Has the situation worsened significantly in the last few months? I was able to snag a 6900xt and 3070 using Discord channels (Snail Monitor and ATR) back in Jan. Got old wearing out the F5 button nightly at 6:30, but it did eventually work.
Yes.
I was able to use a bot to snag a 6900xt off of AMDs website, I would have had no chance otherwise. The rush of bot requests prior to the drop results in most requests returning an error page. I was not fully automated, and as such the more popular products ( 6800xt and 6800 ) I never even received a valid response on. I lucked out getting a valid response on the 6900, and on the add to cart, after that I went to paypal which does not error out and is said to be a more reliable way to complete the purchase.
The bots are designed to be ran in a VM or Docker container, so the user can run them right in the same cloud facility of the service selling the GPU. This alone is not enough however.
Basically the GPU selling service gets pounded, with the majority of the responses being error pages
of the successful response, the majority of add to card follow up requests receive a error page response
and so on
To successfully purchase a GPU, each purchasing attempt has to win the lottery over and over. Repeatedly getting responses that are not error pages and not out of stock throughout the purchasing process.
Even with bots, most purchase attempts are failures. The thing is, many bots can be spawned, over whelming the awful odds with sheer numbers. This undoubtedly makes the problem much worse.
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Lastly, this is
100% AMD's and Nvidia's fault. Not the scalpers, not the miners. AMD's & Nvidia's acceptable and preferred outcome. There is NOTHING stopping either company from simply implementing a queue or wait list on their OEM sites. This would be far cheaper, as they would not be DDOSed on every drop. The expensive and endless credit card disputes associated with digital river would disappear.
Yet the only company to even attempt consumer friendly activity is EVGA. If you look on EBAY, it is nearly impossible to find an EVGA 3000 series. This says everything you need to know.