Lacking in Luck
Usually, I manage to snag myself some pretty awesome deals (deals in the sense of monies spent and/or just the awesomeness of the items themselves) in terms of adding stuff to my collection, but there have been a few times especially of late where I've encountered a few snags with my luck running out on me.
Since this is a Pokemon-themed journal, all of the items mentioned were, of course, intended for my Pokemon collection. Out of all of the incidents, however, a particular one takes the cake the most.
RE: PakiPaki Bayleef
I can't even begin to express how grumpy this incident still makes me even though it happened almost a month ago.
So I use a third party service to bid on items in overseas auctions. I had put in a high bid and then someone else using the same service as me put in another bid during the last 8 minutes. 8 minutes was not enough time for the system to update and notify me that I had been outbid by another user using the same service as me (meaning, their high bid amount was higher than my own high bid) and long story short...
I lost the bid.
What ended up happening was that THEIR bid replaced MY bid... BUT the current bid amount stayed the same since we were both using the same service to make the bids. Same service means same username and same username means the high bidder information and current bid amount doesn't change on the auction's information page...
All of THAT equated to:
NO notification to me from my service provider that someone else's bid was higher.
NO notification to me from the auction page that someone else's bid was higher.
NO changing of current bid amount.
Basically... NO notification of ANYTHING.
Just wham, bam, and the other person won AND they won it at the last lowest bid which was NOT at MY highest bid amount like it would happen in a normal auction.
I would have happily gotten into a bid war over it and ironically, I had actually stayed up until the auction had ended... only to have never gotten any notification whatsover that I had been outbid. In fact, when I went to bed after the auction ended, I went to bed thinking for sure that I had won the auction!
Man, what a surprise the next morning was, let me tell you!
When I woke up to go check to see if I could pay for my auction, I discovered that I had actually LOST the auction.
Confused, I contacted my deputy service about the incident and they explained what I just finished explaining in this post - that another deputy customer had placed a bid with a max bid that was higher than my own within the last 8 minutes of the auction. Owing to the closeness in time when the final bid was placed by the other deputy customer, the system never had a chance to notify me of my bid being replaced which, of course, is how I ended up getting outbid without any notification or warning whatsoever and it is also how the other customer got the PakiPaki at a steal of a price.
... Yeah.
I'm not pissed at the other customer AT ALL; I completely and absolutely believe that everyone has the right to: bid on what they want, when they want, and however they want to.
But I AM pissed that where sniping is discouraged in these auctions (there is a five minute extension rule which either results in discouragement of sniping or last-minute bid wars), there IS, apparently, an inadvertent workaround for it and a workaround that is a failsafe against the original high bidder coming back to put in a higher bid in response to a last minute bid.
THAT is what I think is unfair and THAT is actually what upsets me.
Not that I had been outbid. Not that someone else had outbid me at the last minute.
But that I had been outbid during the last few minutes without ANY notification whatsoever which denied me the chance to make another bid or get into a bid war which I would have happily gotten into.
Aside from the Bayleef incident, this has actually happened a few other times with other auctions and not all of them Pokemon-related.
That said, I've about had it with this sort of thing happening and I really hope the deputy service implements a 15 minute rule where customers from the same service are disallowed from bidding on the same item within the last 15 minutes of the auction to prevent this same thing from happening again (where the original bidder gets outbid at the last minute by a customer using the same service without any notification whatsoever because there isn't enough time for the system to notify).
Since this is a Pokemon-themed journal, all of the items mentioned were, of course, intended for my Pokemon collection. Out of all of the incidents, however, a particular one takes the cake the most.
RE: PakiPaki Bayleef
I can't even begin to express how grumpy this incident still makes me even though it happened almost a month ago.
So I use a third party service to bid on items in overseas auctions. I had put in a high bid and then someone else using the same service as me put in another bid during the last 8 minutes. 8 minutes was not enough time for the system to update and notify me that I had been outbid by another user using the same service as me (meaning, their high bid amount was higher than my own high bid) and long story short...
I lost the bid.
What ended up happening was that THEIR bid replaced MY bid... BUT the current bid amount stayed the same since we were both using the same service to make the bids. Same service means same username and same username means the high bidder information and current bid amount doesn't change on the auction's information page...
All of THAT equated to:
NO notification to me from my service provider that someone else's bid was higher.
NO notification to me from the auction page that someone else's bid was higher.
NO changing of current bid amount.
Basically... NO notification of ANYTHING.
Just wham, bam, and the other person won AND they won it at the last lowest bid which was NOT at MY highest bid amount like it would happen in a normal auction.
I would have happily gotten into a bid war over it and ironically, I had actually stayed up until the auction had ended... only to have never gotten any notification whatsover that I had been outbid. In fact, when I went to bed after the auction ended, I went to bed thinking for sure that I had won the auction!
Man, what a surprise the next morning was, let me tell you!
When I woke up to go check to see if I could pay for my auction, I discovered that I had actually LOST the auction.
Confused, I contacted my deputy service about the incident and they explained what I just finished explaining in this post - that another deputy customer had placed a bid with a max bid that was higher than my own within the last 8 minutes of the auction. Owing to the closeness in time when the final bid was placed by the other deputy customer, the system never had a chance to notify me of my bid being replaced which, of course, is how I ended up getting outbid without any notification or warning whatsoever and it is also how the other customer got the PakiPaki at a steal of a price.
... Yeah.
I'm not pissed at the other customer AT ALL; I completely and absolutely believe that everyone has the right to: bid on what they want, when they want, and however they want to.
But I AM pissed that where sniping is discouraged in these auctions (there is a five minute extension rule which either results in discouragement of sniping or last-minute bid wars), there IS, apparently, an inadvertent workaround for it and a workaround that is a failsafe against the original high bidder coming back to put in a higher bid in response to a last minute bid.
THAT is what I think is unfair and THAT is actually what upsets me.
Not that I had been outbid. Not that someone else had outbid me at the last minute.
But that I had been outbid during the last few minutes without ANY notification whatsoever which denied me the chance to make another bid or get into a bid war which I would have happily gotten into.
Aside from the Bayleef incident, this has actually happened a few other times with other auctions and not all of them Pokemon-related.
That said, I've about had it with this sort of thing happening and I really hope the deputy service implements a 15 minute rule where customers from the same service are disallowed from bidding on the same item within the last 15 minutes of the auction to prevent this same thing from happening again (where the original bidder gets outbid at the last minute by a customer using the same service without any notification whatsoever because there isn't enough time for the system to notify).