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however it is my postition that this kind of defeats the purpose if another bidder is watching...
The point is that if we snipe that early we're doing it for a reason. That reason being, in most likelyhood nobody will be able to snipe later because eBay is too slow. So if nobody else can bid later, then bidding early is the correct choice because bidding later would mean no bid at all because it would get in too late. So in about every circumstance it's the right choice when we know eBay is slow.
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they can easily outbid you with 30+ seconds to go!
Actually they often cant because eBay is too slow. I'll challenge you vs us, Sunday night 7pm. You choose an auction, we'll let our servers do their job, and you can try a 5 second manual snipe and we'll see what happens.
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but shouldnt the bidder have the responsibility to place the lead time???
No. Most bidders are uneducated in these matters, and what if eBay was bogged down at 11am. Are you saying that the majority of our bidders would rather us not snipe in advance to compensate and ensure their bid is placed in time? That is ludicrous. Think about it. People place their confidence in us to snipe on time. Our servers monitor eBay in real time.
If we always sniped on time way more customers would lose snipes. What sense does that make? None. I guess in your case you'd be happy, or maybe not. Maybe youd be in here yelling at us because your snipe wasnt placed. Then you'd be yelling at us to adjust your snipe if we knew eBay was running slow...
In any event we arent changing things. A few snipes might be lost because someone else rebids. But the alternative is to miss wayyyyyyy more snipes to slow eBay servers that we could have prevented, meaning more happy customers.
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instead of it being arbitrarily assigned by AS?
What makes you think they are arbitrary? That would be a manual sniper always sniping at 5 seconds without knowledge of how eBay is performing, which is what you are suggestion we do. Our servers constantly monitor and interact with eBay. They have far more information to make an informed decision on lead times. We adjust lead time to try and have your snipe reach eBay and be accepted at your requested lead.
Perhaps it would be better if I just posted a link to old replies on this topic. I just take it too personal when people think we're doing something on purpose to make then lose, when mostly this a very good feature and saves hundreds of snipes a day. The downside are the few lost when there is enough time for a manual bidder to react and put in a new higher bid. It does happen, but just not very often.
[This message was edited by Sniper Sara B. on November 13, 2003 at 03:21 AM.]
