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AUCTION HOUSE | Issue # ....
nathan
Member Posts: 225 Arc User
AH WOES
The auction house breaks every single week, we all know this. Typically it gets resolved during maintenance and lasts until mid-week the following week. Last week the auction house broke for me on FRIDAY. As in, the very next day after maintenance. The same maintenance that fixed the previous week's issues. Here are the issues I am having, and what I have done to be pro-active about them.
As a buyer:
1) Winning expired auctions and not receiving the item, however, it stays logged in "my bids section"
2) Bidding on an item "pre-maintenance" and the item disappearing from search "post-maintenance," but remaining in "my bids".
3) Expired auctions remain in "my bids" as clutter that prevent you from competing with last minute bidders.
I began looking for ways around this. I found that this bug is not account-wide, and that once your character begins to stop receiving bids that you have "won", then you can log onto another character and start bidding on items and will receive them. However, eventually it will catch up with that character too.
As a seller
I have to preface this by saying that I have not ran into this issue as a seller, but I wanted to bring to light the issues from the other angle... because it is a lot worse.
If you sell an item and someone bids on it, but the duration for the auction extends passed the time of maintenance. There is a very high chance that the item that you are selling will be REMOVED from search and that no new bidders will ever see it. Anyone who did not bid on that item previously WILL NOT be able to see it. I have seen the biggest travesties in the auction house because of this. People who don't know better put up opening bids with 1 AD, someone bids, maintenance happens, then the item is sold for less than a day's refinement limit.
Also, once you have an item that has a bid placed on it, you CANNOT remove it from the AH. Which means that your items are at a serious disadvantage against the other items for sale. Not only will it likely not show up in search queries ( no new bidders ), but you will not be able to do .anything. about it when your item sells for a few AD.
A New Problem.
Today I experienced something infuriating. In an effort to be pro-active with the game, rather than just rage-quit, I spent a week tracking bids across three different characters. After each character would get bugged, I would move onto the next one, but still bid on the previous one. For a week "my bids" had shown the message "your winning" on expired items. Normally this means that I have won the item, and I have come to expect it during maintenance. However, today I received my money back on the item, informing me that I did not win the auction.
So for one week, a large sum of bidding capital was tied up. Why? I have been anticipating this item the entire time, and there is a list of items that I have "won." Now I have to look at them as they continue to clog up my screen and wonder if I actually won them, or if my AD is just sitting in a traffic jam somewhere, preventing me from using that capital to actually try to win other bids.
I understand that this is a F2P game, and I do not know how the back-end of that looks. Some people ( including myself ) have spent and continue to spend a large amount of actual dollars. With the ability to mix currencies, players shouldn't have to worry about whether or not they will actually get what they paid for.
The auction house breaks every single week, we all know this. Typically it gets resolved during maintenance and lasts until mid-week the following week. Last week the auction house broke for me on FRIDAY. As in, the very next day after maintenance. The same maintenance that fixed the previous week's issues. Here are the issues I am having, and what I have done to be pro-active about them.
As a buyer:
1) Winning expired auctions and not receiving the item, however, it stays logged in "my bids section"
2) Bidding on an item "pre-maintenance" and the item disappearing from search "post-maintenance," but remaining in "my bids".
3) Expired auctions remain in "my bids" as clutter that prevent you from competing with last minute bidders.
I began looking for ways around this. I found that this bug is not account-wide, and that once your character begins to stop receiving bids that you have "won", then you can log onto another character and start bidding on items and will receive them. However, eventually it will catch up with that character too.
As a seller
I have to preface this by saying that I have not ran into this issue as a seller, but I wanted to bring to light the issues from the other angle... because it is a lot worse.
If you sell an item and someone bids on it, but the duration for the auction extends passed the time of maintenance. There is a very high chance that the item that you are selling will be REMOVED from search and that no new bidders will ever see it. Anyone who did not bid on that item previously WILL NOT be able to see it. I have seen the biggest travesties in the auction house because of this. People who don't know better put up opening bids with 1 AD, someone bids, maintenance happens, then the item is sold for less than a day's refinement limit.
Also, once you have an item that has a bid placed on it, you CANNOT remove it from the AH. Which means that your items are at a serious disadvantage against the other items for sale. Not only will it likely not show up in search queries ( no new bidders ), but you will not be able to do .anything. about it when your item sells for a few AD.
A New Problem.
Today I experienced something infuriating. In an effort to be pro-active with the game, rather than just rage-quit, I spent a week tracking bids across three different characters. After each character would get bugged, I would move onto the next one, but still bid on the previous one. For a week "my bids" had shown the message "your winning" on expired items. Normally this means that I have won the item, and I have come to expect it during maintenance. However, today I received my money back on the item, informing me that I did not win the auction.
So for one week, a large sum of bidding capital was tied up. Why? I have been anticipating this item the entire time, and there is a list of items that I have "won." Now I have to look at them as they continue to clog up my screen and wonder if I actually won them, or if my AD is just sitting in a traffic jam somewhere, preventing me from using that capital to actually try to win other bids.
I understand that this is a F2P game, and I do not know how the back-end of that looks. Some people ( including myself ) have spent and continue to spend a large amount of actual dollars. With the ability to mix currencies, players shouldn't have to worry about whether or not they will actually get what they paid for.
Post edited by nathan#8975 on
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In fact, I did stop playing the game two weeks ago because of this very reason. I came back with the intention to be pro-active and patient, because I really enjoy playing the game. I've only been here for about three months and have spent a lot of USD with the game. If the developers want to continue to attract buying customers ( and maintain them ), then things like this need to be a serious priority. I would not have this issue with another F2P game that I play by a different company.
I've tried to produce a work-around, and I thought I had one going. Albeit, it was/is a LOT of extra work tracking a clogged bidding system across multiple toons, even just managing it with in-game currency is hard. However, I was willing to do that.
But this particular item has shown on my screen as won since atleast Saturday afternoon. Today I receive the "you have been outbid" with my AD back? That is a little too much for me. That was AD that I likely purchased with cash-bought zen and then used to bid on items that I wanted. It was withheld from me for multiple days and now I have a ton of bids that I am cautiously watching because I have no idea if I actually won them or not, despite what it says on the expired bid. Not to even mention the lost opportunity of not having that buying power when the market was low. This is the first time that this particular symptom has happened to me with this bug.
Also, I forgot to mention. I could be wrong, but I believe that as far as items "disapearing" from the AH, I think the bug primarily effects items which have already been bid on by a player.
Here's why:
I created a dated post-card system before I began bidding on the AH; each day/card would have the time of the expiration of the item and the last known bidding price. I would then flip through my cards each day and make my bids.
Items that were on my post cards, but not bid on through the gateway system were sometimes still searchable by my other characters, presumably because there wasn't a bid placed on it yet.
very annoying bugs around the auction house
expired auctions only claimable via gateway
items unlisted after patch
no-buyout auctions don't end correctly / get stuck