In Escape From Tarkov, the Flea Market is probably the most viable piece of the puzzle. It holds all of the items listed both by the game’s traders and human players, so its assets lead to more natural completion of tasks given by the very same traders. But the FLEA market is also used with bad intentions.
What kind of bad intentions? Well, since the very first edition of the FLEA market, players have discovered it could also be used as a tool to double your income. It’s not just the raids you can benefit from, but it’s also the Auction House that holds thousands of listings, some cheaper, some more expensive.
This is where the dark thoughts strive in, as a regular human player who struggles to get decent money due to short playtime, he starts to abuse the auction house, and with a discrete approach, he could make himself a fortune. And we’re not talking about a small price, but millions of rubles instead.
How the flea market works in Escape From Tarkov is that it synchronizes the timer of the offers across the thousands of people playing the game at the same time. Server distance most definitely matters on the timers, since the RTT or PING is not the same. Hence, not everyone lives next to the servers.
And we’re not talking about bots. Not that they’re absent, but there are merely a couple of them auto-sniping listings on the Flea Market. Most of the items sniped are coming from real players. You cannot beat them by nature since they use EFT’s public API, which allows them to react accordingly. There’s no UI or anything else that could slow things down. That’s why BOTS are the scariest to race against.
Luckily, with the latest update, BSG adopted new ways of filtering and dealing with things, improved public API, certificates, and more. Therefore, Bots are not that easy to develop nowadays. But let’s leave that behind and focus on the better part of the title above.
Shortening Flea Market Timer
A YouTuber claims that after refreshing the flea market at the right interval between the listing goes live. You could make the timer shorter for about 1-2 seconds. By some means, the item with a lower countdown than what other players anticipate should result in a secure purchase. Check the video below for a better explanation.
But this discovery shouldn’t be taken as severe, simply because it’s not how the FLEA market spreads its availability to all of the players.
