Not really sure why this happened

[Techwright]

I've never really had a problem working the AH before.  This one kind of threw me for a loop though.

 

Background:  I was buying a bunch of 40s, and ran into a higher-than-expected pricing for Recharge.  Most common ones (damage, accuracy, etc.) were going for between 100k and 150k.  Recharge was running around 250k.  I opted to put in a bid at 151k, and wait it out.  Finished collecting my others, double-checked it before I signed out of the AH, went away a while to run a Manticore TF, then leveled and put in all my new 40s.  When I checked back in after that, this is what I found (below).

 

So my puzzlement:  I understand losing to the higher 155,555 bid, but why did my 151k bid lose to three 503 bids and a 150,000?  Market reporting delays doesn't seem like the thing here.  I was gone for a notable period of time and I'd checked on it once after completing my other shopping.  None of this was on the board at the time.

 

[Andreah]

The auction histories are sometimes wrong. 

 

You'll see this pretty often; sales from other items will show up. In this case, it could be that sales from some common salvage might be showing up in this IO's history. 

Edited July 16, 2023 by Andreah

[Yomo Kimyata]

The display bug is frustrating, in part because it is not necessarily consistent.  There are certain items that always show a false history.  There are certain items that show either a false history or a true history depending on the refresh.  There are certain items that periodically do one of the above, but that mostly are correct.  I'm not as involved as I once was, but I'm seeing more and more bugged displays in the "periodic" category.

 

The difficult part is that sometimes, sometimes those displays can be correct!  In @Techwright's example, that display should not be correct based on how we think the AH process is supposed to work, so my assumption is that it's a display bug.  

 

Given that display bugs aren't supposed to happen (and I've only noticed that the last 5 are wrong, not #bid or #offered, but I'm not willing to bet heavily on that), it's natural to wonder if there is some fundamental screw up in the entirety of the /AH.  Maybe but I've always found that it works as it is supposed to work.  I have always written off the display bugs as some sort of memory bleed or whatever, and given that we have so many more market slots is it possible that we've overwhelmed the capacity of the /AH database?  Dunno.

 

[Hedgefund]

It "feels like" the display bug is worsening to me.  I hear fixing AH would require basically a full overhaul but I, for one, would be willing for an update (page) to be nothing but fixing AH holistically.

[Yomo Kimyata]

57 minutes ago, Hedgefund said:

It "feels like" the display bug is worsening to me.  I hear fixing AH would require basically a full overhaul but I, for one, would be willing for an update (page) to be nothing but fixing AH holistically.

 

I can't imagine this happening for two reasons.

 

1.  It's an old game with (what seems to me) a gradually diminishing user base.  Is it worth the person-hours to the development team to develop and institute a spanking new system that may not be in use for that much longer, especially since there are kludgey workarounds?  But more importantly...

 

2.  I don't think the powers-that-be are willing to take even the smallest chance that they break the current system and have to deal with the fallout of someone logging in five years from now and find they are missing that one set of Bombardment they had sitting in the /AH interface.  Even if there were a clearly stated plan and timeline, for example, for building an alternate /AH, allowing/requiring/mandating players to shift their items from one to the other, then sunsetting the old one, I feel pretty confident that mobs with poorly made pitchforks would storm the castle.  

 

Don't see it happening!

[Hedgefund2]

Oh I know it's not happening.  I'm just playing "if I were king for a day..."

Edited July 16, 2023 by Hedgefund2

[macskull]

On 7/16/2023 at 12:31 PM, Yomo Kimyata said:

 

I can't imagine this happening for two reasons.

 

1.  It's an old game with (what seems to me) a gradually diminishing user base.  Is it worth the person-hours to the development team to develop and institute a spanking new system that may not be in use for that much longer, especially since there are kludgey workarounds?  But more importantly...

 

2.  I don't think the powers-that-be are willing to take even the smallest chance that they break the current system and have to deal with the fallout of someone logging in five years from now and find they are missing that one set of Bombardment they had sitting in the /AH interface.  Even if there were a clearly stated plan and timeline, for example, for building an alternate /AH, allowing/requiring/mandating players to shift their items from one to the other, then sunsetting the old one, I feel pretty confident that mobs with poorly made pitchforks would storm the castle.  

 

Don't see it happening!

I don't quite understand how the AH history bug came into being, since it wasn't there on live. I suppose maybe bucketing things together did something, but I can't see any obvious connections.

[tidge]

53 minutes ago, macskull said:

I don't quite understand how the AH history bug came into being, since it wasn't there on live. I suppose maybe bucketing things together did something, but I can't see any obvious connections.

 

The AH itself relies on a database; it is very likely that the different views/ways-into the database aren't entirely 'robust'. The mechanism Homecoming uses to 'bucket' items could certainly be contributing, although I suspect the problem is more fundamental.

[Andreah]

12 hours ago, tidge said:

 

The AH itself relies on a database; it is very likely that the different views/ways-into the database aren't entirely 'robust'. The mechanism Homecoming uses to 'bucket' items could certainly be contributing, although I suspect the problem is more fundamental.

IIRC, the auction houses uses a in-house coded tree structure (probably a heap or variant of one) instead of a proper dbms. If that's true, then any manner of weird bugs could occur when changing it, such as by forcing specific or categorical bucket collisions. Can anyone verify that's how it is coded? I recall seeing this a long time ago so it's been too long for me to be sure of it now.

[Without_Pause]

I've talked myself out of looking into helping with the backend for the Market more times than I want to count. I get paid to deal with enough stupid code that doubling down on stupid code on a volunteer basis just isn't that alluring.

 

And yes, I mean I deal with stupid code. I have literally seen a comment saying that 'bad code follows below,' or there is a section of code which validates something and the comment is 'in case something stupid happens.'

[Techwright]

Well, this discussion went in a different direction than I'd anticipated and has been very interesting.  I was so sure I was not thinking through established process somehow, figuring someone would point out my mistake and instead I find it was likely a very problematic bug.  I suppose that's both a relief for me and a shared headache.

[Sanguinesun]

Remember the database the market uses is for all servers and there are delays at some points that can cause variations in listings or even ghost sold listings. This is why you always click multiple times to make sure you look at things.

 

As for what you're seeing regarding cheaper sales before your big one, think on it like this, that "magically" a large number of listings of them were.... loaded... into the market almost instantly, because of that, the bids were all batch sorted where the order of it isn't necessarily what you'd expect.  This happens pretty much daily and is more easily seen with the seeding done with the salvage markets.