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?

[AndyErik]

Hello,

I've been a professional C# developer since its inception in 2002 and have been writing software for 17 years. I wrote two bug reports to P99auctions.com yesterday in an attempt to fix this issue for them. I also wrote an email to support@p99auctions.com. Neither of these requests for contact have been returned. If the owners of the site are reading this thread please PM me or reply to my requests so we can plug this hole asap.

It's a relatively routine issue that can be resolved with little headache.

- Throxis

[fugazi]

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

Hello,

I've been a professional C# developer since its inception in 2002 and have been writing software for 17 years. I wrote two bug reports to P99auctions.com yesterday in an attempt to fix this issue for them. I also wrote an email to support@p99auctions.com. Neither of these requests for contact have been returned. If the owners of the site are reading this thread please PM me or reply to my requests so we can plug this hole asap.

It's a relatively routine issue that can be resolved with little headache.

- Throxis

[You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[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.

[QFuzzle]

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

Hello,

I've been a professional C# developer since its inception in 2002 and have been writing software for 17 years. I wrote two bug reports to P99auctions.com yesterday in an attempt to fix this issue for them. I also wrote an email to support@p99auctions.com. Neither of these requests for contact have been returned. If the owners of the site are reading this thread please PM me or reply to my requests so we can plug this hole asap.

It's a relatively routine issue that can be resolved with little headache.

- Throxis

Yes! Somebody's at least trying to fix what's happening here. Thank you!

[paulgiamatti]

I'd hardly call that rampant manipulation. There's a good chance the people doing that - if they even were, I've yet to see an actual example - are the same people RMTing and flooding the site with data because their tunnelquest game is suffering.

People saying the AH is a net harm versus a net good has got to be one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.

[maskedmelon]

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

I'd hardly call that rampant manipulation. There's a good chance the people doing that - if they even were, I've yet to see an actual example - are the same people RMTing and flooding the site with data because their tunnelquest game is suffering.

People saying the AH is a net harm versus a net good has got to be one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.

Lance explained it perfectly, Paul^^ The thing is, once someone pushed a price to where they wanted, the community kept it there (until pushed/pulled again) because they would just price around the mean, what they perceived as a "fair" price. And pushing prices didn't take much of a time investment. You onky needed to auction once to get an entry on the site. 15 minutes or so a day with a set of macros and you could be pushing/pulling prices on dozens of items however you liked. I wouldn't feel bad for not noticing. Most people didn't.

I don't really care how much money people make. I pay what I want and sell for what I want. I just think it is an awful outcome when someone establishes these phony price points that nobody is willing to pay, forcing unassuming players to waste their time hoping for some purple relief to the green sea of EC, or the opposite: establishing lower price points to suck up all of a particular item for later resale (following a push) when other players could be using the item.

There's nothing wrong with reselling, but p99auctions severely retarded the process making resellers sit on wares for longer periods of time because they had to spend a bit more time manipulating prices rather than just serving as an intermediary to minimize players' time in EC. Meanwhile you have other players largely unaccustomed to the market being forced to spend more time in EC to move their wares, getting annoyed and growing belligerent because they find themselves unable to transact at the published "fair" prices for their items.

EC is full of assholes because of p99auctions.

[kotton05]

Had someone try to tell me my dragon hero bracer was worth 500pp because of this site.

But on the other hand I loved this site since I could hunt down sellers and buyers then negotiate since I knew some prices were askew. Gonna miss this resource.

[paulgiamatti]

I mean, that's what price averaging is: people pushing and pulling prices to what they think the item is or want the item to be valued at. No one is forcing anyone to read the price averages - no one is deeming the site an authority on prices. And if it is, that's because it's accurate. You guys sitting here waxing conspiratorial about this big AH price mafia is just hilarious.

My experience has been the absolute, unequivocal opposite - because of the AH I spent less time in EC, I sold more stuff with less effort, and I dealt with less hagglers. In fact, the general tone in the tunnel as of late seems more friendly than I've ever seen it.

Maybe the AH doesn't suit your tunnelstyle. Maybe it's polarizing in some way - maybe it caters to a certain kind of tunneler and frustrates others. Either way, I have nothing but contempt for people saying it's detrimental to the server. That's a level of paranoia and masochism that goes far beyond saying it's imperfect.