No I have not been a victim of an auction house scam.
There seems to be an increasing amount of players putting items in auction house for insanely low bids with insanely large buyouts.
Could this possibly fixed by removing cancel auction after a bid has been placed, OR, charging a percentage of the buyout price to combat scammers putting insane amounts to hopefully catch someone out?
Asking for opinions and what people think about this.
I’m not here to start a conversation about “If you are dumb enough to full victim to this it’s your own fault”.
If you really want to hurt them, bid like a gold or more on items where that’s a decent bid. When they cancel, they get charged a percentage of that bid.
The simplest fix would be to remove the ability to cancel an auction once a bid is received.
Totally doable, but Blizzard might have to hire a software developer who may (or may not) have uttered some variant of a 'YOUR MOMMA" joke on a TeamSpeak server in 2006… and we cant have that.
Ya I seen someone doing what u were talking about on my server. If you want to hose them the most possible an example would be lets say they have a primal that reliably sells for 20g and they have that 1s 999g bid/buyout going. Bid like 15g. Makes them take a higher hit on the cancel or if he lets it ride his 5g loss on the market will be your 5g gain for free when you resell.
someone that can’t control themselves put a mining pic up on the AH for 1k gold buyout but the guy saying “hey wait a second” has a problem with impulse control?
How is it an impulse control issue if you’re buying tons of stacks at time, it’s very easy for these people to be the last stack, even easier with mods like AuctionFaster to do that. The fact that all of these sellers generally have very ambiguous names entirely made up of special characters seems to indicate they are trying to skirt reporting.
Enforce limitations on how many items any given account can place on the AH at any given time.
Add “Buyer’s Remorse” receipts to any transaction. If you complete a transaction, you have a 90-minute window to cancel it. Will not work if you have used any materials you purchased or if any items you purchased became Soulbound after you bought them.
Add level restrictions to items placed on the AH. Outlands materials can only be put on the AH by level 58 or higher. No more “bank alt” transactions.
I think this back and forth has gone on long enough.
As mentioned before, the Auction House is considered a free market where players may price their wares how they like. This includes putting up items for a low bid but a very high buyout.
It also allows players to remove an auction from the AH if they wish (that is what the deposit fee is for). That is not considered a violation and most especially not Zone/Area Disruption. Sorry. Our Support staff generally will not comment on the validity of a report, only that it will be reviewed and appropriate actions taken based on our policies.
That isn’t to say that policy and functionality cannot change. If you are looking to see a change to how the Auction House functions, can be organized, etc… you’ll want to submit feedback to that effect.
True…
I know somebody who had this problem… they were distracted and accidentally bought one primal for an insane price…
The best way would be for blizzard to change the sorting in the auction house to buyout instead of bid, and / or let you return an item within a predetermined amount of time for a full or almost full refund, as well as banning players who obviously want to scam people out of money through the auction house.
Well… a free market doesn’t mean an unregulated market :).
Even IRL, scamming people is illegal.
So if you put an item into the AH for an insane amount of gold (which is undoubtedly with the intention of scamming people), that should be a bannable offense.
To me, that is no different from phone scammers who call old ladies and talk them into buying stuff for horrendous prices they don’t need.
They put cheap items up that people buy in bulk. They’ll accept the lose of a 2c bid for every post if once a month (or even once a year) they net a 900g victim.
Yeah, I mean it would cause them to stop but would also likely impact other players too for their posts and that’s not the goal.
There really two easy solutions.
Make the AH sort by buyout price. That pretty much fixes the whole dang problem.
Or make it so something cannot be posted for a buyout X times larger than its bid price. For example say 10 times the bid. So if you want a 900g buyout you need to post it for 90g. This 10x window is large enough that regular posters really shouldn’t be impacted trying to post their goods but removes the ability to post cheap/competitive mat bids with 900g buyouts
Scams are defined as dishonest schemes. That is where a scam starts and stop. This particular scam preys on people being inattentive when purchasing, but that doesn’t make it any less of a scam. The scammer knows it’s their auction against thousands of people so it just takes one person not paying attention to hit the lottery. It’s purely a numbers game and the numbers are in their favor.
The whole point of the listing practice is to put items bought in bulk amongst a sea of other auctions in a way in that they are nearby other auctions that are at their market value, but with their buyout at a value way above market value. This is because they hope you mass buy without paying attention. It is why you don’t see specific items sold for overinflated prices…because you’re going to buy one and review carefully.
It’s also why the buyout price isn’t 90000g and is instead under 1k. It’s high enough that it’s a big payday when it happens, but not so high that people won’t likely have that much gold to make the purchase.
There is no way around the fact that it’s a scam. It’s legal and not actionable, but the person posting these auctions are absolutely attempting to scam people out of their gold.
It’s sad that Blizzard is on record to have said deal with this issue though. It’s absolutely a scam based on the way the AH worked back then to prey on inattentive people and as I said earlier the numbers are obviously in their favor to succeed with this AH model.
Furthermore even if you want to die on the not a scam argument (and I know you will despite all the evidence clearly pointing out how this is a scam) its rather semantic at the end of the day. It’s toxic to the community to have to deal with this type of AH posting which leads anyone who falls victim to this to be upset and will be even more so when they learn there is no recourse for them. This may ultimately lead them quitting or resorting to buying gold to regain a significant, if not all, their gold.
No matter which way you try to slice it the ability to do this so easily is not good for the game.
