Wentworth's: Is it just me, or do stupidly high bids slow down the process?

[RikOz]

Asking about this because this is not the first time I've encountered this situation.

 

I was just purchasing the "Hypersonic" flight IO set off the AH. As per my usual purchasing method, I bid 100,000 inf over the highest recent sell prices that are shown. In this case, the first three enhancements showed "recent" prices of 2,000,000, so I bid 2,100,000 for each one, and received them almost instantly.

 

Then I got to the fourth enhancement of the set, and glanced at the "recent" prices: Two sales for 1,000,000, two sales for 1,500,000 ... and one sale for a whopping 20,000,000 inf.

 

Well, I'm certainly not paying that much, so just bid 2,100,000 again, which was well over the other recent prices.

 

And then I waited. And waited. And waited. The AH still hadn't sold it to me by the time I logged out.

 

As I said at the beginning, this is not the first time I've seen this happen. An item showing one successful bid that is grossly higher than, and out of line with, all of the others, and it takes forever for my purchase to go through when my bid is lower than that one ridiculous bid.

 

So what's happening here? Is it the AH seeing that one person--possibly accidentally--severely over-bid, and deciding for itself that anything less than that bid should have to wait a while? Or are subsequent sellers looking at the outlier and deciding that they should now charge that much?

 

EDIT: Actually raised my bid to 3,100,000 before I logged out. Logged in again after I posted this, and still hadn't gotten it.

 

Edited November 1, 2022 by RikOz

[Wavicle]

There are a couple possibilities. Someone may have overbid.

However, since you haven't gotten it at 3.1 that means there probably are none for that little. That is to say, if 1-2 million is the typical price here (which it looks like) then the remaining 10 pieces still on the market are probably severely overpriced.

[Apogee]

What server are you on?  Maybe someone can get you one directly.

 

[Wavicle]

Most likely those 10 have been sitting there for a long time, waiting for someone to either overbid or get really impatient.

Just keep waiting.

 

Or use Converters to get the piece you want.

Edited November 1, 2022 by Wavicle

[roleki]

Just buy a recipe and craft it, fairly quick and likely a lot cheaper.  Failing that, does one kind of Travel Mode enhancement convert to another type?  Buy a teleport or some crap and convert it to a Flight. 

 

What I am getting at is, sometimes a straight buy is less economical than being crafty.

[Perfidy]

So, this is just my first thought. There are probably multiple players who see items such as this that sell somewhat cheaply compared to other sets. 

There are only 10 at the moment. So, it would be super easy for one or more of the players with those super deep pockets to buy those 10 with patient bids of 1M to 1.5M and then relist them at a higher price. 

My second thought: 
Personally, I think it has a lot to do with server issues. I have no evidence of this. It's just a gut hunch of mine, given my own experiences. I'll have an alt list a specific level IO for a set price, and then my alt account will be unable to buy it attuned a price 1 inf higher than the list price until maybe 30-45 seconds goes by. 

So, the term bid creep is often used for situations like these, with an emphasis on the word creep. You bid, and you wait 30-45 seconds. 

In your case, it seems like you waited plenty of time. So my suggestion is to look here: 

 

Pick up one of these for 500k, and use some converters to get what you want. It will be a bit more tedious, but if you allot 70k for the price of each converter, it might cost you 2 converters, or if the rng hates you maybe another 20-30. And yes - possibly a zillion more, but that's really unlikely. 

30 converters x 70K +500k = 2.6M 
So, that's about as much as I see that costing you. Certainly less than 3.1M. 
And since there's only 3 in the set, probably less than that. 
 

[GM Impervium]

Moved to Market subforum

[Bionic_Flea]

I bought one for 3,333,333 and put it up for 1, and it sold for 1,000,000.  *Shrug* 

 

Nothing to see here.  Move on.

 

https://y.yarn.co/f8cff73e-70c4-4037-a5dd-35d3e5df188d.mp4

[Galactron]

3 hours ago, RikOz said:

I was just purchasing the "Hypersonic" flight IO set off the AH. As per my usual purchasing method, I bid 100,000 inf over the highest recent sell prices that are shown. In this case, the first three enhancements showed "recent" prices of 2,000,000, so I bid 2,100,000 for each one, and received them almost instantly.

 

Then I got to the fourth enhancement of the set, and glanced at the "recent" prices: Two sales for 1,000,000, two sales for 1,500,000 ... and one sale for a whopping 20,000,000 inf.

 

Well, I'm certainly not paying that much, so just bid 2,100,000 again, which was well over the other recent prices.

 

And then I waited. And waited. And waited. The AH still hadn't sold it to me by the time I logged out.

 

As I said at the beginning, this is not the first time I've seen this happen. An item showing one successful bid that is grossly higher than, and out of line with, all of the others, and it takes forever for my purchase to go through when my bid is lower than that one ridiculous bid.

 

So what's happening here? Is it the AH seeing that one person--possibly accidentally--severely over-bid, and deciding for itself that anything less than that bid should have to wait a while? Or are subsequent sellers looking at the outlier and deciding that they should now charge that much?

 

EDIT: Actually raised my bid to 3,100,000 before I logged out. Logged in again after I posted this, and still hadn't gotten it.

 

 

LOL, that was me.  It was not an accident, I literally kept increasing my bid by 500k at a time, until I finally got the dang IO I needed.  Yes, I was waiting a few minutes here and there, in case the system was lagging.  No idea WHY the damn thing cost 20mil in the end!  Even worse, a few hours later an older bid for 2mil finally popped.  I relisted that at cost.

[Grouchybeast]

3 hours ago, RikOz said:

So what's happening here? Is it the AH seeing that one person--possibly accidentally--severely over-bid, and deciding for itself that anything less than that bid should have to wait a while? Or are subsequent sellers looking at the outlier and deciding that they should now charge that much?

 

I took a long break from the game, and when I came back I had a stack of KB protection IOs that had been sitting there unsold for the whole time (12-18 months).  I'd listed them for a completely reasonable amount at the time, and the price must have dropped right after I listed them and never risen above that for the whole time.  Those 10 Hypersonic IOs could have been sitting there since the day Page 3 hit the servers, and whoever listed them either doesn't want to eat the relisting cost, doesn't care about the AH slots, or just isn't around any more..

 

The AH isn't the smoothest piece of code, but it generally manages its basic functions like bid-matching okay.  I think the core issue here is that Hypersonic just isn't a high-demand set, so it has low volume and low prices, so there isn't a lot of supply being generated.  

[lemming]

3 hours ago, Apogee said:

What server are you on?  Maybe someone can get you one directly.

AH is cross server, so doesn't matter.

[RikOz]

I know how to use converters, and how to craft. I was mainly providing the info of my most recent encounter with this as just an example of AH behavior I've seen many times: Bids go through quickly quite consistently, unless there is one gigantic recent sale. Then they take hours or longer.

 

Anyway, made dinner, watched a couple episodes of Sandman with the wife, checked back in, and got my IO. I had just respecced the particular character and had specifically given her four slots in Flight to accommodate that set, so I had been trying to get it quickly :)

[lemming]

3 hours ago, roleki said:

Failing that, does one kind of Travel Mode enhancement convert to another type?  Buy a teleport or some crap and convert it to a Flight.

Flight, Teleport, Jump, Running are all their separate types.  Soar and Freebird can convert to Hypersonic

 

Other than that, yea, converting can circumvent a lot of market pain.

[Apogee]

1 hour ago, lemming said:

AH is cross server, so doesn't matter.

Yes, I know the AH is cross server.  However, if someone wanted to sell/give the IO to the OP directly (outside of the AH) they would need to be on the same server or have to go through swapping servers which would be more of a pain than the good deed is worth.  I come across the particular IO often enough but I usually keep converting for something else.

Edited November 2, 2022 by Apogee

[Lyrium]

4 hours ago, Apogee said:

Yes, I know the AH is cross server.  However, if someone wanted to sell/give the IO to the OP directly (outside of the AH) they would need to be on the same server or have to go through swapping servers which would be more of a pain than the good deed is worth.  I come across the particular IO often enough but I usually keep converting for something else.

You can mail it to their global 🙂

[tidge]

Years ago, I perceived (perhaps incorrectly) that set pieces with %procs and globals had "stupid large" numbers of unsold pieces, no matter how useful those pieces would be in play(*1). The specific set under discussion is much newer than the pieces I am thinking of, but part of me still thinks that a potential seller sees the extra effects listed in a piece name and inflates the value (in their mind) when listing it on the AH.

 

(*1) I'm not talking about utility of some %procs in corner cases or experimental use, I'm thinking of the %procs that have two orders-of-magnitude more pieces for sale than there are bids, and the number of outstanding bids are in the few-dozen range.

[Zect]

1. That's not an intentionally stupidly high bid, that's someone attempting to type 2,000,000 (i.e. the same price as the rest of the set) and accidentally adding an extra 0.

 

2. Hypersonic has a decent 2-piece bonus (2.25 E res, one of the highest rates of res per additional slot) but it's also rather niche. So it's not always well-stocked compared to popular sets - note the small number for sale in your image. Items with small stocks and low volume are more vulnerable to wild price fluctuations.

 

3. The AH interface is broken and frequently displays incorrect prices or sales from different items. Sometimes the incorrect prices are interspersed with correct prices. You may see

 

3,000,000

100,000

3,000,000

100,000

100,000

 

Where 3,000,000 is the "real" price for the item and 100,000 is the sales for some other item that the AH is feeding to you as lies. An apparently reasonable bid of 110,000 will take forever to fill.

[Galactron]

11 hours ago, Zect said:

1. That's not an intentionally stupidly high bid, that's someone attempting to type 2,000,000 (i.e. the same price as the rest of the set) and accidentally adding an extra 0.

Nope.  As I already posted above, in this exact scenario I literally paid 20mil on purpose...  after trying 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3...19.5mil and getting nowhere.  Yes, I was being impatient as heck - but I have inf to burn and was honestly curious how high I'd have to bid to finally get the IO!  What's odd, to me, is that after my single purchase at 20mil the next few were back to normal prices... despite the available pool of IOs shrinking.  Guessing some serious server lag is to blame.

[Yomo Kimyata]

It's just you.  Not saying that there is anything wrong with you, but the system appears to be working as intended.

 

Since this is a player-based economy, you can only buy an item if someone else has put it up for sale.  This is a relatively rarely used item that has a tremendous supply (I get it all the time when I'm playing rare roulette).  I never bother listing it because 1. if I sell-it-nao I'll get a crummy price.  If I sell ten of them I'll get even worse prices.  and 2. There's not enough demand for me to list one or more at what you may think are reasonable prices.  If I made and listed ten at 2mm each, how long would it take for me to sell them?  A week?  A month?  Not worth it. and 3. I'd rather spend my time and effort on making and selling things that are more profitable and also more in demand.  

 

If, in fact, 20mm was the lowest price that one of the ten was listed at, I could understand someone thinking "Well, in order for this to be worth my time, I'll just list this at 20mm and check back next year."  That's not how I operate, but I can see it.

 

It's not about what's reasonable value, unfortunately.  If it were, then Force Feedback +recharges would be at 5mm, because those things are gold!

 

In the future, you could try putting in a bid that you think is higher than the other outstanding bids (it looks like someone is bidding 1mm, so anything higher than that) and wait until someone comes in and sells-it-nao so you will be first in line.  But if you want it now, you have to buy what's available at the price it is available.  Alternately, as mentioned above, there are plenty of ways to make this with converters with high probability and low cost.

 

Happy hunting!

[Galactron]

Do people routinely respond to the first post without actually reading the thread, or is it just this post?

 

(honestly asking about *these* forums, I know how Reddit is already)

[starro]

7 hours ago, Galactron said:

Do people routinely respond to the first post without actually reading the thread, or is it just this post?

 

(honestly asking about *these* forums, I know how Reddit is already)

 

Please stay on the topic of the thread.

[Galactron]

4 hours ago, starro said:

 

Please stay on the topic of the thread.

Is this meant to be funny?  Because you missed by a mile.

[Scientist]

On 11/2/2022 at 6:45 PM, Galactron said:

Nope.  As I already posted above, in this exact scenario I literally paid 20mil on purpose...  after trying 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3...19.5mil and getting nowhere.  Yes, I was being impatient as heck - but I have inf to burn and was honestly curious how high I'd have to bid to finally get the IO!  What's odd, to me, is that after my single purchase at 20mil the next few were back to normal prices... despite the available pool of IOs shrinking.  Guessing some serious server lag is to blame.

My speculation is that rather than server lag, someone posted 10 or so of these things at 20M long ago, and the lower sales you were seeing are new ones people recently posted at more reasonable prices.  Now that leads to the question of why someone would post 10 at that price, and the possibilities are (1) extra 0 on the posting price side and they were posting a stack at once, which seems a bit unlikely given that is an obscure item to try to mass buy and craft, or (2) "Live" experience. 

 

By "Live" experience I'm referring to someone who played on CoH back in its original days, and this was their market niche but they didn't realize the market changes when they started playing on Homecoming.  Thus they started off by buying a stack of these recipes and crafting them and posting them for what they used to sell for when decent set IOs cost a lot more on Live.  It is not particularly obvious when starting play here how different the market is, the first two strategies I attempted here were abject failures (hint, putting a Rare salvage up for a sale price of over 1M is not likely to result in a sale here. . . 🙂 )