sorry yes LIFO, brain dead lot of game.
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Yeah, I found some nice “deals” last night 
A simple fix would be to make it so when you click the Buy button to get a price quote for your requested stack size, it locks the requested stack of those items for a limited time (Perhaps up to 30 seconds, or longer for high-value items) so you can actually check if the price is good and click the buy button, similar to what Ticketmaster does for event tickets (It holds them for several minutes, with a countdown timer on screen, so you have time to fill out the information and make the purchase).
EDIT: Yes, Ticketmaster is a garbage company with too much market control and not enough competition, I’m just using the pending purchase lock as an example.
That hasn’t been a thing on retail for a long time. The AH does not run slow in the least.
The issue is people using AH bots or addons that SHOULD be banned like TSM to post something for like 1/10th of the value, and use the addon/bot to snipe the unsuspecting people who post them for the same price.
It wouldn’t be hard to flag accounts of people who list things for over half off, then purchase said items within the next 5 minutes, to have a GM investigate. But that would take effort.
But while people do it, it creates the issue the OP describes. You go to buy something, but there’s 1-10 of the item over half the price of the others, so you input to buy X amount, but the bots/addons sniped them, so the price is now back up. So you get told no. Then you go to buy again, but by then, the bot/addon has relisted more for over half, and it repeats.
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Again I’m sitting for multiple 5 minute intervals just trying to buy mats. This is really not fun.
Make a “purchase order” system for the AH just like the stock markets have, then any attempts at listing low to trick other people into posting items at below-market prices will get auto-sniped by out-standing purchase orders.
Kind of funny but The Grand Exchange on OSRS works more fairly than WoW’s auction house. Crappy interface, but having standing purchase orders for a set amount of items is great. The amount of items you can sell or purchase in a day is capped per account so you can’t just dominate the market all on your own.
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I meant LIFO and it is effectively LIFO as you MUST purchase the lowest priced reagent and people in-practice always will post mats at the lowest price or lower to bait people. If they are the same price as the lowest of the stack, they will be at the top effectively making it LIFO.
In theory sure it fails some conditions, in practice 99% of this is a LIFO system on interactions.
This is what you said in the OP. This isn’t LIFO. This is undercutting, which happened before the AH update.
People have always tried to bait others to post low like this. This behavior is not new.
Yes but before this system you could buy the mats above the undercutting. Now you MUST buy that auction.
And because you have to buy that auction you have 100+ people all trying to purchase the same thing.
This means that if you don’t get the auction, you have to reload your UI to refresh. This leads to reloading the UI for 6 minutes because you can’t buy mats due to high traffic due to population / players undercut fishing. Instead in the old system, you could just buy an auction further down the line for a slight price increase.
Are you using TSM? The issue with purchasing isn’t because someone is trying to bait low prices, it’s the high volume and frequency of posts and purchases because the AH is now region wide, and not just your server.
I found that the best thing to do is use the default wow interface when TSM can’t keep up.
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No I’m using the wow interface. The wow system is screwed cause again you are forced to buy the lowest on the stack. The people who are baiting with low prices add to this issue. There are several people who try to snipe and bait on nearly every single materials.
Just go sit there and refresh it and watch someone put 1 material for half of the price and it get bought in an instant.
And again, this wasn’t a problem with the purchase order system we came from. I could buy mats that were say 4 prices higher and they were 99.9% always there an available to purchase.
This is definitely the root of the problem. I spent a solid 20 minutes trying to buy crafting mats last night, but couldn’t due to snipe bots that kept breaking the AH. I would have happily bought the high priced mats first, so I could stop wasting my time.
Someone mentioned it already, but the game desperately needs a buy order function. Even if they didn’t allow outstanding buy orders, but allowed you to send a specific buy order with maximum price, and number of units requested, which grabbed anything it could fill and then mailed remaining gold from the order, it would solve a LOT of these problems.
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How is someone posting 1 mat for half the lowest price any different than posting 1 mat 1 silver lower?
In both cases that mat is being purchased instantly, while hundreds more are being posted and purchased.
I’m not convinced that this issue is specifically caused by people baiting lower prices.
Because it is artificially increasing the traffic from real buyers and sellers. They are spamming the stack to try to bait people to post lower and buy them out.
It isn’t natural just buyer and seller demand. But even if it was, this system still fails under high traffic. I don’t know what you are arguing at this point.
Person A lists a bait mat for 50% undercut.
Person A running a snipe bot to grab anything that gets listed at or below that bait.
Person B comes along, just trying to buy 10 mats, and their buy succeeds, scooping up the bait and 9 other units.
Person C was trying to buy too, but because Person B bought the bait, the buy bugs out because it’s “not there” anymore.
Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, because Person C would just try again. But Person A has already done the same list/snipe bot nonsense multiple times while Person C is trying to manually buy again.
The easiest fix is for them to determine the average post action per ACCOUNT, and then hard restrict post action counts that exceed 95% of the player base. They’ve done it a few times in the past, but for some reason haven’t done it this time around.
I don’t see how this is any different than someone posting a 1s undercut. The problem would be the same. Person C would try to buy the lowest price but the stack is already sold.
I was running into this issue and it had nothing to do with people baiting with massive undercuts.
Because this is an actual seller using the stack to sell goods. Other people are running programs to bait, cancel, and snipe are again, artificially increasing the traffic by a large margin. They are not using it to sell goods. They are using it to trick people into posting large amounts for cheap so they can flip it.
They have addons specifically designed to do this and are very efficient. Google wow auction sniper and you will see how to set one up to snipe low bait auctions.
In my example, Person B and Person C were attempting to make a single market action. 2 people, 2 actions. But Person A is very likely making as many market actions as the AH lag allows, every second, of every minute, of every hour. Even a very conservative estimate of one bait snipe attempt every 2 seconds, that’s 1800 market actions per hour, for JUST that one sniper. With addons like TSM, it is so easy to setup, that I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a great many people doing this right now.
I understand the concept.
In my experience over the past few days, the issue of a stack being gone before you can buy it has nothing to do with baiting others to post low.
It’s a region wide AH. Think about how many players are posting and buying common commodities at any given moment.
It’s a high volume issue, and happens even when people are undercutting by 1s.