P99 Auctions is Closing

[paulgiamatti]

Originally Posted by Sage Truthbearer [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The claims that all of these people were all using P99auctions to inflate prices are extremely exaggerated. There were a number of safeguards that prevented this, and from personal experience I have a pretty good idea of the market value of a lot of items an P99auctions was mostly pretty accurate.

This,

Originally Posted by thufir [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

p99auctions was a public aggregator site, with its information available to all. now that it is down everyone loses information, but those who had less information (traded less often) suffer most, since this information bloc represented a much larger percentage of their total knowledge than it did to an experienced tunnelquester. that this information could have been manipulated by others is not relevant. those same people will be able to manipulate information in their private trades more easily now, because this site isn't around to contradict them.

and this.

The extent to which people were able to manipulate price averaging on the AH was far, far less than you're able to do so elsewhere, and people who claim otherwise are really bad at math. This is likely the doing of a prolific tunnelquester or tunnelquesters who deal in RMT. With accurate pricing information easy enough for a chimpanzee to access available to everyone, people flipping items and such lose their edge and profits drop.

[Quidello]

Can anyone show some evidence or a case of people manipulating prices on the site?

[Lhancelot]

Originally Posted by Quidello [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Can anyone show some evidence or a case of people manipulating prices on the site?

Let me explain how easy it was to manipulate P99 auction site. If an item had not been sold for a month alone, if I took that item and priced it at 50k, let's say, a cloth cap... That cloth cap's average price for the last month would read as 50k.

If that doesn't show you the ease to which P99's prices could be manipulated, then I can attest to my personal experience in learning how it worked.

I was stubborn about not dropping price on one particular item. What I noticed was over a course of a few weeks, as soon as I changed the item to another alt to try to sell in EC, the price for monthly average raised slightly everytime I moved the item to an alt to try to sell it.

I then understood that if I could alter the monthly price just by selling the same item on different toons over a multiple weeks time, imagine if I sold the item across many alts and sat in EC all day long, every day? I could easily alter the price by a lot, either up or down simply by changing toons I sold the item on. In essence EC tunnelquesters do this, they also have different alts they sell on. Don't be naieve and think they do not.

Once I understood that, I then started to notice people auctioning items by typing out the name, no link of the item provided. Innocently selling an item on an alt, and didn't have time to get it's link or the actual item, right? No.

When I went to P99 auction site, and looked for an item I wanted to check a price on, I found that in the history of that item being sold were this item being auctioned using the same writing style but being sold by many different toon names.

The price was extremely high, and many times just typed into the /auc. That's because P99 auction gleaned price average from the item's name, whether it was typed, linked, abbreviated, it didn't matter. So this one guy was typing the name in, at a stupid high price on many toons to manipulate the average price. It was clear to me.

Once I understood this was being done rampantly, I then understood that there was a P99 auction site problem, and that prices were being pushed up by people who had known what took me many months to learn and understand.

How long has it been going on? I have no idea, I was off game for 2-3 years, and P99 auction site did not exist when I had left. I do know since I been back, this has been going on well before I realized it about a month ago.

Anyway, P99 auction site was a wonderful idea, but it was just way too easy to manipulate.

Anyone that thinks the manipulation of P99 auction site is grossly exaggerated by it's detractors are naive, or don't want to believe the truth because anyone that has tunnelquested for any extended periods of time would learn this on their own as I did.