Auction Sniping (in General)

:( Grump. Rant on.

When was the auction duration reset for bids under 15 minutes removed?

I just got sniped for an EC aution I had been consistently winning, with the winning bid placed with under a minute left to go on the auction, (It wasn't form Central Bank!) as I had been following the close of it. Obviously not close enough...

Auction Sniping sucks, and was something we never used to have on CB.

Why do we have it now? And if it's always been this way (which isn't what I remember at all), why do we still have it?

I thought max-bidding changed all that?

If you didn't put up as much as you needed to pay, then you get beat.

Was there a time when you could put in a surplus bid AND bids triggered an extended auction time? I'm afraid I just don't remember...

I had a surplus bid, made sure of that.

The whole thing was sniped with under a minute to go.

If it was changed due to the overbidding surplus, that's an awful change.

Why not figure out what the max amount you want to pay for something is and then bid it? That is to me a foolproof method. If you lose an auction, there is always next time.

I have bid on stuff the last second and lost stuff the last second.. kinda exciting.

That isn't the point.

A better example (althought not as harsh) would be to move the CB 'snipe' to 10 seconds to go. See how popular that is.

The problem with human sniping is your overbid can be, overbid, with little you can do, as you run out of time to respond.

Especially if you have to refresh a page, then click a couple more to get back in to bid, and you've only got seconds to do so.

Sniping sucks.

Especially as the last second sniper can massively overbid, and only be charged the minimum bid. There's no penalty not to, and no reason not to snipe.

Personally, I'm going to boycot non buy now auctions from now one.

That's how passionate I feel about sniping.

Well.. everything has a definite value.. to me that cloak was worth 250k.. and once that was beaten, I gave up. Would not have cared if someone beat that with 20 hours or 3 seconds to spare.

AdminJonathan December 2 2006 10:11 PM EST
Like it says on the auction page now, "Your bid will automatically be increased up to the amount you give here. Only you will see what your real maximum bid is."

The bids-extending-auction-duration feature is thus no longer necessary and has been removed.

that is from this changelog:

http://www.carnageblender.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=001y3z

I, on the other hand would have paid more, but didn't get the chance.

But GL, why didn't you just place a stupidly large Overbid then?

Becuase I was (like everyone) trying to score a deal, didn't want all my cash tied up in an aution time, and didn't want to get burned by someone artificially increasing the price just to make me spend more.

Sorry, I shouldn't have sniped.

Auction sniping did exist in cb1 and was changed to auction duration reset in cb2?

Auction duration extend/reset to 10 minutes(or was it 15 minutes?)
was how it should been when I was still active playing.

Today I have a hunch that it was changed, it seems duration reset is really removed. I am also curious since when was duration reset removed/changed?

Ugg.

Thanks for finding that dude.

It's a rubbish change. Sniping Sucks. Let's move CB to 10 seconds to go. No need to have him at 15 minutes any more, is there?

^ see above then as i posted the changelog as well as the post from jonathan. ; )

No need to apologise! This isn't anything personal (and I'm not desperate for the item in quesiton!).

Sorry if it came across as a rant at anyone in particular, it's not. ;)

Just the system! :P

If you over-bid and the previous bidder also over-bid.. then you might end up paying more than you want.

I managed to over-bid your 200k with 200,023 cause I guessed that you might have bid 200k. So next time.. maybe bid say 341,234

I overbid you to 300K ;)

But that's not really the problem.

As I say, there's no reason for CB to bid at 15 minutes any more, it's not refresh time. So let's make him a proper sniper and move him to 10 or 5 seconds to go.

"I managed to over-bid your 200k with 200,023 cause I guessed that you might have bid 200k. So next time.. maybe bid say 341,234"

Just as I would like to think. I thought GL max bid should be 300k.
I don't want to pay too much. If my guess was wrong and GL max bid was 301k I would have stopped and GL would have won. A really good hidden max bid would be 352k (those that are bidding 350k or 351k would have lost) and if they are bidding more than 400k I wouldn't mind let them win it.

Then why wasn't your max bid higher, set you max bid as high as you're willing to go and there's no problems.

You can put the maximum amount you would actually spend...

If you did this, then there would NEVER be a time that someone outbids you and you say "darn i would of paid more if i could".

and since there are no unique items in the game, it really doesn't matter if there are people out there willing to pay more than you for an item, as long as you have patience.

As a newbie, I thought I'd bring a fresh perspective :-)

At first, I simply bid the maximum I was ready to pay and then let things go and it didn't work too well with me losing almost every auction (8-9 out of ten) I seriously tried to win, especially considering that I bid around the average. I should have gone closer to a 50-50 kind of result.

It's then that I realized, analyzing bid results, that CB bidders (exaggeratively) tend to bid higher for no special reasons other then having someone else against them, like if the thrill of the bidding competition augmented the value of the desired item... This would be normal for very rare items, but shouldn't be for semi-rares and more common items. Foolish and juvenile if you ask me.

So, since I didn't want to start paying double price just because others saw bidding as a sport, I tried snipping (using the same target prices) and the results were incredibly more normal, even better since a (vast) minority of bidders just bid on anything trying to get a deal to resell it (kind of how US economy found its way down the drain if you ask me...) and don't really try to get anything at normal price.

I don't like snipping, but I despise paying too much for anything, and as long as CB bidders act with irrationality, I believe snipping is the only practical tool at hand for those not willing to pay 50% over average. Good thing I already bought every auction-spawned items I wanted :-)

JS the reason sniping works better is because most people don't actually bid what they are willing to pay, only if someone over bids them, and the way the Chairmen works.

i dislike auction sniping, i really liked the old system. made items value more realistic. Perhaps 15 minutes was too much to reset it too. But 5-10 min is more realistic. if someone after thinking really doesn't want the item they won't bid but they won't feel pressured to snipe at which i feel no one wins. first of all u have the burden to have to be there in last minute to bid and who wants to do that? and people who do put in their max bid, and leave never win the item. I feel the logic that well they shouldn't feel bad/angry cause they wouldn't have paid more anyways. But in real life when someone snipes they can get the item for as little as 1K over your max bid...so in reality they bid almost the same thing only difference is if they were on in the last minnute and outbid you. thats why i hate and feel auction sniping is wrong. 10 minute window is good time and gives person potential to come back or other people and bid seeing other people what they are bidding.
Secondly, what it can do is undersell an item also. say i'm selling something and it got to a certain auction price of 500K now there are 5 people interested in this item and max bid is 550K by the winning bidder who isn't online. but all the other 5 snipers are online and want this. They aren't sure how much they are willing to go....they see the 500K so they figure they'll get the item at 600K or less. Now the problem is in the last seconds of the item all 5 people can bid around or exactly 600K, so only person who would get it is whoever maybe put in 601K or first put in 600K. perhaps if 600K was registered and clock put back to 10 min people see other people are interested and realize the items higher worth/cost and may bid that item higher to 700 or 800K.... so in this scenario an item sells for around 600K when it could have sold for significantly more if all people were aware of others peoples presence and bids.

Wraith, let's move CB to the last 10 or less seconds of the auction then.

I repeat, there is *no* longer a reason for him to be at 15 minutes, if we feel that sniping is a valid tactic for CB auctions.

I remember when everyone was happy with this new feature.
I like it better than the old way. If you want something bad, put up the money! Also like posted before, people have a tendency to bid in even numbers making it easy to push them to their max if you just want them to pay for it, or if you want to outbid them just by a little bit at the last minute. :)

I think it would be better if Mr. Chairman just had a hidden bid feature.

Every item that spawns gets a minimum sale value attached to it by Mr. Chairman. He never actually bids up the price, it's just at the end of the auction if nobody put a bid in that was above the minimum sale, Mr. Chairman automatically gets it.

Now if your max bid is equal to or above the minimum bid then the bid history will show 1 bid by Mr. Chairman that raises you to the minimum, then you win it. But if your max bid is 100k, and Mr. Chairman's minimum was 110k for that item, then when the auction ends you lose, Mr. Chairman takes the item.

How would that be better, Wraithlin? At least now, people know why they lost an auction.

Wraith is in Japan for a while, so he won't be reading this.

er... oh :(