Do real-time last-minute bidding wars occur?

[monitorman]

I had a fairly nice Barb rare ring up for sale in the GAH = 130 str, 21% incr crit dmg.

I had decided to not to list a buyout price, and started with the vendor sell price = $731. Searches for similar rings had buyouts in the 75K range, along with the inevitable 2Mil listings...

I only had one bid on it, and it looked like it was going to be sold for the $731. I had to log off with 15 minutes left in the auction. When I came back a few hours later, I was surprised to see it had sold for 91K.

Since there's no Ebay-style "watch this item" feature, did several people manually keep track of a bargain? Or is the GAH just poor at giving me accurate data as the clock ticks down?

TIA.

 

[kestegs]

I will usually watch an item without bidding on it and then bid a good amount at the last minute.

In case people don't know, you can actually "watch" an item most of the time.

it always works if they have no buyout. Just input a bid higher than the amount of gold in your bank, like 1 billion
the bid will fail but will show up in you bidding list.

If it has a buyout and you have enough to buy it then there is no way to do this trick, that's the only downfall.

Not sure if many people knows this as I found it out myself on accident.

 

[konfeta]

People very much do last second bids. I didn't realize this, and ****ed up on trying to score a sweet source for 16 million gold by bidding in the last 4 seconds.

Big mistake, I was outbid instantly. If the item looks like a deal too good to be true, get yourself a stopwatch and attempt to bid literally in the last second. Maybe practice on bidding on very cheap low level items to get the feel for it.

As a side note, the in-game clock is accurate. Just doesn't show seconds, but when the indicator changes to 2 or 1 minute, you know that exactly 2 or 1 minutes are left.

 

[gakky]

That was most likely just 1 bid in the last 15 minutes. The first bidder put in a bid of 91k which shows up as 731. Second bidder sees the bargain and puts in a bid of 90k. The bid then automatically goes up to 90k

 

[monitorman]

Thanks very much for the helpful replies!

I'm totally using that "watch" trick now!

 

[SWalker]

As a side note, the in-game clock is accurate. Just doesn't show seconds, but when the indicator changes to 2 or 1 minute, you know that exactly 2 or 1 minutes are left.

Are you sure it doesn't lock the bidding 10-20 seconds before the auction is about to expire? I remember trying to do this once but counting without relying on a stopwatch and even though i only counted to 30 it was already expired... I'd like to think I wasn't counting like a retard but who knows

 

[LimaWhiskey]

Quite strange, with current bidding system (bidding max gold you'd pay for an item) in theory last-minute bidding shouldn't occur.

 

[galzohar]

Theory is nice, but when people don't understand the system different things happen in practice. Though it's really an entire topic of its own.

 

[Delvin]

[edit]: Nevermind, I just read the other bidding topic and... what? If the really bidding system really works like this, it's explained absolutely TERRIBLY to the user.

 

[galzohar]

Yes, it is, that's why I made the thread and is the main reason last minute bidding is profitable and the main reason a lot of people think bots are bidding against them.