AH Bidding ProblemSource
Newschooler
idk if other people find this to be a problem but when bidding on items in the last few minutes when you try to increase the bid, it doesn't accurately say what the top bid is at. for instance ill be winning the bid until the last minute until someone bids higher trying to snipe it so i click bid and it gives me a recommended increased bid but once i click bid, it always says it isnt high enough, so i keep going higher and higher and it keeps saying it isnt high enough until the point that it expires and i lost. i want it to say what the actual top bid is so i dont have to guess how much to increase the bid by. anyone else find this annoying?
02/27/2013 08:10 PMPosted by RapapThe AH was hotfixed a few weeks ago to do this. Instead of raising the current bid 5% over your attempted bid it just brings it up to yours. Blizzard changed it to help prevent other players from finding out your max bid.
This is correct. Preserving your max bid as a secret is important in allowing players to bid according to their true valuations as well as mitigating shill bids. (Bids with ill intent to artificially inflate the price)
Others in this thread have said it better than I but in essence if your desire is that you simply want to know what it is that you need to beat (so you can bid a bit higher) flip your thinking over and let the system work in your favor instead. Suppose the current winner is Bob with a visible (public) bid of 50,000 gold. Bob's true max bid (which is hidden from you), is 75,000 gold.
In this case one of the following will apply:
Scenario 1: You are willing to bid between 52,500 and 75,000 gold. In this case, you're not willing to pay as much as Bob, so Bob will win. The system will automatically increase Bob's bid to your max bid. Since he entered his bid first (and is also willing to pay more), the system considers Bob the winner.
Scenario 2: You are willing to bid 75,001 or more gold. In this case, you are willing to spend more than Bob, so the system makes you the winner. Suppose you enter a value of 150,000 gold. Well now the hidden bid is working to your advantage. The public bid is 75,000, the maximum amount Bob was willing to pay. But now you're the one who is willing to pay more, and entered a higher number, so the system considers you to be the winner instead. Even though you entered 150,000 - if the auction were to end right now you only pay 75,000, the maximum of the second place bidder (Bob). Of course somebody else may come along and bid that up, but the system will automatically increment your bid upwards for you to the maximum (150,000) you had specified.
For the academically interested, you can read more about this auction approach on wikipedia, it's called a Vickrey auction or "Second Price Auction". One very nice property is it gives bidders incentive to bid their true value. a.k.a "Truthful bidding". For the Diablo Auction House it enables players to make a truthful bid, leave the game, come back 24 hours later and see if they won. No need to babysit a bid and make sure you don't get "sniped". As long as you bid the maximum amount you were willing to pay you either win and get a refund for the difference between you and second place, or you lose the auction to somebody who was willing to pay more.
INFO like this should be in the game guide!
Good suggestion, I'll pass this along to the Game Guide gurus to have it added.
That's how it used to work, but it made shill bidding (the practice of having friends bid your item up higher and higher to search for the bidder's max bid, then stop when it is found without ever taking a risk of exceeding it) an issue. Your bid was not truly hidden when the auctions worked that way.
This is correct.
