Auction House - Last second bidders that ALWAYS win, yet there is no way to tell it's the last second.
Tue, 07/12/2011 - 07:47
The past couple of days i have noticed some very weird goings on in the Auction House. Whilst trying to buy Light Shards when the auction time was at "very short", i would regularly be the highest bidder right until the very last second when the auction closes. At that moment someone else would step in, the auction would end before i could refresh the page and they'd get the item with a message sent to me stating i was outbid and so on. The first couple of times this happened i put it down to bad luck, but skip forward to another 20 attempts later and not once had i successfully won an item. Each time i would bid and be the highest offer for a large period of time, but as soon as someone else outbid me the auction would end a mere second or two after and i (or anyone else for that matter) would have absolutely no chance in re-bidding and thus the last-second bidder always won.
Something fishy is going on here surely... "Very short" time is considered to be 5 minutes or under and there is no way to tell exactly when an auction will end, so how can someone know when each individual item will end and how are they able to cut in at the very last second for every single auction they are taking part in? I've experienced this several times the last two days, specifically on the Light Shard items. Most of the time, dare i say 95%, i've lost to a bid which was placed at the very last second when i had not been outbid at any point leading up to that moment.
Could this be a bot or some kind of automated service? Is there a way for a person to somehow know the exact time lengths of auctions even though there is no way of knowing in-game? I'm aware you could technically work out how much time is left if you wait for the specific moment where an auction goes from "Short" to "Very Short", but you'd need to be a pretty dedicated (and sad) individual to do that and this was happening for every auction which had a decent bid price; a human could not achieve that level of precision for so many auctions.
Tue, 07/12/2011 - 08:06
#2
I was going to reply with the
I was going to reply with the same question.
I buy using buyout price all the time and I often buy things that are on "very short" with buyout.
Maybe it was me who bought the shards the guy wanted.
Tue, 07/12/2011 - 08:17
#3
The 5 minutes (Very short)
The 5 minutes (Very short) are reset each time a bid is placed, so the only explanation is that someone won it on buyout.
Unless someone is hacking the AH o.0
Tue, 07/12/2011 - 08:23
#4
Good question. Most of the
Good question. Most of the auctions involved no buy-out or the price itself was well above the typical acceptable level. For example, these were lots of 1 to 10 Light Shards with the bids hovering around the 15-20 per mark, where-as the buy-out price was up in the 50-80 per (or something like that, either way nowhere near the lowest if sorted by buy-out price). It could be that some people were buying-out the ones for an expensive cost, but the same cannot be said for the auctions which had no buy-out at all.
EDIT: I just checked the watched bid section in the Auction House and i can confirm most of the time they are not being instantly-bought. One of the auctions i recently lost ended at 139 crowns for 4 Light Shards, yet the buyout was at 500 and nobody took it. This particular auction, like many others, ended a couple of seconds after the last bid and i had no time to react despite being on the same page and attempting to bid as soon as i saw someone else out-bid me.
Tue, 07/12/2011 - 08:38
#5
What you are describing
CANNOT happen, in theory. If a bid is made at the last second, the auction time is extended. This is to prevent the exact situation you are describing. If this report is true, perhaps the auction time extensions have been remove.
On a side note, it is quite easy to tell when an auction is approaching it's last few seconds. If you do an empty string search on the entire auction house and rank based on end time, you can dance back and forth between another type of search and the 'all' search to get real time rankings in how short your auction's 'very short' actually means. The closer it get's to the top, the less time is left. The auction house is doing such a high volume these days, this method pretty easily get's you the last 5 second window on the item you want to snipe. Pay attention to how quickly items are sliding off the top of the list and bid when your item hits the top 2 to 3 items (or when it hit's the top if you're ballsy or the pace is slow)
If the above doesn't make sense, I apologize. The TL;DR is that it IS quite possible to tell when an auction is nearing it's last moments.
Tue, 07/12/2011 - 08:46
#6
Zelda
what a lie ive won on medium + bids before, if they alwasy win in last second, where were they when i won my auctions??
Tue, 07/12/2011 - 09:13
#7
LAG
There are times when AH is in LAG mode and updates kind of funky. The My Bids tab is especially laggy. Anytime someone kicks your high bid out by bidding higher, I suspect the notification filters are linked to your game mail which which tends to be laggy. How laggy can it get? Well if the updating in the My Bids tab is linked to mail notices, sometimes mail notices can lag a few seconds to a few hours or more. There have been times where I have bid on items with very short times or have sold items through the AH and don't get the email notifications till a few hours later.
AVOID using the My Bids tab and use the search function instead if you need to keep track of something that is ending Very Soon. Search function isn't linked to mail notifications so it should not lag .
Are you sure they didn't just get the items for buyout price?