The Curious Case of the Miracle: +Recovery in the Night-Time

[Yomo Kimyata]

Well, it may not be that curious (although they mostly come at night.  Mostly.) but it's time for a tell-all about this little sub-segment of the /AH.  Why now?  Well, I'm just plain done with managing it for now.  I've made plenty of inf from it over the years, and there is little or no chance in my mind that the powers-that-be are able to address either of the two glaring problems that have allowed me to have my way there.  So at this point, this is just monologuing.  As I am wont to do.

 

Now, we can all see the value of the enhancement.  If you are struggling to maintain endurance, it is a no-brainer to put it in Health.  I end up slotting it in about a quarter of my builds (basically any that require more than a Panacea proc in Health and a Perf Shifter +end in Stamina.  But it's not an absolute necessity.   But it gets a lot of attention:  1188 for sale, 1585 bidding, and the last 5 trades have all been around 4mm.

 

It will come as old news to all regular members of this sub-forum that the Miracle: +Recovery is one of the poster children for the infamous display bug.  For some reason, it occasionally shows one of two Last-5 histories:  a true one, and one that generally shows a number of trades in the 10mm+ range.  And this bugged history is notable for two reasons:  it happens periodically, and it happens consistently.  And for some godforsaken reason, people put in bids in the 10mm range.  A lot.  I have no idea why they do that, while they seemingly pay little attention to other false histories, but they do.  When I sell 50-100 overnight (not unusual, but that would be a good night), I might see 1 of 5 trades or even one of three sell at 10mm+, while others clearly trade just over 4mm.  Because, as we all know, just because you have something listed at a level doesn't mean that someone can't wildly overbid and print a trade 3x over that level.

 

I know, I know, caveat emptor and all that, and I think we have all told everyone who will listen to never overpay for a Miracle: +Recovery.  But here's where it gets interesting, and here is where I fear some of you may be getting a bit of a queasy feeling as you wonder why you don't seem to get many, or even any of these sales.

 

Because this is also a perfect place to execute what I call the inverted market bug/exploit.  I've danced around this a bunch, but it's there, and I don't think it should be, and the devs I've notified tell me "working as intended."   If you bid for something and you offer it at a higher level (let's say 4mm and 4.005mm, shall we?) then everything is groovy:  You can be both the best bidder and the best offerer, and you can be first in the queue if anyone else wants to buy it or sell it nao.  The problem, of course, is that someone can always underoffer.  If they figure out you are offering at 4.005mm, they can offer at 4.004mm.  Sounds fair, uh huh.

 

But what if you invert the market, bidding at 4.005mm and selling at 4mm (or even lower)?  Now things get screwy.  First rule of AH club is that you cannot trade with yourself on the same character, so no trade occurs.  However, you are now both the best bid and the best offer, and you have locked the market.  If someone wants to buy at 4mm, they can put the bid in, but it is lower than your bid so it is subordinate in the queue and it cannot transact.  The fact that you have some for sale there or even cheaper is inconsequential.  In fact, no one can buy any unless they surpass (or tie, but that's its own can of worms) your outstanding bid.  If they want to hit all my bids, have at it -- there are a lot of them and you may not have 100+ items available.  Or if you want to buy all the ones I have for sale, have at it -- there are a lot of them too and you may not want to buy 100+ items.  But doing either of those things will break my lock.

 

I never noticed this exploit on Live, mainly because I never had 200 AH market slots on Live.  If it's a fast moving item like invention salvage, I would expect these market locks occur all the time but clear up quickly.  But if you want to sell your Miracle cheap, I'm going to buy it.  And since I'm offering below where I am bidding, I am also always going to make the first sale.

 

Personally, I don't feel this is breaking any rules, but I think it should be.  And from here on out, I certainly won't be doing anything shady here.  If anyone else wants to try to take up this challenge, well, I guess now everyone knows about it so, um, good luck?  I expect to be a seller of the item for the rest of time, but I don't plan on managing the prices anymore.  Even when there was no display bug in effect, buying at 4mm and selling at less than that made me plenty of profit because most people try to buy it at 4, can't, try to buy it at 5 and do.  That's profitable. 

 

Devs, I implore you to put in a little piece of code that checks to see if you are bidding and offering on the same item at inverted prices.  I suspect that you may be fearful that will break the system we currently have.  Sorry.

 

Happy hunting everybody!

 

 

[Ukase]

This path is paved with madness. But hey, it's not your fault people are foolish enough to overpay. (or have clumsy fingers and mash in an extra digit)

I stay out of this niche for no other reason than I do not wish to pay for IOs from the market. I just sell my drops. Only with pvp recipes will I buy from the AH because the profit is worth the effort to me. 

My grandmother would tell me, "It's not how much money you make, but how much money you save. Every dollar you save multiplies to the bottom line."  My 7 year old self wasn't too clear on what that last part meant, but if the first part takes root, the second part takes care of itself. 

Buy low, sell high, that's all good. Buy buy nothing and sell fair, that's even better. 

[iBot]

OK so @Yomo Kimyata has seemingly confirmed something that I've suspected for a while.  And while on the surface it seems as if a simple check could prevent this sort of scenario my programmer sense tells me that there is probably a deeper widget in the code that would explode if this check was made.  It could have something to do with the way transactions are matched which seems to be a bit voodoo and lots of black magic.  Possible also that there isn't enough information available to the matching algorithm to make the determination that a certain bid or ask should be ignored.  It may well be in the very rule that allows this in the first place: no selling/buying to/from yourself.  Could be an anti-duping measure also.  Or given this code base none of the above. 🤪

 

Most likely this wasn't a thing on live because of the limited number of AH slots available.  It just wasn't possible to maintain this sort of hold for long even though this sort of collision probably happened quite a bit.  When HC upped the number of slots it increased the length time this sort of issue can persist.

[tidge]

I want to thank you for admitting that you were behind this peculiar part of the market; I'd noticed the oddness for this unique some time ago and simply ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . You didn't stop all my sales, but I feel like you got in the way of many. I don't work in specific niches, so it is not as if concentrating on this enhancement had major effect on me. I believe there is similar activity happening in a few other areas as well... although I am mostly out of the market myself, I still drop certain things there.

[Tenebrose]

20 hours ago, iBot said:

OK so @Yomo Kimyata has seemingly confirmed something that I've suspected for a while.  And while on the surface it seems as if a simple check could prevent this sort of scenario my programmer sense tells me that there is probably a deeper widget in the code that would explode if this check was made.  It could have something to do with the way transactions are matched which seems to be a bit voodoo and lots of black magic.  Possible also that there isn't enough information available to the matching algorithm to make the determination that a certain bid or ask should be ignored.  It may well be in the very rule that allows this in the first place: no selling/buying to/from yourself.  Could be an anti-duping measure also.  Or given this code base none of the above. 🤪

 

Most likely this wasn't a thing on live because of the limited number of AH slots available.  It just wasn't possible to maintain this sort of hold for long even though this sort of collision probably happened quite a bit.  When HC upped the number of slots it increased the length time this sort of issue can persist.

 

I suspect the issue is that the AH coding is such a mess that nobody feels confident touching it. I've seen this happen at work often. There's obviously a check in place to make sure you aren't trading with yourself. So at some point the code knows that you would win the bid and you are the seller. Perhaps the matching functions themselves are not privy to who is buying and who is selling, and the check is made outside of that function? It's possible that throwing "but not to myself" into the logic will mean new indexes to keep the code performant. Which, in turn, could be the cause of concern if the devs are not comfortable with those kinds of changes.

 

I've recently seen other cracks in the AH and email regarding what appears to be massive lag accessing data. I suspect those are due to similar issues that will eventually need to be addressed.

Of course, all speculation without seeing the code itself. But speculation based on 25 years of database and software engineering experience. Not my first rodeo lol.

[Yomo Kimyata]

4 hours ago, tidge said:

I want to thank you for admitting that you were behind this peculiar part of the market; I'd noticed the oddness for this unique some time ago and simply ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . You didn't stop all my sales, but I feel like you got in the way of many. I don't work in specific niches, so it is not as if concentrating on this enhancement had major effect on me. I believe there is similar activity happening in a few other areas as well... although I am mostly out of the market myself, I still drop certain things there.

 

I'm conflicted.  I like you, so I'm glad you got *some* powerful sales off.  But it also demonstrates that I simply was not doing a good enough job.

 

There were many times I just didn't have the bandwidth to maintain the bid layer or the offer layer on a timely basis; that's on me.  I did appreciate when a market PvP(lol)er would come in and hit all my bids, which would generally lead to my offers insta-selling; that's just good drama.  My favorite though was when someone would look and say, oh, the bid is at 4,005,000?  Let me offer big stacks just over that level!  Then when I ran out of supply, I would bid 4,105,000, pick up 50-100, relist at under 4mm, profit!  It was like when old-time sailors would flip giant tortoises on their back on ships so that they had fresh meat when they were ready for it.  NOTE:  no tortoises were harmed in the writing of this post.

[tidge]

Oh to be clear, I barely even market. I haven't even spent that much time in-game the last few months. It's been at least a year since I did anything that most of us would consider "marketeering". The niches I noticed looking "odd" were because:

• I was playing around with 2nd or 3rd builds, and who wants to spend all that time on the test server?! I check the AH before I pull/craft/spin pieces for new builds.
• After a play session, there are certain enhancement drops I will always craft/spin... and the Miracle set is one that I always check.

[Ukase]

57 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

My favorite though was when someone would look and say, oh, the bid is at 4,005,000?  Let me offer big stacks just over that level!  Then when I ran out of supply, I would bid 4,105,000, pick up 50-100, relist at under 4mm, profit!  

So, perhaps I'm confused. Or lack in reading comprehension. You're stating that you would simply buy the enhancement at a price of over 4M, and sell it at a price of less than 4M. 

That's only profit when someone has made a mistake overbidding due to impatience, clumsy fingers, or insufficient knowledge of AH price glitchiness. 
To hear you say it - our fellow players (not to be confused with savvy ebil marketers) are confused or have clumsy fingers or insufficient knowledge more often than not. 

While this may be the case, I do not think this is in anyone's best interest, least of all, yours. Buying high and selling low...that's no way to make inf. 

 

[Yomo Kimyata]

3 minutes ago, Ukase said:

So, perhaps I'm confused. Or lack in reading comprehension. You're stating that you would simply buy the enhancement at a price of over 4M, and sell it at a price of less than 4M. 

That's only profit when someone has made a mistake overbidding due to impatience, clumsy fingers, or insufficient knowledge of AH price glitchiness. 
To hear you say it - our fellow players (not to be confused with savvy ebil marketers) are confused or have clumsy fingers or insufficient knowledge more often than not. 

While this may be the case, I do not think this is in anyone's best interest, least of all, yours. Buying high and selling low...that's no way to make inf. 

 

 

That is precisely what I'm saying and I've probably netted well over 100bn doing exactly that on Miracles over the past year or two.

 

You are never going to go broke underestimating the capability of others.

[iBot]

Under normal conditions Yomo's tactic would be a net loss all the time but I concur that humans are very strange and will do counter intuitive things even to their own detriment.  The whole scheme only works because humans get impatient or fumble a digit which is what this scheme takes advantage of.  It is just a way to always (so long as you have stock) make sure your sell is the one that fulfills when the other makes the mistake.

 

And there is something to be said in economics for a "loss leader".  Stores do it all the time.  Hell for the longest time in the video game console market (and still to some degree today) the hardware is sold at minimum profit or even loss knowing that they make it up in the software sales.  Not quite apples to apples here but an example of how odd human behavior can be exploited for profit.

[Yomo Kimyata]

25 minutes ago, iBot said:

Under normal conditions Yomo's tactic would be a net loss all the time but I concur that humans are very strange and will do counter intuitive things even to their own detriment.  The whole scheme only works because humans get impatient or fumble a digit which is what this scheme takes advantage of.  It is just a way to always (so long as you have stock) make sure your sell is the one that fulfills when the other makes the mistake.

 

And there is something to be said in economics for a "loss leader".  Stores do it all the time.  Hell for the longest time in the video game console market (and still to some degree today) the hardware is sold at minimum profit or even loss knowing that they make it up in the software sales.  Not quite apples to apples here but an example of how odd human behavior can be exploited for profit.

 

It works in this case because:  1. people will bid somewhere between where I listed it and 2bn inf -- without knowing exactly where I listed it people do tend to overbid.  This is behavioral economics rather than game theory; 2. the recurring display bug keeps some people believing that the listed price is significantly higher than it actually is, and so in the interest of saving time, they put in a single bid that they think will win.

 

1. is pretty much reason enough to make enough to beat the vig, but 2. puts it way over the top.

 

Barring a miracle (see what I did there?) the only way you are going to sell a piece of yellow salvage for 400mm (I've got a screen shot of that somewhere) is by having it listed there when someone, for whatever reason, decides to bid that (and you are the best offer).  Other than that you are just dumping.

[iBot]

Yes leveraging the system to ensnare the impatience.  It happens by accident a lot I'm sure but that is just luck.  This "working as intended" system simply allows someone with the desire to do so to "game" the system and make sure they are the lucky one.  As far as I'm concerned, its all fair and certainly more about psychology then game theory but then game theory really doesn't mean what a lot of people assume.  🙂