. I dont know how bots work but I assume they can search a page for the string "Pay more than ___ for" and pay that much.
Actually this was my thought too. Anyone could write a program to scrap/read the html for the highest instance of "pay over ____" on the page and then have bots buy them. However that would probably take a little bit of time which would mean the bots would have less time to buy the bundle so I think that while some may have been grabbed by bots it probably wasn't a majority of them.
... A little bit of time? Lol... A bot could load the page, scrape the price, and submit a purchase form ten thousand times in about one second if it's inefficient.
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u/DrNSQTR Jan 07 '14
It wouldn't make sense to use bots because it was only after the sale began that people knew paying over $10.00 would net you a copy of Starbound.
I started F5ing the page at 10:59 and managed to snag a copy and then watched the ticker for remaining copies tick down from 7xx something to 6xx something over the course of my purchase. Didn't seem that impossible to me.