Auction House (/AH) price refresh seems less effective.

[Sszl]

Definitely can tell a difference after the patch today.  Seeing tons (over 100 so far) of examples where I can now see that the price I placed on a sell order is way off what they are really selling at.  Thanks for the fix today.

 

I am still seeing some examples where it looks like my orders don't process at all though.  Here is an example (I have more if needed):

Sell order

 

This is an old order that I have been watching not process before the fix today. From what I can see post-fix there are still orders processing at higher prices on these but these never get executed.  I have previously taken them down, and put them back up at the same price and then they process.  I'm leaving a few orders up to monitor and in case the devs need any examples to check.

 

Thanks.

 

 

Edited March 12 by Sszl

[Ukase]

On 3/9/2024 at 12:33 PM, Sszl said:

Question on the restriction mentioned - does the AH limit buying a recipe and selling the finished enhancement on the same character, or does it recognize the recipe and the finished enhancement are different items?

I promise you, the AH makes no limit on buying a recipe, crafting the recipe and re-listing the enhancement on the same character. Many of us have accumulated a large stack of inf doing that very thing. 

[Yomo Kimyata]

1 hour ago, Sszl said:

Definitely can tell a difference after the patch today.  Seeing tons (over 100 so far) of examples where I can now see that the price I placed on a sell order is way off what they are really selling at.  Thanks for the fix today.

 

I am still seeing some examples where it looks like my orders don't process at all though.  Here is an example (I have more if needed):

Sell order

 

This is an old order that I have been watching not process before the fix today. From what I can see post-fix there are still orders processing at higher prices on these but these never get executed.  I have previously taken them down, and put them back up at the same price and then they process.  I'm leaving a few orders up to monitor and in case the devs need any examples to check.

 

Thanks.

 

 

 

It is possible that there are plenty of Salvo A/D listed UNDER your price of 800k, and every one of those listed trades were legit, just a case of the buyer throwing in a "fair" bid rather than doing any price searching.  An easy way to check is to go to another character (or use this character after you take down the offer) and bid 799,999 and see if you own a new Salvo.

[Sszl]

Tested as suggested.  before making bid offer, I had 1 lvl 25, 3 lvl 22 and 1 lvl 24 all at 800k - all old orders.  Also on another character had 3x 21's, and 1x 22 at 1m, also all old orders.  Verified no sale orders for that item(of any level) on 3rd character and placed orders at 799,999 as shown here:

Did not receive any sales from AH.  Waited 5 minutes and placed another one at 800k.  This one executed immediately:

Logged back on to selling character and it looks like my order at 800k bought from this character.

 

So I think that verifies there weren't any orders below 800k. 

 

Second test - placed new buy order at 1m for the same item - still on character that doesn't have any for sale:

This test also filled immediately, and looks like it took it from one of my 800k sales orders.  so I guess it could all be coincidental and it may be working right.  Just seemed odd to watch it not process and see higher bids complete for a long time (all before the fix today though, so display could have been wrong), then still see what appeared to be the same behavior today.  I'll watch it a few more days to see if it seems to happen any more.

 

Thanks for the suggestion on how to test.

[Yomo Kimyata]

On 3/5/2024 at 10:57 AM, Number Six said:

 

It's a bit more than a display bug, and I suspect I may know what's going on, but it's proving to be difficult to reproduce in a lab environment or even on the beta server because it's something that can only happen when there's a lot of item histories getting recycled at once due to ongoing transactions.

 

I would love to hear as much as you are willing to tell about this.  I've had plenty of personal theories!

[Number Six]

On 3/12/2024 at 3:56 PM, Yomo Kimyata said:

I would love to hear as much as you are willing to tell about this.  I've had plenty of personal theories!

 

It was a case of the auction server creating a hash table using the old Cryptic StashTable implementation, which defaults to storing pointers to string keys instead of the actual string. That's fine for read-only data that's always in memory, but not when the table is being populated by a small number static memory buffers being filled out by a function to generate the key. In this case a set of static buffers on a rotor so that recursion could work for a few levels.

 

That in turn caused hash key collisions - which are normally resolved by comparing the actual keys - to sometimes get a false match on the comparison function if the same buffer was used twice in a row due to the rotor wrapping around, or if multiple slots were filled by the same temporary copy of the key. When that happened the two items with the colliding keys would be considered as equal when they really weren't. It could also cause false negatives where no item would be returned at all because it was comparing the wrong string.

 

The irony there is it meant that spamming the "Find" button to try to refresh history made it more likely to return the wrong history, but only if the table was already at a certain size so that there were colliding keys, and there was a fair amount of other traffic hitting the server to increment the rotor. That's why the UI enhancements to automatically refresh the display seemed to make it get worse instead of better.

 

The fix itself was incredibly simple -- just have the StashTable copy the keys instead of storing a pointer.

 

We do have a better hash table that newer code like the launcher and some newer game featuers are using that it could have been switched to. That implementation uses fancy strings that have automatic memory sharing and copy-on-write semantics. Switching to that would have also resolved it, but in the middle of a page I opted for the conservative route to just do the simple fix.

[Hedgefund]

I've been so excited by this fix, clicking on things just to click them to see immediate and (ostensibly) accurate results.

 

I did see something suspicious just now, this is a rare, popular piece.  I find it unlikely (though not impossible) that a successful sale of 56,009 went through.  I could go through the motions of acquiring and selling a bunch of these to see the floor but... I'm not.

 

[Number Six]

25 minutes ago, Hedgefund said:

I did see something suspicious just now, this is a rare, popular piece.  I find it unlikely (though not impossible) that a successful sale of 56,009 went through.  I could go through the motions of acquiring and selling a bunch of these to see the floor but... I'm not.

 

I checked the database and it appears to be a legitimate transaction. The lucky bidder on Reunion has a number of standing bids for that item at similar values, and the seller on Excelsior listed the item for a lower price, looks like the stars happened to align.

[Lockely]

7 hours ago, Number Six said:

 

I checked the database and it appears to be a legitimate transaction. The lucky bidder on Reunion has a number of standing bids for that item at similar values, and the seller on Excelsior listed the item for a lower price, looks like the stars happened to align.

 

Something is definitely up with the AH though. I listed a ton of converters last night at 65k a pop on my main character (Lockely). A scant few of them sold by the time I woke up in the AM, which was weird.

I logged onto my alt (Auric Bombardier) and listed a few, they sold by the next time I checked at 70k. Logged back into Lockely, none of his had sold yet.

Logged into my other alt (Remarus) and listed a few just a few moments ago. Same price point, 65k. All sold before I had a chance to log off. Logged back into Lockely, all his are *still* listed for 65k.

Did the AH develop a recency bias as to who it pulls the sell orders from?

Edit: I complain on here and everything finally moves, including an enhancement I had listed for like over a week now. Still very odd that my alt's sales went through before my main's despite being same price. Still have 20 unsold converters at 65k though. Will watch them. I'm listing a bunch more on Auric again as I just downed Hami. We'll see if I can spot who moves first.

Edited March 14 by Lockely

[Yomo Kimyata]

13 hours ago, Number Six said:

 

blah blah GINGER blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah GINGER blah blah blah...

 

That's fantastic and great work on your part!  We all really appreciate it, although it puts more information in the hands of dumb money retail investors.

 

(I actually understood more of that than I thought I would, but you got to go for the Far Side reference when you can!)

[Sszl]

18 hours ago, Lockely said:

 

Something is definitely up with the AH though. I listed a ton of converters last night at 65k a pop on my main character (Lockely). A scant few of them sold by the time I woke up in the AM, which was weird.

I logged onto my alt (Auric Bombardier) and listed a few, they sold by the next time I checked at 70k. Logged back into Lockely, none of his had sold yet.

Logged into my other alt (Remarus) and listed a few just a few moments ago. Same price point, 65k. All sold before I had a chance to log off. Logged back into Lockely, all his are *still* listed for 65k.

Did the AH develop a recency bias as to who it pulls the sell orders from?

Edit: I complain on here and everything finally moves, including an enhancement I had listed for like over a week now. Still very odd that my alt's sales went through before my main's despite being same price. Still have 20 unsold converters at 65k though. Will watch them. I'm listing a bunch more on Auric again as I just downed Hami. We'll see if I can spot who moves first.

I've had similar experiences both with converters and enhancements I've made from recipes.  I have no explanation.  It seems like something is going on but I'm not clear on exactly what it is.  Here's another example of one of my toons having enh's that just won't sell but I can sell on other toons,  if I cancel and relist at the same price on the toon with this listing, it usually starts to work.  It seems random or at least, I don't understand the pattern.  I have 6 of these up for sale, all at 2m list price, all old orders - only one order older on this toon, so I would guess these are 2 or 3 weeks old, maybe older.

Edit to add 2nd screen shot from a few minutes later:

 

One more screen shot - different enh.  This one is an old order, again maybe 2 weeks+.  I've sold several of the same item on newer orders even on this same character at the same price.  But this old one won't process:

Edited March 15 by Sszl
Another screen shot