Auction House Heartbreak

[Catharlex]

Finally got revenge on the AH today. I've had some very similar things happen to me OP, as well having (what appear to be) bots snipe a bid at the literal last second.

I managed to snag a 1h axe. 772 dps, 136 str, 147 int, 490 LoH, and 56% crit damage (no socket sadly!) for the small amount of 250k! I also managed to snag a strength Andy's for only 200k today. I have a feeling the person meant to put that as the bid, not the buyout, and I lucked out on my searching. (had a socket and everything!)

Edit: I also just had a really good wizard shield (7% Crit, 191 Int are the notable stats) sell for 7.8 million this morning. AND I found a pretty decent 1h Spear (http://i.imgur.com/GM1YY.png) for Wizards that I'm taking my time on while attempting to sell.

[maceron]

The entirety of D3, in 6 words.

Oh god I laughed

[melodramocracy]

Finally got revenge on the AH today. I've had some very similar things happen to me OP, as well having (what appear to be) bots snipe a bid at the literal last second.

The problem is how easy sniping is to do for the buyer... lets say I'm looking at a 400k ring with 1 minute left, and in that minute, the price goes up to a million. If I snipe it at the last second with a bid of 2 million, I'll get the ring AND almost a million back.

Last minute bidding shouldn't work that way.

[Deleted]

happened to me before on an anwesome lvling 2H , like lvl reduction 18 and 1200 dps for 20k

[Trotheus]

Get used to it. Auction house botting means regular players are out of luck. Blizzard doesn't care at all since it doesn't hurt their profits. If anything, bots flipping items to the RMAH increases their profits.

[Zuroka]

Got this for 50k the other day.. looks like someone forgot 2 zeros




And what's with all this sniping? If you get "sniped" it's because someone else was willing to pay more than you. Big deal, that's how auctions work.

If there's an auction at 500k (no buyout) and it's worth 5M to you, then why wouldn't you bid 5M at any time? Why wait until the last second? It will show as 525k bid to everyone else. Are you trying to bid 525k and win it cheaply or what? If someone else was trying to snipe you with a 2M bid, they will fail and you'll win at 2M and get refunded 3M. If you put in your max bid early on, you'll win regardless if someone tries to snipe you, unless they bid over 5M which means they are the rightful winner regardless of timing of their bid.

I just don't get what the strategy is here...

[Catharlex]

So if it's worth 5 mil to you, when you bid it should take the bid to 5 mil. Plain and simple. As it sits right now, as long as you have a huge stock of gold and watch auctions are they are about to fall, you can get an item for 600k just because you set your max bid to (for example) a 5 mil.

Imagine if auctions worked like this in real life. An item is for sale, and you really want it. So you instantly say "$5 million!" Then they go around and find out what everyone else would pay. When they find out the next closest person to your number was $20,000, then you get the item for only $22,500 even though you bid $5 mill. It's just a silly function.

[Zuroka]

So if it's worth 5 mil to you, when you bid it should take the bid to 5 mil. Plain and simple. As it sits right now, as long as you have a huge stock of gold and watch auctions are they are about to fall, you can get an item for 600k just because you set your max bid to (for example) a 5 mil.

How does bidding 5M at the last second preclude someone else from bidding 3M (at any time)? The highest bid still wins.

Imagine if auctions worked like this in real life. An item is for sale, and you really want it. So you instantly say "$5 million!" Then they go around and find out what everyone else would pay. When they find out the next closest person to your number was $20,000, then you get the item for only $22,500 even though you bid $5 mill. It's just a silly function.

I agree that it's silly, but that's beside the point (which is: what's the point of sniping in D3?)

[Lolsteak]

So if it's worth 5 mil to you, when you bid it should take the bid to 5 mil. Plain and simple. As it sits right now, as long as you have a huge stock of gold and watch auctions are they are about to fall, you can get an item for 600k just because you set your max bid to (for example) a 5 mil.

Imagine if auctions worked like this in real life. An item is for sale, and you really want it. So you instantly say "$5 million!" Then they go around and find out what everyone else would pay. When they find out the next closest person to your number was $20,000, then you get the item for only $22,500 even though you bid $5 mill. It's just a silly function.

Completely wrong.

The AH simply lets you set a maximum bid, handing the money to a third party to bid on your behalf.

It's not silly, there's no "sniping" on the bidding part of the AH at all, you bid how much you're willing to pay then walk away.

What you wrote in the underlined part is so stupid i can't even begin to describe it, what you're basically saying is do away with bidding altogether and only have buyouts, either a blind buyout or a visable one (In which case if it were visable, the person would still get it for 600k) if it was blind then nobody would know the average prices of items at all.

If somebody wins an item on the cheap it's not because they set a bid at the last minute, it's because OTHER people didn't set a high enough max bid in the first place.

People put low bids to encourage others to start bidding, also ensuring their item selling (Remember this part, they have to be willing to put the item at 600k in the first place).

[melodramocracy]

What you wrote in the underlined part is so stupid i can't even begin to describe it, what you're basically saying is do away with bidding altogether and only have buyouts, either a blind buyout or a visable one (In which case if it were visable, the person would still get it for 600k) if it was blind then nobody would know the average prices of items at all.

If somebody wins an item on the cheap it's not because they set a bid at the last minute, it's because OTHER people didn't set a high enough max bid in the first place.

People put low bids to encourage others to start bidding, also ensuring their item selling (Remember this part, they have to be willing to put the item at 600k in the first place).

It's generally exactly because they waited till the last possible second. Do you bid on items that have many hours left on the auction, and then bid again every time you see that you're outbid?

Proxy bids work in actual auctions because you always know exactly what the highest bid is. They don't work here because there is a set timer that simply does not get extended in the case of a higher bid. So yes, if you see an item with 10 seconds left on it going for 50k gold, at the 5 second mark you can simply throw 500k down and you will almost always get the item and about 420k back, because most other buyers don't actually realize what's happening in the last few seconds... they're hitting incremental bid, getting an error, possibly having to go to the completed tab to get their gold back to re-bid, and by then it can be too late.

Sooner or later this practice will become less effective, as more people wise up to it.

What should happen is that if you want to walk in and try to guarantee-buy something with a large bid, then that number is what the item should actually go for. (in this case, 500k). Buyer gets the item and no gold back, seller gets the rest. This levels the playing field a bit, and probably gets sellers more money in the long run.

[Thuld]

It's generally exactly because they waited till the last possible second. Do you bid on items that have many hours left on the auction, and then bid again every time you see that you're outbid?
*snip*
What should happen is that if you want to walk in and try to guarantee-buy something with a large bid, then that number is what the item should actually go for. (in this case, 500k). Buyer gets the item and no gold back, seller gets the rest. This levels the playing field a bit, and probably gets sellers more money in the long run.

Yes i agree with you in the first part, the reason people appear to be sniped is they want to try their luck manually and have not set a high enough max or are just too slow with placing their bid.

I don't agree with your view of what should happen with 100% consumption of bids. The risk should be on the seller as they are the ones that deliberately chose to NOT set a buyout which means they by default accept the highest competed bid that is above the set bid amount, which could in fact be only one increment if only one person puts down a bid.

Now if multiple buyers are interested in the item and place their max bids, the highest one wins by a single increment above the second highest bidder. The system seems to work to me. You can already see if someone has declared an interest in the item by clicking on bid and seeing if the amount the proxy wants is above the declared starting bid. You then make up your mind on whether you want to try return at the 11th hour and risk not clicking in time, or put in your maximum amount and risk someone else having the time to rebid higher than where the last competitor's declared cutoff was placed.

Perhaps I am missing some advantage snipers or bots have worked out to better game the system, but it seems to me the only reason people are being beaten is they want to avoid declaring or tying up resources in bids and hope they sneak a viable bid in at the last nanosecond.

[Trotheus]

Perhaps I am missing some advantage snipers or bots have worked out to better game the system

It's pretty obvious if you watch a few auctions end.

For one thing, auctions don't simply get sniped in the last minute - they get sniped in the last SECOND. The AH doesn't even list seconds. While you can see the minutes left change from 2 to <1 by manually clicking between tabs while looking at your watch, I doubt there are enough humans doing that at any given time to have snagged every auction I've watched, at times paying above the item's worth (which also suggests botting - perhaps one that isn't set up properly - lmao @ botters overpaying).

And it would allow someone to more easily track auctions they haven't bidded on. Like the point I made above, you can manually write down the stats to search for and find it again, and the approximate end-time and be there when it happens, but again I doubt there are enough humans not only sitting in front of PCs all day, but doing nothing but AHing all day, to explain every auction I watch get sniped... By holding their hand closer to their vest in this way they have an inherent advantage. If you can't see this obvious fact, do yourself a favor and never go to Vegas.

[melodramocracy]

I don't agree with your view of what should happen with 100% consumption of bids. The risk should be on the seller as they are the ones that deliberately chose to NOT set a buyout which means they by default accept the highest competed bid that is above the set bid amount, which could in fact be only one increment if only one person puts down a bid.

You have a point, but the scenario I describe can easily happen in a buyout situation if the difference between min and max is high enough. And as Trotheus states, you can pretty safely get a bid put in with less than 5 seconds left or less if you time things right and use a stopwatch.

I don't think the tactic is wrong per se, but it certainly is on the sneaky side. As more folks become aware of it, it will certainly work less effectively I suspect.

And as Trotheus says, writing down stats, setting alarms / reminders, is certainly being done by people. Whether there are bots doing it as well, who knows... I'm sure one could be written to do that, that either tracks time, or simply continually refreshes a search until it hits item x with y stats, and only 2 minutes remaining, etc.

[Thuld]

I can see nothing at all wrong with using the 'tactic' of submitting your bid at the last second if that floats your boat except when those that do whine they were beaten by a bot.

Neither another player nor a bot can actually pay less than you have nominated as your maximum amount (providing you have submitted the bid before the action finalises of course). It plainly comes to down to who valued the item for more and were prepared to put their money where their mouth is.

Those that play the only bid at the last nanosecond gamble seem to lose regularly from what Troth is saying which is not surprising as a heaps of how-to-clean-up AH vids have popularised the practice. Those that gamble and try to get low bid undervalued snap purchases will ALWAYS fail if someone gets in a bid of a higher value. I am not trying to suggest botting does not exist, just that you can only be beaten by some mechanism (person or bot) that values the purchase higher than you do. Clearly a program has the ability to revisit and watch a large number of items and therefore has a much greater chance to snatch non-competed items or items where the competition undervalues their bid.

If you have some insight into how others can buy something for less than you can competing for the same item at the same time then by all means share this "obvious fact".