OT: Tool for sniping over at ebay

[Mindi]

I'm leaving this thread and any references up. Although I understand that there are lots of opinions on the subject, until ebay does something to shut down electronic sniping, it's going to be done and by not coming out against it they have made it acceptable. I've sniped on items (although I do it the old fashioned way and wait until the last few seconds to bid without the aid of electronic tools) and I have been sniped on.......heck I even had someone send me a rather hateful email because they were pissed I bid in the final 10 seconds of the auction (which I promptly ignored, he was a newbie so he would learn soon enough that this is common practice).

From one of the ebay help pages:

Last-minute bidding
Placing a high bid in the closing seconds of an auction-style listing is called “sniping” within the eBay Community. Sniping is part of the eBay experience, and all bids placed before a listing ends are valid - even if they're placed one second before the listing ends.

To help avoid disappointment, ensure that the maximum bid you enter on the item page is the highest price that you're willing to pay. The eBay bidding system automatically increases your bid up to the maximum price you specify, so entering a higher maximum may help prevent you from being outbid in the closing seconds of a listing.

Tip: Did you know that during the last 15 minutes of a listing a “Refresh” link will appear on the item page? When seconds count, using this link will make it much faster for you to see the most important information at the top of the page: current bid price, bid history, time left, and high bidder. Reference

Ergo, they practically encourage the practice of sniping. On another page (Reference near the bottom of the page) of their help section it specifically says they do not investigate bid sniping, so again, it seems they don't care. They want you to use the proxy bidding system instead to make you put in the top price you are willing to pay. If someone bids you out in the last few seconds by putting in .01 over what you wanted to pay, then that's considered your tough luck, you should have put in a higher bid. Remember, ebay takes a piece of the final value, they want the price to be driven up. They really could care less how that happens. As they put in the ebay glossary for sniping sniping, "Any bid, placed before the listing ends, is allowed on eBay."

[Ragnarok-X]

Wow. I think some ppl in here have a wrong impression about moral and good/bad. Under no circumstances would i ever think that sniping is illegal or bad. Its just the way it works. If you want to save money, you use it. You can always snipe the hard way (entering the bid manually) but when you arent around, a tool like that is good.

I absolutly dont get what is wrong about it.

[shinigami]

Looking back over my last post I realized that my final comment could very well be taken as an attack on Fyron. That is most certainly not my intent. I view Fyron as an (extremely) important member of the Space Empires community and respect all he has done to improve the games, I just (obviously) disagree with him on this point.

Fyron, if you saw my previous post as an attack on you, I apologize.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Electronic sniping is not immoral; it's lazy and removes skill from the game.

[Hugh Manatee]

e-bay isn't a game...

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Of course it is. You have a goal, competitors and a playing field.

[Atrocities]

I dislike ebay.

[Mindi]

If you think of it like a real auction, an electronic tool for sniping is just like having someone bid for you at an auction house. All sorts of people bid at auctions and a lot of people use firms to buy the pieces for them if they can't be at or don't want to go to the auction themselves.

My father-in-law owns a small auction house and trust me, he could care less who is bidding at the last minute or how they are bidding, as long as the price is going up and the bidder is good for the money. Ebay is the same way. If the item is that important to you, you either place your bid for the absolute maximum amount you are willing to pay and they will proxy bid for you, or you are there when the auction is winding up and bid how you see fit. If it's allowed at a regular auction, I don't see why it wouldn't be allowed at online auctions.

The only people who get screwed from sniping is people who put in bids early and assume because no one else is actively bidding against them right then that no one wants the item but them, so they put in a low maximum bid. Truthfully, if you put in the highest amount you want to go and you lose the item to someone else who bids higher in the last seconds (no matter what method) then you would have lost it anyway even if they put in their bid 5 minutes earlier.

So you still wouldn't have gotten the bargain you thought you would have. To think otherwise is only fooling yourself.

[Fyron]

Real auctions don't tend to have arbitrary time stamps cutting off each item, do they? As long as people are still bidding, it continues. And you are all there when the auction is taking place, over a short, concise time period. This is unlike Ebay, where the auction is on-going for many hours or days until some point in time, which often ends up in the middle of the night or some other period where you can't be there to have a final "bidding war" with the other bidders. This is where the whole sniping thing comes in... Sure you can set up an auto-bid value, but its just not the same as being able to decide whether you want to continue bidding past that point or not. Scarcity of said item makes a big difference, naturally. Treating online auction sites like a live auction is inherently flawed.

Automatic sniping agents are not really analogous to hiring someone to go to the auction for you. A better analogy would be a null-sound field that prevents everyone else from being able to talk.

[Randallw]

I think Ebay has a mechanism whereby you make a bid of what you want to pay but you also make a bid of the maximum you are willing to pay, that way if someone outbids you near the end it will automatically up your bid for you.