Why is the snipe time 25 seconds off as compared to the Ebay timer? I tried to snipe an Ebay auction this evening and set the Snipe timer for 3 seconds before the auction ended. As I watched the auction and refreshed the page, the Auction Sniper placed my bid 25 seconds before the auction ended?!
'cos AS adjusts the lead time at busy times to ensure placement of your snipe. I use the Forum-recommended 8 seconds. Read the forums for more info. on this!
I have encountered a number of 1 second snipes. This would be very difficult to do manually, is there a computer program to do this? I have seen several auctions end with multiple 3,2,1 second bids. On one the snipe clock was 20 secs off.
Do you mean the count down on the My Snipes page? If so then shout 'eubanker' at the programmers for putting that useless gem in place - it only represents the time on your PC and not the time on the AS Servers!
Or do you mean the lead time? In which case AS (allegedly) adjusts the lead time (ie. time between snipe being placed and end time of the auction) to reflect network/server speeds! I use 8 seconds which works fine for me.
I've heard this before, the traffic adjustment "feature" of AS. But, if the alleged adjustments were being made properly, there wouldn't be any evidence of it in the completed auctions, as the "target" would still be to place the bid at 8 seconds before eBay time. What is happening here is AS is placing the bids well in advance--and the bids are hitting eBay well in advance--of the end of the auction.
I just had one that I won (using AS), but my chosen 7 second lead time was mysteriously increased to 1:19, which allowed another bidder to get three bids in before he ran out of time! It just made me wonder how many other times this has happened without me noticing... and which auctions I may have lost because of it.
I dunno, but the explanation given is just a bit fishy.
As far as 1-second snipes is concerned, before I discovered AS, I used to do this all the time, manually. I'd refresh the auction page a couple of times to check the delay, and then place my bid (using another window) a few seconds prior to the end of the auction. I think my goal was five seconds before, but sometimes this would end up being three or fewer seconds, depending on Internet traffic.
Point to ponder, would you rather lose an auction because AS bid was sent too soon, or lose because they timed it too close and it didn't register at all before the auction ended? The very able support staff explained this to me after I lost two very crucial auctions because they manually adjusted my 6 second lead time and the snipes came in early enough to be reacted to. I am on dialup and cannot snipe manually, period. So I will continue to place my faith in A S. There's some sort of Murphy's law about only the important bids failing, the crap keeps flowing smoothly.
I think my point was that a few second adjustment due to Internet traffic is one thing; these clearly excessive "adjustments" are not so easily explained by that policy.
And no, I would have preferred to have had a late bid placed--if the fault was indeed mine for choosing too small an interval. At least then I would have known what the problem was, and therefore, the solution.
I've yet to hear a reasonable explanation for placing a bid 90 seconds early (or whatever)--when the purported "adjustment" was demonstrably off by over a minute! If you're going to do something like that, at least get it right...
