A bored South Carolina man decided to stream the launch of the new graphics card from Nvidia, but he didn't know it would become one of the most difficult-to- buy gadgets in the world.
Larry says he is on track to make $100,000 a year as the proprietor of the Falcodrin Stock Alerts and the Falcodrin Community Discord. They help others find 50,000 graphics cards in exchange for affiliate revenue. You get a ping when a graphics card is in stock. Do you like what you see? The retailer gives Falcodrin a piece of the action when you press the buy button.
If you are hoping to find a graphics card this holiday season, Falcodrin has a message for you: it might be a cold winter, because retailers, scalpers, and stock trackers are all locked in a software arms race that kicks the little guy to the curb.
Larry asked us not to use his full name because he said it was a bot war.
So what is a game player going to do? The Falcodrin crew talked about how they cheat the system, how they cheat you, and how the arms race is pushing them to build their own bots. There are some tips if you are still trying to get a graphics card.
The conversation has been edited for clarity. Despite living in different parts of the world, Larry and Stu tend to finish each other's thoughts, and there were a few times I lost track of who said what.
What is the name of the dog? What do you do?
Larry considers us to be switchboard operators, and we send you where you want to be. You have a computer and phone. When something drops, you get a link, and you do your best to buy it. We try to let you know as soon as possible.
Larry is the operations and community engagement manager. He engages with the community via the internet, whereas I focus on development. When new people join our chat, they are asked how the game is played by our users. Everybody is trying to figure out how to get through websites.
Larry thinks that they don't want us to do that. I find websites that prevent scrapers to be an annoyance, because the better we scraper, the less people will be using their own computer to ping EVGA.
:noupscale is a file on thechorusasset.com
A sample of the community.
Sean Hollister has a Screenshot.
The focus is on our Discord. You sign up for roles. Do you want to receive any kind of alert? Do you want a PS5 or an Xbox? We try to be the fastest when something comes in stock.
Why is it so hard to buy a graphics card? What is happening behind the scenes?
In a nutshell, retailers. I think the traffic load on their website hurts them and they are trying to stop the volume of traffic. The more volume hitting your website, the more server cost you have. Large holes in their websites prevent anyone from being able to check out and purchase products, which hurts the purchasing process. They need to take action.
The actions we have seen are similar to implementing a queue system. Instead of having a large amount of people waiting in the lobby, they created a queue which puts everyone in the parking lot.
The policeman counts everyone who goes inside to make sure they are safe.
If we can get a message across that the systems they are putting in place to prevent the heavy load are preventing regular users, the users who want to buy just one, and enabling bots and software to win even more, then we can get some kind of message across.
The bots are at the checkout. They have figured out how to checkout without going to the site. The queue systems are blocking the traffic but the bots are going through the back door and buying all the items while the shoppers are still in the parking lot.
They need to lock the back door. Do they care? Are they saving on infrastructure costs? The price of these goods can be driven up by bots and scalpers, and they give them higher margins. Retailers might enjoy it because they can save a lot of money on shipping costs.
They need to lock the back door. Do they care?
Walmart is a really bad example. They put in a queue system where you could just go to your cart and get the PS5 you ordered. You had a PS5 before? There is a free ticket to get another one.
The full auto-checkout, auto- buy-now is associated with scalpers. We develop tools. We can help you get through some of the tricky stuff by giving you little scripts you can run.
We have to develop auto checkout tools just to compete with the other bots because a lot of the retailers are so bad. It is a bot war.
At the end of the day, it is our users who are the victors. We would like to think that we represent the little guy.
How do you know if your users are playing a game?
There is no way to be certain, but there are people who post a win and then disappear. We don't know if they post two to three a week, but they talk about mining and show off their rigs. When people are buying a lot of cards and not showing pictures of their rig, it gets a little iffy, but most of them are staying quiet. The scalpers are keeping their profile low.
They know we will ban them on the spot.
I don't get upset at people who are in a line, because if they are in a line to resell a graphics card, they will need an extra $500. If it is someone who is botting and getting 70 cards in a drop and will resell them for thousands of dollars in profit, that is when you get angry.
You can't stop them all, we're going to have scalpers and miners.
They are smart enough to keep their mouths shut, otherwise we will ban them on the spot.
Do you have any tricks of the trade?
Enabling a buy button that is disabled is one of the basic ones. You can turn off the disabled state of the inspector by right-clicking it in the inspector in the browser. You can click on it if it's enabled. It is still there!
Larry: We have a little jаvascript that you can paste in.
It doesn't take a genius to figure it out if you know any of the basics. One of our competitors created an extension for Best Buy, which stopped working, but Best Buy does something similar, which is called re-rolling the queue.
It allows you to add to cart again, which will give you a new queue time. You just click the button and your queue time is 30 seconds. That could be the time between getting one and not getting one.
:noupscale is a file on thechorusasset.com.
What a drop in the community.
Sean Hollister has a Screenshot.
The add-to-cart button was added to every item in the script.
It became a problem because the cards were out of stock before anyone saw them. Nobody would see the inventory on their website. It hurt people who weren't aware that there was a card out there.
The queue is random and you might be put at the front of the line, the middle, or the end of the line. If you open up multiple sessions that don't know about each other, you can open the queue 10 times instead of just once.
The tool we created is called the AMD Queue Buster and it makes it easy for you to open 500 independent sessions. The problem is that there are 500,000 sessions.
The kind of stuff we have to resort to is because the bots were not waiting in line. By the time you got to the front of the website, you would have eight minutes. What was left in eight minutes? Nothing.
:noupscale is a file on thechorusasset.com
The wait time was over an hour even though I signed up for the queue as soon as it opened. You can re-roll your wait time with tricks like Falcodrin.
Sean Hollister has a Screenshot.
We have a lot of hacks. You call up customer service just before a Newegg shuffle, hoping to get a new customer. When I click on the Add to Cart button on your website, it doesn't add to cart. Hopefully their manager approves the purchase. It works because you know which cards will be in the Newegg Shuffle before it opens.
Will you charge for your own machines?
It was never part of the business plan, but now it is. I think we will have a lot of retailers in January. Our plan is to be cheap, but we don't want to make a lot of money. It is more of a lifestyle business for us. We will have to pull in more resources, so we would just ask to pay for development costs. There is only one man.
How should our readers get a computer?
If you want to protect your mental health, you can either sign up for EVGA's queue, enter the Newegg Shuffle, or buy a bundle on Newegg. The Founders Edition cards are no longer available. You will be searching for a long time for the cheaper cards. You have to be willing to wait and let the systems work the way they are if you are not willing to spend your entire life on a Discord.
You spend a bit more, or you buy things you don't really want to buy in a bundle, or you spend your time learning the ropes. It is possible to get a graphics card, but it takes a lot of time to get them.
You are going to spend hundreds of hours to save a hundred bucks, and the time investment doesn't make sense. You are doing well if you get a card within three to four hours.
People enjoy the community because they are a bit bored and locked away at home, and that is due to COVID. It isn't just, "I'm going to spend a hundred hours here because all I want is GPUs", it's the social aspect, the community, having a common interest with other people.
Where are the best places to find the best chances?
There are times and dates all over the place. Sign up for the Newegg Shuffle. A lot of people are winning the shuffle. They should penalize people who sign up for things and not buy them.
Early mornings, 10 to 10:30AM Eastern, are when Best Buy has been weekly recently.
All the time, Amazon is there. The EVGA B-stock is usually on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday or both.
Zotac's prices have gotten so high that it's just nuts. A lot of people have been pushed away by Zotac. Most of the people who click on a Zotac link are there for entertainment, and very few are there to buy.
Every four months, the company drops.
If you are looking for a card, you can find it on Thursdays at 9:50AM.
The aftermarket prices are insane. What kind of premium should you pay?
We are seeing anywhere from $550 to $750. 3060 Tis are close to the same range, but there aren't as many as 60 Tis.
Most of the 3070s are around $700 and $800, while the 70s are around $1,000.
$1,200 for 3080s. I was happy when I got an ‘80 LHR with a headset and mouse for $1,200.
Most of the really nice ones are like $2,000, but you can find them for a few hundred dollars. The Strix costs $2,199.
3090s are rare because they are the only cards that guarantee the full hash rate and people are hunting them, so a lot of them are currently $2,200, $2,300.
How has the business changed?
People are discouraged right now. A lot of buyers are good at what they do and get cards a lot, but the rest find that upsetting, so we have to do mediation. The other people are getting three cards a month. It has been getting worse.
We used to think getting a graphics card was hard.
We have been seeing a lot of new people recently. We have been seeing a trickle of people who have been gone for a while who want to get a Christmas card.
We adapted by affiliating with more retailers. Walmart, Best Buy, and GameStop. We started tracking consoles. We were really sad that we didn't do both consoles and graphics cards. A lot of people just want to tear into the graphics cards, so we have diversified and moved into computer parts and prebuilts.
Are you making a good living?
Larry is currently in a lower cost of living area.
We are not filthy rich.
Larry is still waiting.
We are making enough to be comfortable.
I just bought a house, so I have something if I screw up.
We are doing okay, but we are constantly plugged in. Both of us are stressed out by it. There could be drops in the morning. We wouldn't be able to do this if we had kids.
It requires constant interaction. It will take several hours to type responses if there is a big drop. You feel responsible and want to give your customers the best chance. You ruined someone's Christmas if you messed up.
Any last tips?
Determination is the biggest thing a normal person can have. When you are trying to check out a website, it is dying. Five minutes later, you will have a card. It will take an hour of trying to get a console at Walmart.
Give it five minutes. You have to try again. Try for an hour. The dedication is more important than how fast you click, and that is hard to convey to people. The determination in running it again and again is a part of it.
Why would you click it once and think it's gone?
