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A note to all Heritage "Snipers"
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47 posts in this topic

This is to those of you that consistently wait until the 1 second mark under the "Fair Warning" section of the Heritage Live! auctions to place your bid....and then get outbid and then wait again until the 1 second mark of the next "Fair Warning" section to place your next bid and so on and so on.

Newsflash - there is no strategic advantage to doing so....it is pretty obvious that HA is not like Clink or eBay in this regard. All you are doing is dragging things out and frankly annoying us all.

Thank you in advance. 

Venting over.

Edited by Lago32
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There is no rattling or demoralizing in the situation I am describing - only irritating. I am talking about in the Heritage Live format (either the weekly auctions or the cheap day on the Signature Auction) where all active bidders are watching and participating. The irritation comes from the guy who decides to wait to bid until literally the last second during the "fair warning" period. There is no "too late" as I am sitting there ready and watching and am still able to bid and I do immediately and then often have to wait for the other guy to count down the clock. With the other guy(s) doing this literal last second bidding, the outcome will still be the same but instead of the auction potentially being over in 20 seconds, these "snipers" have to drag it out for minutes needlessly. There is no situation where I get demoralized or rattled and give up bidding or adjust my bidding if the other guy(s) are doing this, again it is just simply incredibly irritating. I guarantee it is simply a mistaken instinct on their part having been through other auction formats where this type of "sniping" actually works like Clink or eBay

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Not so much in the signature auction, but in the weekly auction, there's often the tedium of watching an undesired item go for $5...6...7..8...9... eventually making it to 30...32...34... with almost five seconds passing every other bid for an item that ends up around $100.  Seems like somebody just having some fun horsing around with the system, making a low consequence item take 5x as long to conclude as the big ticket items.

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1 minute ago, RBerman said:

Not so much in the signature auction, but in the weekly auction, there's often the tedium of watching an undesired item go for $5...6...7..8...9... eventually making it to 30...32...34... with almost five seconds passing every other bid for an item that ends up around $100.  Seems like somebody just having some fun horsing around with the system, making a low consequence item take 5x as long to conclude as the big ticket items.

Exactly, this is what I am talking about. Someone is either doing it to have fun aka irritate or they mistakenly feel it advantages them somehow.

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28 minutes ago, Lago32 said:

Exactly, this is what I am talking about. Someone is either doing it to have fun aka irritate or they mistakenly feel it advantages them somehow.

It could also be a shill bidder, trying to drive you up past the point you want to spend and then dropping out.

Of course it is annoying. That’s a side effect of the effort.

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The impact is worse for ComicConnect auctions where "Extended Bidding" for 3 minutes can keep repeating while other lots open and close-- theoretically you can have multiple ComicConnect lots with concurrent active bidding .  At least with Heritage, one lot has to close bidding before moving onto the next lot and it's only about 5 seconds between extensions....but I know that seems like torture waiting through extensions unnecessarily (ie, 2 bidders intend to bid much higher but one deliberately lets the "shot clock" wind down before each shot).  Perfectly legal but frustrating to the other side.

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11 minutes ago, GreatEscape said:

The impact is worse for ComicConnect auctions where "Extended Bidding" for 3 minutes can keep repeating while other lots open and close-- theoretically you can have multiple ComicConnect lots with concurrent active bidding .  At least with Heritage, one lot has to close bidding before moving onto the next lot and it's only about 5 seconds between extensions....but I know that seems like torture waiting through extensions unnecessarily (ie, 2 bidders intend to bid much higher but one deliberately lets the "shot clock" wind down before each shot).  Perfectly legal but frustrating to the other side.

I assume it hasn't changed but the best is Hake's 30 minute rule.  Their increments increase fast (10% of bid price right?) so it won't go on forever.

As well I didn't know they had this rule where there is a time when all auctions end, regardless of the 30 minute rule.

Malvin

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17 hours ago, Lago32 said:

This is to those of you that consistently wait until the 1 second mark under the "Fair Warning" section of the Heritage Live! auctions to place your bid....and then get outbid and then wait again until the 1 second mark of the next "Fair Warning" section to place your next bid and so on and so on.

Newsflash - there is no strategic advantage to doing so....it is pretty obvious that HA is not like Clink or eBay in this regard. All you are doing is dragging things out and frankly annoying us all.

Thank you in advance. 

Venting over.

Mike, I'm in complete disagreement with you, and we can discuss it over a beer one of these days, post-covid.

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1 hour ago, jjonahjameson11 said:

Mike, I'm in complete disagreement with you, and we can discuss it over a beer one of these days, post-covid.

Appreciate it bud but honestly not sure what would change my mind. Regarding these comments about "it is working" or me "blinking" lol, it depends what you are referring to. If you are referring to it irritating me, yeah it does obviously. If you are referring to that irritation then having the intended effect of deterring/demotivating me from bidding on or winning a piece, no it doesn't at all. I will stay there and bid as per normal up to my threshold and put up with it taking 10 minutes instead of 2 minutes - nothing changes on my part. Conversely, if you are referring to that irritation having the intended effect of then motivating me to bid more on a piece, yeah I can see someone potentially getting caught up in the emotion of it all and placing some "how-dare-they" type bids perhaps past their original threshold. But as mentioned by someone previously, in this latter instance why would anyone want to do this unless they do not intend on winning the piece and are either thrill-bidding or shilling, which obviously does happen. Hence my initial post questioning the intention and effectiveness of the bidding "strategy" to give someone an advantage in winning a piece. Anyways, nuff said on this, seems pretty clear to me.

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well, assuming that the objective is to win, I guess people do it thinking some people will indeed back off or get demoralized.  

Clearly it doesn't work on Mike, he just gets annoyed and maybe even bid stronger!

What we need to prove the hypothesis is for someone to admit that they back off or get demoralized and not bid when it happens to them!

Malvin

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19 minutes ago, malvin said:

well, assuming that the objective is to win, I guess people do it thinking some people will indeed back off or get demoralized.  

Clearly it doesn't work on Mike, he just gets annoyed and maybe even bid stronger!

What we need to prove the hypothesis is for someone to admit that they back off or get demoralized and not bid when it happens to them!

Malvin

I'll own up to being guilty of having done this before.  Obviously not early on with a bid, but just once it's down to me and one other bidder.  To the degree that there's any strategy or logic behind it, it would be a matter of snatching away what the other guy thought was a win, where the price of his victory unexpectedly jumps two increments.  As malvin says, the idea being to demoralize the other party, since when you feel like something was yours at $xxx, paying another two increments more suddenly makes the item feel that much more expensive.

I'll note that off the top of my head I can only think of three occasions where I've done this, with two wins and one loss.  All three situations were for items where I was willing to go above what I perceived FMV to be, so outside of an alternate universe where I just pounded the bid button with different results, there's no way to say whether I won because of the technique or in spite of it.  

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7 hours ago, ShallowDan said:

I'll own up to being guilty of having done this before.  Obviously not early on with a bid, but just once it's down to me and one other bidder.  To the degree that there's any strategy or logic behind it, it would be a matter of snatching away what the other guy thought was a win, where the price of his victory unexpectedly jumps two increments.  As malvin says, the idea being to demoralize the other party, since when you feel like something was yours at $xxx, paying another two increments more suddenly makes the item feel that much more expensive.

I'll note that off the top of my head I can only think of three occasions where I've done this, with two wins and one loss.  All three situations were for items where I was willing to go above what I perceived FMV to be, so outside of an alternate universe where I just pounded the bid button with different results, there's no way to say whether I won because of the technique or in spite of it.  

I've only done this once, and it was on ComicConnect. Two similar pieces where I only wanted one of them, but I thought someone might want to buy both as they were prime examples. Both kicked off within a minute of each other, and I proceeded to string out both to excruciating levels of last second upticks of minimum bid increments... The idea was to give the other bidder relief on one, so when I stopped the routine on Piece 1, it would to allow them the opportunity to then give up/gets distracted on Piece 2. Each piece went for about 30-40 minutes as we cat-and-moused each other, and I cried Uncle on the first one and threw my weight on the second, which then went my way. I found out who the other guy was a year or so later, and we joked about that night and the pain of the experience that we shared.

It was a unique set of circumstances for that specific art, governed by ComicConnect's shot clock rules, so I don't expect (or want) to ever need to do that again.

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21 hours ago, malvin said:

well, assuming that the objective is to win, I guess people do it thinking some people will indeed back off or get demoralized.  

Clearly it doesn't work on Mike, he just gets annoyed and maybe even bid stronger!

What we need to prove the hypothesis is for someone to admit that they back off or get demoralized and not bid when it happens to them!

Malvin

I suddenly have an urge to get a commission of an enraged Hulk mashing the bid button. Hulk strongest bidder there is!!

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