What is the Purpose of an Auction Bot?

I've posted twice about suspicious users I've found in the auction, referring to them as bots. That's the term I've seen tossed around when people bring them up on Reddit. I'm not sure that's the best term for them, because these users don't appear to be winning cards for personal gain. For instance, I could understand some bot that checks Free Agency right after each refresh and automatically buys up all of a particularly great card.

But why would an auction bot exist?

To be frank, I honestly have no idea. I find the concept utterly confusing. Despite discussing this with numerous people and thinking about it myself quite a bit, I still have no good reason for why such a malicious user would exist (particularly a malicious user run by Com2Us, as some have suggested these are).

In this blog post, I'll go over the ideas I've come up with, and why I think they're pointless.

Raising bidding prices from legitimate users

This seems to be one of the first reasons people jump to and might sound convincing on the surface. But it doesn't hold water. Since all bids are private, having a bot to raise the prices doesn't make sense. Legitimate users won't be driven to bid higher because they don't know if the card they're bidding on is going to get bot'd. At most, it could drive legitimate users to bid higher since they've seen cards go for huge sums, but cards go for huge sums all the time anyway. So I don't buy that either.

Preventing too many good cards from getting into circulation

The data doesn't support this.

While the two bots I've encountered have exclusively won top-tier cards, there have been hundreds of similar cards won by legitimate users in the same time span. How does winning less than 10% of those auctions help? And also, we can get great cards from TS Crafts or League Rewards or a dozen other free, random paths.

If the bots were winning a significant chunk of all top-tier cards, this might be a more convincing hypothesis. But as it stands, their wins simply wouldn't do enough.

Creating a bid floor

This seems like the most plausible reason to me. The idea is that Com2Us decides that certain top-tier cards should not be able to sell below a certain amount (the bid floor). If no legitimate user bids above the bid floor, the bot is unleashed to win the auction and prevent a legitimate user from getting a steal.

But like with the circulation idea, the volume of bot wins is simply too low. There have been ~10x as many cards just as good (or better) going for a much lower average price than these bots are winning with. Why wouldn't those cards be bot-blocked as well?

In addition to that, sometimes great cards DO go for a steal. If Com2Us were using bots to enforce a hidden bid floor, I don't think we'd ever see steals happen in the auction.

Trolls. They're just trolls

Ok, maybe this is the most plausible reason to me. These malicious users are real-life users who have tons of cash to throw around and find joy in sniping great cards away from other users. Would any sane person throw away hundreds of dollars just to troll a random user? No. But, the internet is a weird place and I've seen crazier things.

But come on. Nobody's doing this to troll people they don't know.

We may never know...

At this point, I've resigned myself to just accepting that sometimes we just don't have the answers. None of these answers sound plausible to me, and I haven't heard any better ideas.

All that said, I still think it's worth it to bid in the auction. These malicious users only represent a tiny fraction of actual winning bids.