TGWaffles (Thomas) – How Minecraft Cheaters Turned Physics Into Profit…

In any economy, you have the buyers, and you have the sellers. For example, in the real world, you have farmers, you have hungry people, and then you have the supermarket in the middle taking a giant cut of the profits. What if I were to tell you a similar thing happens in everyone’s

Favourite game within a game within a game, Hypixel Skyblock! What if I told you, that sometimes when you try to sell your hard-earned items, you aren’t selling to a customer who REALLY wants your dirt blocks, but instead, directly to a bot who will resell it on your behalf and keep the profits.

Let’s take a step back and have a look at how the economy came to be this way – what exactly is auction flipping? Well, auction flipping, is not, sadly, doing a super cool backflip for the highest bidder, but is instead when you sell something for a higher price than you bought it for.

Hypixel rolled out the auction house in – well, at the start of Skyblock. However, this early on in the game, the only type of selling on the auction house that you can do, were actual auctions. That’s right, if you wanted to sell your collection of 500 fancy swords,

You would have to list each one for a set time, and wait until that time was up before you could claim your 1,000 coins that someone bid because they didn’t know how to get to the gold mine. On the topic of claiming, you should claim your place under 10k in our race

To beat this subpar YouTuber who doesn’t even care about his subscribers. Looking at the insane rate you guys are subscribing, this might be your last chance to be under 10,000 – make sure you don’t miss out! Anyway, the way that these auctions worked meant that

If you wanted to buy a cheap item, everyone else also had the same chance to discover that exact same item, and bid it out of your price range – or maybe even it ended while you were asleep! Clearly this was quite annoying, especially when people were looking

To get rid of their items as quickly as possible so they could upgrade to the next best gear, so on May 19th, 2020, Hypixel added a new way to sell your items – “Buy it now”, or BIN. When you list your item as a BIN sale, you set a price

You want to sell it at, and a maximum auction time. That means that if someone tries to buy your item right away… They can! As a seller, if you wanted to get rid of items and get coins fast, you could simply list your item for cheaper and someone would buy it

Way faster since yours would be the best deal. This was a HUGE improvement, but also meant there was a gap in the market. If, previously, players were willing to pay 1M coins for an item, but you were listing it for 800,000 coins to get rid of it

Faster, there’s a free potential 200,000 coins being thrown away. Enter the flippers. Auction flippers are fantastic for you as a seller trying to sell items quickly, and terrible for you as a buyer looking for good deals. Their number one goal is to buy your cheap items fast, list them higher,

And wait for a buyer willing to pay the higher price to come along. As a buyer, though, that meant that once again, all the cheap deals were gone – you had to hope you got extremely lucky and managed to buy an item before a flipper did,

Or you had to spend the full price to one of these flippers and miss out on the potential savings. But, most players didn’t care. The flippers were putting real time into their flips – they had to know the market, what the price should be, that you were listing it below market price,

And they also had to see your listing soon after you sold it, so that someone else didn’t get to it. This was quite respectable, and soon became one of the easiest ways to make money in the game. Essentially, once you knew the prices, flipping

Takes very little work for your reward – it’s like an investment! You simply invest some money into an item, wait for someone to buy it, and boom! Your investment pays off. In the end, it turned into a 3 party system – you put in the work to obtain and sell the item,

The flipper puts in the work to know the market and where that item should really be priced at, and the buyer puts in the coins. Wait a second. Remember how I said you need to know the market to be a good flipper? What if you didn’t. Enter the flipping sites.

Hypixel provides an API for their auction data. An API is pretty much a way for other programs to interact with a system or read its data remotely. In Skyblock, it meant that you could write a system to download all the data of the current auctions.

And you could do that every minute, over hours and over days. With all of that data, you could start to figure out what things normally sell for – the median price – and with that, you can detect when auctions are cheaper than they should be! This gave rise to the first flipping tools.

The first website of its kind was a site called “HyAuctions” – if you’ve played SkyBlock, you’ve definitely heard of it. The site actually predates BIN auctions, releasing in December 2019, so when BIN auctions first arrived, they were straight on the scene. Now, the site was far from perfect –

But it still dramatically lowered the skill required for auction flipping – rather than memorising every single item, you just had to have some common sense and you could join in. HyAuctions was not the only site doing this. People built their own flipping sites, with their own price

Calculations, trying to beat the other websites. Most of these were private – for example, a developer called Meyi made a flipping site for themselves in September 2020, and let me tell you – flipping was LUCRATIVE back then. Next, the first paid sites started appearing,

Where you had to pay (with real money) to access these sites. To these players it was worth it – a hell of a lot cheaper than buying cookies or IRL trading, and a lot more respected in the community. One such paid site was made by a player called iCheppy

– remember this name, it’s super important later. It was pretty late to the party, launching on the 3rd of January 2021, but it further still widened the prevalence of these sites. Another site, called Coflnet, opened later still, in May 2021. This time it was another public site, and like hyauctions,

It tracked all auctions over time. But – it was faster. See, there’s another limitation I haven’t mentioned till now – these sites were slow. Aside from the infamous HyAuctions loading times taking multiple seconds, it’s just not very fast to keep a website open all the time

And copy-paste the view auction command into your chat. A lot of the time, if you were manually flipping auctions, you could beat the flippers since you’d see the auction on your screen and be able to instantly buy it, whereas the flippers had to see it, tab out of Minecraft, select it, copy it,

Tab back into minecraft, open chat, paste the command and then finally buy it. The smarter among you have probably already realised the obvious fix here – brain implants! No. But, what if we could somehow put the website flippers in-game? If we could cut out as many of these steps as Hypixel allows,

Maybe we could buy the auctions faster? Enter the mods. The first private flipping mods started popping up in January 2021, but they wouldn’t start to enter the public eye until much later. One of these, called Jasmine, was actually also made by Meyi – remember,

That’s the person who made a private flipping site earlier. They had moved onto better, faster things. Another early private mod was called Stonks. This was a flipper that started off as a Discord bot for finding exotics on auction and quickly adapted to work for pretty much any item sold.

Eventually, he too was struggling with being beaten by faster flippers, so a mod was the clear next step. Let’s quickly recap – how does the Hypixel auctions API actually work? Well, it updates once a minute, and there were around 70 pages of auctions with 1000 auctions on each page.

That’s 70,000 auctions live in Hypixel at any one time – and some of these mods could do that in under 10 seconds, after the API updates. Imagine if you, a manual flipper, tried to go through 70,000 auctions and check their prices? It just wouldn’t be possible – these tools had a REAL advantage.

And the mods, themselves, had a huge advantage over the websites. They pretty much worked like this: the mod continuously checked the Hypixel API for any new auctions, like the sites, comparing them to existing price data to determine whether it’s a “flip” or not.

If it was, the mod would then send a message in your chat. You could then just click the text in chat, and quickly buy the auction. This was MUCH more efficient than the previous website flippers, and saved so many steps – plus,

It seemed to be allowed by Hypixel, so there was no risk. But, they couldn’t stay hidden forever. Eventually someone would make a public mod, right? The date is the 25th of August 2021. 7 whole months after the first private mods were popping up. Oh, look, a new YouTube video. Oh.

Oh dear… Earlier I said that a player called iCheppy made a paid flipping site, and, like the others, didn’t stop there. They made a video showing their flipping mod, called AOTF – Aspect Of The Flipper. Now, the mod was nothing revolutionary –

As I said, it was first showcased 7 months after the other mods. But that’s not why this matters so much. The video gathered a LOT of attention. To date, it has 80,000 views. That might not seem like a lot, but considering the number of people who knew about mod flipping

Before this was closer to a hundred, this was wild. This video made people realise – flipping with a mod is MUCH faster than a website – and people made their own mods, others sold them, and overall the competition grew by a hundredfold in just a few weeks. The need for speed grew.

I said before that these mods could check the whole 70,000 auctions on API in under 10 seconds, right? Well, they had to get faster now – the 10 seconds QUICKLY shrunk with tons of programming time and optimizations. Some of these mods were now able to check every single page

Of auctions against their pricing information in under a second. With this, the room for human error slowly started to narrow. Remember how before I said that “anyone could flip as long as you had common sense”? Well, it turns out that common sense takes time. When you’re trying to compete with other mod users,

You can’t wait half a second for your brain to think about whether it’s a good deal or not. Someone with more money they can afford to lose will have already bought it! This meant that the pricing algorithms these mods used got increasingly more complex, since the better you could guess the price,

The faster your users could buy the items, and the more profit they made. With these mods operating like businesses, higher profit means more customers, and more money for the developers. Eventually, they got good enough at pricing that their users didn’t care anymore. At this stage, these mods were generating

Billions of coins per day combined for their users, and now that all required brain cells were removed, it was a game of reaction speed. Who would click the chat message first? Except it’s not just the chat message. After you opened an item’s buy menu,

You had to move your mouse to the middle of the screen to actually buy the item, and again to the left to confirm your purchase. You think you’d be able to guess where this is going – but apparently not! I was just as surprised as you,

When it turned out that some of these flippers had resorted to using DRAWING TABLETS to buy the items faster! Yes, those drawing tablets – auction flipping had turned into Minecraft osu! With drawing tablets, you could click on the exact position of the buy and confirm buttons every time, with some people going

As far as to mark it on the tablet with tape, so they didn’t miss. The mods also implemented keybinds, so you could simply hold a key on your keyboard and the auction would open. As they kept adding more features like this, they were getting closer and closer to breaking the Hypixel rules.

But it did require human interaction for every stage of the process, so it wasn’t breaking every rule, right? Enter the macros. You knew this was coming. When anything comes down to time, whether that be spending hours farming or buying auctions in mere milliseconds,

You’d be sure to see the macroers taking a piece of the pie. I do have to warn you, before we continue – doing anything we talk about from here on out will get you banned. It’s not worth it, you won’t even get to keep the coins.

Back when this was first happening though, Hypixel hadn’t yet caught on and most of these users got away scot-free with their malicious actions. If you’re blissfully unaware, a macro is basically a simple program that performs actions for you – anything from clicking your mouse, to moving your character –

Performing actions with little to no human interaction. Some of the simplest macros at the time would wait for a single button press from the user, and then instantly click the mouse where it expected the buy and confirm buttons to be. People could do this without any programming knowledge or skill –

They’d just use any macro program that let them click a spot on the screen in a certain time. Problem was, this still had to wait for the user to realise there was an auction to buy – fatal milliseconds where other, faster macroers could buy the auction first.

In case you didn’t know, a millisecond is a tiny unit of time used to measure extremely fast things. One single second is 1,000 milliseconds, and the average human reaction time is 250 milliseconds. When I’m saying a mere 250 milliseconds makes the difference between getting the flip or losing it,

You know this stuff happened FAST. The goal was to take away that human reaction time. Newer macros were designed as mods that you could install separately to the flipping mod itself, and it would automatically listen for the chat message, open the auction, and buy it – with zero human interaction required.

Let me show you an example. Did you see that? They were buying these items in under 100ms flat – and most of that time was spent waiting for the GUI to finish loading from Hypixel before it could click buy and confirm. Well, at least, these macros had to wait.

Even though these public flipping mods were widespread by now, that didn’t stop people from making and using their own mods. One such mod, we’ll call it “Mod F”, had a special, rule-breaking trick up its sleeve. It would, as most users called it, do a “confirm skip”. once you’d hit buy,

It would intercept Hypixel at the packet level, and say “Yep, I’ve clicked confirm” before the GUI could even show on your screen. Eventually, Mod F completely took out the GUIs and player interaction altogether – when it found an auction, it would ask Hypixel to view it,

And before showing the buy GUI with the gold nugget, instantly respond with the click, and same for the confirmation. This meant that players using Mod F could keep doing other things – zealot farming, dragons, anything, as long as the mod could run the /viewauction command. This would be quite easy to detect,

If only Hypixel knew what was going on. As the macroing scene grew, legitimate players were forced out of the flipping game, and more and more macroers were the only people getting auctions. The authors of the flipping mods didn’t like this – legitimate players were a big portion of their userbase,

And less legit players using their mod meant less profit for them. So, they tried to help – they added delays, fairness systems, to try and give their legitimate users an advantage, and to slow down the macroers. This did work, but each mod could only add

So many precautions and slowdowns before another mod, not adding those, would have such a large speed advantage that they got no auctions. As all of the flipping mods were limited to fetching auctions at the same rate, which is once a minute, when the Hypixel API updates,

Any delay or speed penalty you added would hurt your mod’s performance. For example, if you got the flips 100ms after the API refresh, and normal users took another 800ms after that to buy it, but the macroers only need 50ms, you’d need to delay the macroers by 750ms

More to make it somewhat fair for your normal users. But, that means no one using your mod could buy the auctions until 900ms after refresh – if another mod refreshed in 150ms but allowed macroers to buy the flips 50ms later, all the auctions would be sold 200ms after refresh.

It’s like black Friday, except you always lose. January 2022. The mods found an exploit. Or, I should say, some mods found an exploit. I’m not going to go into too much detail about how this works since it’s still not been patched, but normally, Hypixel sends

The new auctions to Cloudflare (to reduce their network load), and a few seconds later everyone can see the new auctions. However, with this exploit, the mods could see the auctions update without waiting for cloudflare, giving them sometimes up to a 2,000 millisecond advantage over the other mods – a HUGE advantage.

Using this trick, these mods had a lot more room to delay the macroers, since no one else would even see the same flips until a whole 2 seconds later. Thankfully this worked for a while, but the detection methods weren’t perfect – if a macroer waited until a super high profit flip, for example,

A 1 billion coin Hyperion being sold for 1 million coins instead, and macroed only that – the mods couldn’t delay them since they didn’t know the user was macroing until after they’d already bought the item! But – it worked. Players and macroers were on pretty fair ground most of the time,

And using a macro didn’t really help you out. Well… In September 2021, just after the first mods were starting to take off, Hypixel admin Minikloon posted this tweet, asking their followers if there should be a 20-second grace period before someone could buy your auction, so if you accidentally listed a Hyperion

For under 0.1% of its value, you’d have time to cancel it before someone could snipe it from you! This seems like it would be a GREAT change – just don’t show anyone else that the auction exists until the timer’s up, and you’d have all that time to realise your mistake

Before it could even possibly be sold. The date is April 2022, and that change is finally rolling out, except… That wasn’t exactly how it works. After listing an auction before this change, you actually already did have a small grace period before it would show up on your auctions

– roughly 5 seconds after creation. Now, however, you had a 20 second period, but that was before people could BUY the auction – that didn’t stop it from showing up on your user page, the in-game auction house, or, most importantly, on the auctions API. Remember how those mods with a 2-second advantage

Could mitigate macroers on almost all flips? Well, if the auction was in this grace period, if a macroer or another mod found it before it expired, the macroers could simply wait for the grace period to end, then instantly perform the two clicks that bought the auction, before any human players had a chance.

Since the API updates once a minute, that means 1/3rd of all listed auctions were made less than 20 seconds before the update – 1/3rd of ALL flips, guaranteed to be won by macroers. The only flips that the human flippers could buy now, were the first 2/3rds of auctions,

The ones that were listed more than 20 seconds before the API update. And, yeah, you guessed it, there’s something I need to tell you about that, too. We’ve covered manual flipping, website flipping, mod flipping – even macroing the mods. But there’s one other category I haven’t talked about, something that works completely

Differently to all of these methods… Page Flipping. The API had a huge limitation – it only updated once a minute. That means, if any flips were listed right after the update, it wouldn’t show on the API until the next update – up to a whole 60 seconds later.

This wasn’t really an issue before this – any manual flipper going through the auction house wouldn’t be able to cover every item in that time, especially considering there were 70,000 auctions to check through. But, what if, instead of checking every auction, they just watched for new items of a certain type,

Let’s say, Hyperions, to be listed at a super-low price? They could simply open up the auction house, search for Hyperions, and wait. Well, not exactly. If you just stare at the auction house, nothing will change – the expiry dates on the items will count down,

But it will still be the same items, regardless of how long you wait. To make these items update, or new items show, you had to make the whole page update, either by leaving and re-entering the auction house, or, as the name implies, visiting the next page and coming back.

This is where the term “Page Flipping” comes from – both because you were “Flipping” items, but also because you had to “Flip”, like a book, to the next page and back. These “Page Flippers”, as we call the people doing this, would spend their time clicking back and forth between pages,

And checking the lowest-price item (which is normally the first item) matching their given filters, to see if it’s worth buying and reselling. While flips from the other methods happened pretty often, the chance that a flip for a specific item is going to appear is actually extremely low. This meant that these “page flippers”

Had to sit there for hours on end, clicking two buttons back and forth until a good deal appeared – if you ask me, one of the most boring things you could do in the whole of Skyblock, and this is in a game where the admins want the best money

Making method for early game players to be holding two buttons down, so, that’s certainly saying something! And these players agreed. That’s why almost none of these page flippers were legitimate players, and almost all were specially coded bots built to do this 24/7, flipping through a single item’s

Auction listings, and buying any deals it finds. While these page flippers were extremely efficient at finding and buying flips for the items it’s searching for, it won’t generate nearly as much profit as the fastest mods searching the whole auction house. But, it was a lot simpler and pretty easy to automate,

And so long as auctions were listed, they were basically guaranteed profits since no one else could beat them to it. Since this was starting to turn into a fully-AFKable auction flipper, it was a huge pain for the people running these bots to go through and list these auctions once their inventory fills up,

So of course the next step was to automate that, too. They’d buy the items, list new auctions to sell the items, and collect sold and expired auctions, turning them into a money-making machine which they could leave running 24/7 while they went to school or work, and come back to a nice profit

All collected in the bot’s purse. Wait. If they can run one, and make a small amount of profit, can’t they run 2, on different items, and double their profits? How about 4, or 8, or even more?! Yes. Yes, they could. The only problem, though, was they needed each of these accounts

To always have enough coins in its purse to afford a flip, or to list anything they bought, and they’d need to collect the money from all these flip bots at some point. Now, even though Hypixel’s detection of these bots was pretty much nonexistent at the time,

Hypixel’s IRL trading detection was pretty damn good. For context, IRL trading is when you buy in-game content for real-life money, and so they’d monitor all trades which were either extremely unfair to one party, or were clearly an attempt at transferring money unfairly. And, well, there’s not really a way to get your money

From all of these bots without some red flags being raised. This brings us to the next, and one of the final topics – Headless Clients. It should hopefully be clear to you by now, that the biggest factor among all of this was speed.

Whether that’s the speed to check auctions for the manual flippers, the speed to copy-paste for the websites, or just the speed to click buy for the mods and page flippers. It’s not just human reaction time that affects their speed. No, it turns out that Hypixel is actually xenophobic.

Anyone who’s not from the good ol’ US of A is slowed down by Hypixel so they have less fun playing the game. No, I’m just kidding, Hypixel aren’t xenophobic – physics is. You see, in this universe we live in, everything has a speed limit.

From your grandma’s driving to the light from the sun, there’s a maximum speed for everything in the universe. If you’ve heard of the sound barrier, or the concorde jets, they would travel faster than the speed of sound – creating a sonic boom behind them. That’s because sound itself is also limited

– it can’t travel faster than the air particles that carry it. The same thing applies to light, and to all information. The speed of light is the maximum speed that anything in the universe can travel at, whether that’s a physical “thing” (like a photon), or an abstract concept, like gravity or information,

Nothing can go faster. Let’s pretend the Hypixel servers are in New York, and you live in London, England, just a short 3 and a half thousand mile trip across the Atlantic Ocean away. If you were to shine a laser directly at the servers,

It would actually take a whole 18 milliseconds to get there. And, once the servers receive that laser, they have to send their own laser back to let you know they can see yours – which takes another 18 milliseconds to reach you, making your whole conversation take 36 milliseconds.

We call this back-and-forth time “latency”, and it’s what people mean when they talk about their “ping” to a server – how long it takes their internet signals to reach the server and come back. This is also aptly called the “round trip time”, since the information needs to perform a round trip.

Well, that’s only if the light had nothing in its way to make it bounce another direction. In reality, your internet signals are sent through copper wire and fibre-optic cables, in which light and electrons only travel at 2/3rds of the speed of light in a vacuum. That 36 millisecond journey

Would be more like 48 milliseconds, and that’s before we even consider inefficiencies like the undersea cables not being a direct path between the server and the sender, the fact that we have to repeat the signal so it doesn’t fade away, and any routing algorithm to figure out which way it needs to go.

In reality, you’re looking at a time closer to 70-80 milliseconds. An 80 millisecond delay in buying their Skyblock items is a HUGE hit to these cheaters. Even worse, it is not just 1 “buy” signal they need to send – they have to ask to “view” the auction,

Wait for the view to be received, “buy” the auction, wait for the confirm screen to be sent, and finally “confirm” the auction. That’s 5 steps to purchase an auction – at 80 milliseconds a step, almost 400 milliseconds. Remember how I said some macroers could buy the auctions in less than 50 milliseconds?

Yeah, a 400 millisecond delay means you’d get absolutely nothing. This also applies even if you don’t live an ocean away – every mile of distance between you and the servers adds up to 5x the time, so the people living next door to the servers would always have an advantage.

So, the cheaters came up with a new solution. They’d all move to Chicago. Wait, no, most of them live in their mum’s basement – that’s not really feasible. Okay, well, how about they just ran their Minecraft clients in Chicago, and have their cheat software buy the auctions for them?

This is exactly what they did. The cheaters would buy their own servers closer to Hypixel’s servers, and run Minecraft there, cutting out sometimes HUNDREDS of milliseconds of delay, all for a few extra Skyblock coins. You can start to see how this is getting expensive now

– they didn’t just have to pay real money for the flipping software and their cheats alone, they now also needed to rent a server every month. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but Minecraft likes to show things on the screen. For example, the blocks around you,

The main menu, or even the auction house itself. Mod F cut down on some of this, hiding the buy and confirm GUIs from you so that you didn’t have to wait for them to load, but this is different – Minecraft actually needs some form of graphics processor

To run, and most of these servers didn’t have them! Plus, even if they did manage to get graphics working on these servers, they were significantly underpowered, and lower frame rates means slower purchase times. This is where the term “headless” comes in. No, I’m not just talking about Henry the 8th’s wives

Or the French revolution, the “head” here refers to the graphics and images shown on screen – the player’s ability to view and interact with the game. The programs that these cheaters had written or bought didn’t actually need to interact with the screen anymore. They used a 3rd party Minecraft client with no GUI,

Which meant all they had to do was listen for the packets sent by Hypixel, and send back the right answers – this was a LOT faster than actually processing, displaying and interpreting the GUI itself. Of course, at this point, regular players had no chance of ever buying a “bed” flip,

Nor any of the flips that a page flipper was watching, but still, they might have had a chance on the rest of the flips if the flip mod they used tried to give them an advantage over the macroers. The humans trying to make this profit could still do it, right?

They could. And they did. Even though their profits had dropped from a hundred million coins per hour to 30 million coins per hour in some cases, it was still profit – and you only had to pay attention to it

For the first couple seconds of each minute, so for the rest of the minute you could actually farm, do slayers, or anything else with your time, as long as it didn’t require 100% attention. So the flippers persisted on, making their decent pocket change, buying and selling when they could.

But, since the mods were paid and the competition was at an all-time high, eventually it became less and less worth it, which did help to reduce the competition but greatly limited the variety of flippers – only the richest players in real life could really afford to use these paid services anymore.

December 29th, 2022. With a pretty low number of humans left in the game, flipping was becoming a dying breed of money-making. Everything changed, however, when a player solved one big issue. Remember how I said that people couldn’t run many page flippers since it was a huge hassle

And there was a high risk of a ban for IRL trading? There’s a solution to that, and it’s an interesting one. How about, instead of having these accounts flip through auction pages and buy the auctions, they just find the auctions, and send it to their main account,

Where they can flip it before anyone else and collect all the money in one place? This is where the term “pre-api” comes from, as it worked almost exactly like the mod flippers, except the auctions came from in-game headless bots rather than from using the official API.

This method eventually wiped out pretty much all legit players, as if there’s a new item making profit, the bot-master (who we’ll call Player R), could simply spin up a new account targeting those items. Everyone else stood no chance. As with everything, though, there is a huge trade-off to make here, too.

This quickly got expensive – even if he was illegally buying stolen Minecraft accounts, the costs quickly add up as he goes through dozens of accounts. In addition, Hypixel could figure out that these accounts were botting auctions, and start issuing bans, meaning he had to buy even more accounts still!

They couldn’t just be any account, though. They had to be unbanned on Hypixel, and they had to have played SkyBlock, too, so that they had stats. He would buy cookies on these accounts, sell the bits for profit, and run the /ah command from his island

So that admins didn’t find the bots sat in a hub all day. At one point, his “bot army” had over 100 accounts online simultaneously, fetching and sending auctions to the server. He actually didn’t do this just for the Skyblock coins, though – he sold this data to the mods themselves

So that they could offer this service on his behalf to their existing customer base. This netted him a decent profit, but considering the accounts and servers he had to buy and rent, it wasn’t as large as you might think. This was it, though. There was no chance of any mods or players

Using legit methods to be able to compete with this service – the regular api macroers and cheaters could buy all the bed flips, and the pre-api users could buy… Well, everything else. This brings us now to the present day. What’s the state of flipping now? Well, it’s not all doom and gloom.

Hypixel finally caught on – they’ve issued mass ban waves for a bunch of cheaters, and they’ve added some fantastic detection for the page flippers and pre-api bots in the last few months. So will flipping ever go back to what it used to be? Well, probably not.

Now that these methods have been developed and are in the public eye, there’s always going to be someone flipping with a website, a discord bot, or with a mod to tell them all prices and find the flips faster than a human brain can. Some popular Skyblock mods, such as NEU, added precautions

That alert you if you’re trying to list an item for way under lbin, so there’s a lot less snipeable auctions around, and overall a lot less profit available. subscribe.