I think that 48 hours for an item auctioned in AH is too long. There are people who don’t even play the actual game, they just want to lower the prices and that’s unfair for those who play every day and for many hours. Some people just leave some items in AH in a low price for 48 hours and everyone has to comply with these low prices. In my opinion, 12 hours is a good amount of time for an auction. What do you think?
It doesn’t affect what you are describing. How would you even think that? Those push prices work through very short timespans. In fact, if longer listings weren’t allowed, you had no chance of listing for a higher price and having it sold once someone buys a tons of cheap stuff. It might be making it worse.
As for prices lowering, where it happens gradually, it is a game theory thing, a result of collective convenience and selfishness and maybe also ignorance. Where does this cumulative tiny undercutting ever stop? Only eventual brute force of demand can keep it from leading to everything sold for 1 silver.
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to some people, the economy IS the game.
Just because you don’t want to play the Economic part of the game, doesn’t mean those who do enjoy it should have a watered down version just because you want to do M+ or whatever instead.
12 hours is terrible. That’s just a few more hours than a normal work day.
48 hours is fine. Gives normal people a chance to use the AH.
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For me once the AH would pay less than a vendor. I want my stuff to sell so I just undercut by however much I feel like in the moment, usually no more than ~80% of the next lowest price.
As for the OP, I think it’s fine, for certain items that sell very rarely but for a high price it’s very convenient, as well as allowing people to post for a higher price and have it sell eventually if all the lower priced stuff is sold.
Your stuff sells quickly anyway if you are the newest listing, and especially with stackables where this big issue is. Otherwise you could just as well undercut by a moderate degree like 5-10% to have the most appealing listing.
There is no excuse; the game informs about how undercutting for mats and such isn’t needed anymore.
What frustrates me is that I have to join the folly or I shoulder the downside massively that others don’t want to deal with at all, because if I list for just the second lowest, right after that the endless undercutting frenzy migth bury it. (Although I still sell my stuff quite well when refusing to list for the lowest if that is significantly lower than the next.)
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Ofc it’s needed. If I want to sell my stuff in 10 seconds I then list them at 50% price and they instantly sell. I don’t have to wait maybe 30min-2 hours for it to maybe sell.
What kind of stuff are you talking about? I just list mats for the cheapest listing there and they sell almost instantly, too.
Everything I list at AH. I don’t have the time or patience to wait for anything to sell.
I have enough gold that I don’t need to every worry about what price I sell anything at.
You are only underlining my point. Your impatience is irrationally extreme and that convenience makes things worse for everybody.
Why in the world would it be a problem for someone with tons of gold to only get even more gold from AH sales automatically in the mail minutes or maybe sometimes hours later instead of RIGHT NAOW? 
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I am aware of that but I simply don’t mind. And being the newest listing often fails, I posted my meager amount of ores I got (~300 or so) for the lowest price, someone dumped 3k ores like a second after and mine didn’t sell. So I just listed them at slightly lower, and now fewer people posted theirs at the same price I set, so mine sold as well. As far as I’m concerned the AH is just a vendor who think for a while before buying my items and I treat it as such, I’ll do anything as long as it means I get my gold, even if it’s less gold than I could’ve gotten.
How does it make it worse for you? If you think it’s so cheap you could just buy it and list it for whatever you think it’s worth.
Cause I got better things to do then to keep relisting stuff that didn’t sell.
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More irrationality. If your time is so valuable that forgoeing a lot more gold gain is worth it, then why don’t you just vendor the stuff? Even better, avoid doing stuff that aims at getting stuff. Don’t loot corpses. Takes a second anyway. Waste of time, no?
Plus, as I already said but you are too deep into your imaginative bubble, the system is designed LIFO, so if everybody kept listing at the lowest price present without ever undercutting, then people’s time would still be rewarded with more gold gain.
Whether one covers the fluctiations between supply and demand over a range of prices or in a LIFO queue of the same price doesn’t make a relevant difference.
This is classic game theory folly: Everybody ends up undercutting so you have exactly the same situation you tried to avoid. And because many carelessly list for any lowest price in a hurry, the price scamming system works.
Watch a Youtube video: A Beautiful Mind - Bar Scene John Nash’s Equilibrium Game Theory
That stuff should be common understanding instead of effectively genius-level enlightenment.
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1 second looting a corpse =/= 4 hours to sell stuff at AH. You can’t even compare the two.
Except if I list 50 ore and someone lists 10k ores after me I need to wait for 10k ores to sell. I’d rather just undercut them and get rid of mine instantly. Every trade goods is shared across the entire EU region right now. Don’t even pretend like it would sell in the same time. The difference for the amounts I’m selling with or without undercutting is at best 20k-50k gold and honestly I couldn’t care less about that amount.
I don’t try to avoid it. If more people undercut I can get the stuff I want at cheaper prices when I do need to do some crafting for alts.
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48 hours is alright.
There’s items that you have to pay a good amount of gold to the AH, just for posting them and they don’t sell that high.
For example level 60+ green items.
Sometimes I see items being listed 20-10g above their vendor price.
Now let’s imagine, it’s 12 hours.
If you don’t sell the item, that’s 4 times you have to post it in order to achieve the 48 hours.
I usually love to buy cheap stuff.
Like now. Most of my characters are level 62+. None is buying that gear and I’m getting amazing deals. I want this players to keep posting it for longer periods so I can buy their stuff. I don’t go on the AH all the time. So having them in the AH for longer periods of time, allows me to purchase them.
Cheers.
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I wasn’t aware you are a little kobold opening a door to the AH and then sitting in there working the gears until your stuff is sold.
If someone lists 10K ore after you, it doesn’t matter what your price is. Because of this army of mindlessness, people will start listing stuff for your price, and then theirs get sold first, for your price. Or someone actually undercuts you, too.
Significant undercutting and said habit of tiny undercutting by so many work hand-in-hand here.
Also, the AHs are not unified across all of EU. There are realm pools. And it can fluctuate. Blizzard seems to experiment or dynamically add and remove realms from AH pools. It might even depend on the item type.
You keep being inconsistent. You said you don’t care about the gold losses from significant undercutting, yet now you say you like buying crafting mats cheap. More of what I am saying. The whole system is bonkers. If you sell your stuff cheap and buy stuff cheap because you drove the prices down, then the result is that it more or less negates itself. - But just like the system behind all this that conditions people’s minds, it is not sustainable. It is like an arms race. Continuous one-downing here instead of one-upping.
And if you sell big quantities, and you should only sell stuff every once in a while to save time, then anything not sold the first time can just mix into the new stuff that accumulated, so it’s no extra time spent.
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It’s all about supply and demand, people who are complaining about low prices are wasting their time. imho, add 72h option instead ^^
I really don’t want to relist items every twelve hours, sounds awful for me.
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Prices are set by supply and demand. If you think something is under value, buy it and flip it.
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yeah 12 hours is the way to go. Especially with the ah now being across all servers. If things did not sell in 12 hours you likely got undercut by alot of people.
Maybe some things like mounts and rare tmogs dont sell quickly enough an can stay on for 48 hours. But most trade goods will be sold within a hour
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