AS is great but I'm pissed now!

Hi Daniel

You would have won for $10 less? Maybe, but maybe not. I've seen manual snippers place 7 bids in less than a minuet. Someone that fast can beat a 10 second lead time quite often. bassman placed his first bid at 3 minuets till close. He saw your bid, but then waited till 2 seconds and TRIED to do to you what you did to him. Why did he wait that long? He probably thought you were manually sniping as well, and was afraid you would counter again if he bid earlier.

Doesn't feel right to say 'congrats' on your win...
so I'll say congrats on your previous wins.

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Originally posted by Puppy Raiser:
Hi Daniel

You would have won for $10 less? Maybe, but maybe not. I've seen manual snippers place 7 bids in less than a minuet. Someone that fast can beat a 10 second lead time quite often. bassman placed his first bid at 3 minuets till close. He saw your bid, but then waited till 2 seconds and TRIED to do to you what you did to him. Why did he wait that long? He probably thought you were manually sniping as well, and was afraid you would counter again if he bid earlier.

Doesn't feel right to say 'congrats' on your win...
so I'll say congrats on your previous wins.

http://home.twmi.rr.com/keithspage/images/dog001.gif http://home.twmi.rr.com/keithspage/images/life.gif

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With all due respect, it would be practically impossible to get in a bid (manually) at 10 sec or less, if the "other" bidder saw my bid get in at that time. He'd then have to go through the mental and physical tasks of outbidding me at 10 sec or less - unlikely he'd be successful.

Daniel

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Originally posted by Puppy Raiser:
Why did he wait that long?

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The question should have been "why was he allowed to wait that long and know my bid a full 31 sec before auction close ?". If AS bid at around 10 sec, then he'd be scrambling to counter-bid - he'd be most unsuccessful, especially when he wasn't expecting it. At 31 sec he knew of my intentions .. he was ready and he could have placed in seconds before. ----Daniel

i agree with dan and anyone else that complains about the snipe being posted too early - retalitory bids will always drive up the price. some of you will argue that 10 seconds isn't long, is very difficult to place a manual retalitory bid, etc. i don't agree with this at all, i have pulled off plenty of wins with a manual snipe in the last few seconds. with a good size retalitory bid ready to counter and a second window next to it quickly refreshing it's definately possible to get good at posting last 3 second bids. i don't know about floating dan 10 bucks but would definately recommend he use a lead time of 2 seconds. the only reason i don't put 1 is because i'm scared of a potential situation where the bid just doesn't get in.

i understand with latency and system load AS is playing a little guessing game - but when dan puts in 10 second lead and AS does it with 31 that is a real bad guess.

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This is an instance when AS is surely at fault here.

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Ha ha ha. Just because it's at 11am?

Lets see.... who here knows more about sniping? Us or you? Why is it that you think you have all those wins?

Leave the sniping to us. It's what you pay us for, we know best. We want you to win because if you lose we dont get paid. Why on earth would we do something that would decrease our chances of getting paid? We wouldnt.

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don't agree with this at all, i have pulled off plenty of wins with a manual snipe in the last few seconds.

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Not on the auctions we snipe early on. So your argument is pointless. If all you did was snipe such items we'd have a 90% win ratio, and you'd have maybe a 35% ratio. Manual snipers cant compete with an automated system that has millions of historical snipes as guide data, and can measure eBays speed in real time from the snipes going through the system at that point.

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Yes, I am oficially asking for a $10 refund payable to my PayPal account. Thank you. -----Daniel

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Request denied. If you think you'll win a higher % of snipes manually sniping go for it. You wont, and as for snipes such as this when we bid early you'll lose even more. But please do manually snipe every auction that ends on an hour. When you've dont 50 or so come back and let us know how many you lost.

PS: the snipe was 41 seconds early, not 31.

sara i don't agree, i think i can manually snipe auctions just as well if not better than auction sniper. i use auction sniper because i'm watching a ton of auctions and don't want to sit around my house all day on ebay, and don't want to get up at 7am just to watch an auction when i could be sleeping instead. in terms of sniper prowess i am fully confident i could match this system though!

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Originally posted by Sniper Sara B.:
[QUOTE]
PS: the snipe was 41 seconds early, not 31.

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It's even worse that I thought! In all this "excitement" I miscalculated .. Yes, it's a FULL 41 sec prior to auction end. I would really like an explanation, one that makes sense, of why AS was in the right to do this ? 41 sec at 11 am with only 2 bidders (myself included), when I put in 10 sec and when countless times I've heard all you guys say that this amount of time (10 - 15) sec was plenty of time even on weekends, is BEYOND me! "Refund denied" ?? WHY ??? FACT remains that a manual sniper outbid AS and I lost to a manual sniper.

Daniel

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Originally posted by Sniper Sara B.:
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Lets see.... who here knows more about sniping? Us or you? Why is it that you think you have all those wins?

Leave the sniping to us. It's what you pay us for, we know best. We want you to win because if you lose we dont get paid. Why on earth would we do something that would decrease our chances of getting paid? We wouldnt.

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Once again, I give FULL credit to my past wins to AuctionSniper but mostly to the fact that I can be away from my pc or not have to go through the stress of doing this manually etc .. BUT if you feel so confident about AS why give us the option of putting in our own "lead time" ? Why in the hell would I want to put in 10 sec if you sniped at 41 ? What's the point then ? It defeated the whole purpose of "sniping" and surprise.

Daniel

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Originally posted by taveirne:
sara i don't agree, i think i can manually snipe auctions just as well if not better than auction sniper. i use auction sniper because i'm watching a ton of auctions and don't want to sit around my house all day on ebay, and don't want to get up at 7am just to watch an auction when i could be sleeping instead. in terms of sniper prowess i am fully confident i could match this system though!

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Agreed. AS is fabulous when you want to sit back, relax or go out knowing your snipe will go through. Forget lead-times though. They're hit & miss. If you really wanna "snipe", either use AS at non-primetime hrs or just manually proxy bid at 30 sec.

Daniel

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Originally posted by taveirne:
i agree with dan and anyone else that complains about the snipe being posted too early - retalitory bids will always drive up the price. some of you will argue that 10 seconds isn't long, is very difficult to place a manual retalitory bid, etc. i don't agree with this at all, i have pulled off plenty of wins with a manual snipe in the last few seconds. with a good size retalitory bid ready to counter and a second window next to it quickly refreshing it's definately possible to get good at posting last 3 second bids. i don't know about floating dan 10 bucks but would definately recommend he use a lead time of 2 seconds. the only reason i don't put 1 is because i'm scared of a potential situation where the bid just doesn't get in.

i understand with latency and system load AS is playing a little guessing game - but when dan puts in 10 second lead and AS does it with 31 that is a real bad guess.

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Precisely. Exactly what I'm talking about. Thanks! But it's 41 sec so it's even worse. As a result price got inflated by 10 bucks. Person knew 41 sec before auction close what my intention was and he was ready. If I'd hit him at 10 sec, and he wouldn't know it and he didn't use proxy (which he did not) then there's no way he could have countered back.

Daniel

...this is the only forum where people get MAD about WINNING ebay auctions!

If you don't like what you end up having to pay, don't set your snipe so high!

Jabbergah                                                    

Thats a particularly good point Jab - BRAVO!!!

I think its best to focus on the fact that you won - your bid made it in - you can never know whether the outcome would of been different.

It would of been real different if you had of gotten a "Bid not in time" message.

Lexie

Daniel, how do you know the other bidder was a manual sniper? You have no way of knowing whether he bid manually or through a service.

On this forum it has been stated literally hundreds of times that auctions that end exactly on the quarter hour are given extra lead times because of the intensely high amount of eBay traffic during these times. While it may sting you that your bid was placed early, the reality is that you won, and you likely won because the bid was placed early. AS's highly experienced computers know the odds during these times, and they adjusted accordingly. While it is true that one may occasionally luck out and be able to get through in less time, the probability is that he would not, and AS compensates for that. I have seen many times where snipes placed at 20, 25 or even 30 seconds on quarter hours did not get through in time, there was so much eBay traffic

If AS did not do this, they would get many more posts in here complaining that snipes did not reach in time. As Sara has said before, they get complaints either way (snipes placed too early, too late), so they would rather have the small number of too early complaints, then the avalanche of too late complaints, which would mean no revenue for AS.

I am getting in a little late on this thread...but I have the same complaint....I just lost about 4 auctions because of this...The person I was bidding against was outbid by my AS bids and then came back and outbid me with 5 secs left....AS placed my bid approx 30 secs early on all bids....If AS can not make bids according to what the customer wants....then why even ask tje length of lead time....I can and often do outbid automatic snipers manually....I always use 3 second lead time with AS and I guess they think its 30 secs.

From now on I will only use AS when there are a large number of auctions ending within the same minute...but anything over 60 secs apart, I can definately bid much closer to the end time than AS.

By the way....I am not new at this... I have been using AS for over 4 years.....I have never had this issue before. Lately there are a lot of minor issues adding up.

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Manual snipers cant compete with an automated system that has millions of historical snipes as guide data, and can measure eBays speed in real time from the snipes going through the system at that point.

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I think I'm going to be one of the dissenting votes here - but please don't flame me! I like and use AS for what it is and does. It is certainly more reliable than the previous, now unsupported, software package I was using. However ... if AS were measuring eBay's speed properly then it doesn't make sense that bids would go in early. Here's my thinking (which may very well be incorrect):

AS: Hello eBay, it's now 00:00:00
eBay: Hi AS, I think it's 00:00:03

AS now thinks there's a 3 second lag. Ok, add 3 seconds to the bidders snipe time and bid when appropriate.

This isn't what happens in the majority of complaints (and I'm not complaining). Most of the time 20 sec, 30 sec and more are being added. Perhaps this relates to AS assuming that 'special ending times' require more padding? I don't know.

How about a compromise from AS? Add a user setting that says, "Don't change my lead time"? If you are concerned about AS loosing revenue when the lag time prevents a bid from being placed then perhaps you could charge .05 each time it happens? Send the bidder an email which clearly states "Your bid could not be placed because your lead time was too short. You have told us not to extend your lead time during busy eBay loads. To change this setting, please click on this link...."

Just a thought.

Mother Mary Says, 'HONESTLY! you're just ruint!'

Or maybe adding 30 seconds is too much? It seems to me that if AS were adding time to compensate for the lag, they would add 30 seconds, but the lag would eat up ten or 20 of those seconds, so the snipe would still get in 10 seconds early. But all these complaints are from people whose bids were accepted 30-40 seconds early -- so what happened to the lag?

But then, we have to remember that AS MAY VERY WELL BE adding extra time to lots of OTHER auctions, and the lag eats up the extra time so it LOOKS like the snipe was placed exactly when we wanted it to be. We only hear about the ones that have an obvious (negative) effect on the outcome -- what about those that do exactly what they're supposed to do?

Personally, I prefer to assume that AS knows what it's doing, and if it adds time to my auction it had a good reason to do so. It goes against AS's interests to do anything that would DECREASE my odds of winning...

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Originally posted by boone62:
By the way....I am not new at this... I have been using AS for over 4 years.....I have never had this issue before. Lately there are a lot of minor issues adding up.

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That's pretty good--using AS for over four years, when it is a little over two years old.

You also state that you routinely beat automatic snipers with manual bids. How are you able to tell which bids are automatic snipes and which are manual snipes?

Sounds more than a bit fishy to me.

41 seconds before close doesn't seem like much. however, it was really 31 seconds before the intended snipe right? 31 seconds, to me anyway, seems like a lot, especially for an automated program.

refund? not if you got the item within your max bid.

imho, you have a legitimate complaint on the timing, but you won what you wanted so no $.

AS adjusts the lead time automatically to compensate for slow server speeds etc. You know this. You've seen it happen before. It's what happened here.

So a manual sniper would also suffer from the slowness.

Thus, in these situations where you are beaten by a higher bid or your item is bid up towards your max then accept it. AS and equivalent software minimises the risk of manual responses but it can do nothing against bids placed automatically.
AS improves your chances of winning but it doesn't guarantee success or low prices.

Last night I was sniping about 20 items. Very popular. And all the action took place in the last minute on every single one. I did try placing a manual bid a couple of times where my snipe was going to be beaten (I know I should bid my max but it was exciting and I got a bit carried away!) over DSL but was too slow to be accepted. I only won one item. And guess what? I'm happy!

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Originally posted by region2:
So a manual sniper would also suffer from the slowness.

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Region2 - I don't think so - It appears that AS adds a lead time to snipes ending on 'boundaries' without testing to see if the lead time is necessary in that instance. Were the lead indeed needed (ok, couldn't resist), you wouldn't be seeing auctions being placed early - the lag time would eat up the padding.

I know the software I used to use would calculate the lag time from my machine to eBay a minute or two in advance of the snipe. I never had a problem with it placing bids late. However, this was one snipe on one machine - much different than AS who are running many snipes.

And for those that keep saying, 'bid your max' - well, the whole point of sniping is to make sure someone else can't bid their max after you As I said before, I like and use AS. Were I bidding on something I really wanted and thought it needed to go in at the very last possible moment, I'd do it manually (and yes, I can certainly beat a 41 second lead. By timing page refreshes I can usually get it down between 2 and 5 seconds).

These are just my observations - as I have yet to see anyone from AS tell us exactly how/when they calculate padding. Every system has its positives and negatives. It's up to the individual to decide which method (amazingly AS is not the only sniping service/software out there!) fits their needs best. For me, AS does a pretty durned good job.

Mother Mary Says, 'HONESTLY! you're just ruint!'

Sorry Chatter163, I must have exaggerated a little....time runs together after awhile....I won my first snipe in 2001, how about you?

The only thing fishy is ......will I better not say....

Also,I can send a bid in on E-bay within 4 seconds of auction closing manually and sometimes 2 seconds....care to try?

The reason for the post was to make a point that alot of people with high speed internet service can refresh a page in under 2 seconds and can definately outbid a snipe that is placed 30 seconds early....I am sure alot of people just sit there and hit refresh 30 times to see if the are outbid....A person can open 2 windows and have a bid wating while the contiually refresh the other open window....I have done this and beat bidders within the last 3 seconds of an auction.

The only reason I use AS is for convenience...The items I collect may never be offered again, so it is very aggravating when AS does not perform as advertised.

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sara i don't agree, i think i can manually snipe auctions just as well if not better than auction sniper.

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You are sadly mistaken. Unfortunately you wont know it until you lose an item you really wanted.

You lack much info our system has and uses to snipe. You can not be as accurate with less info.

Kinda like a race to a new destination without a map, we've got the map, you have a pretty good idea of where to go, and mostly you'll get there, but sometime you wont and we will.

Similarly 80% of people believe they are better than average drivers. Yet that isn't possible. 30% are overestimating their abilities.

Sara,

I know your quote in your response does not pertain to me....but I can DEFINATELY gurantee you that I can beat an Sniper program that bids 30 to 40 seconds before the end of the auctions....

I have been bidding on E-Bay for 6 years, (no exaggeration this time), and have ALWAYS been able to get a bid in within the last 6 seconds of an auction, (execpt when provider or E-Bay is down), and AS has not always been 100% either.

And if you have the "map", why do you need to add at least 30 seconds to the bid....sounds like too many maps so time is added in case a wrong turn is made.

The bottom line is that I can bid as close to the end of the auction as AS does.

BTW, I am much better than average driver...care to race?

"Deafaahnutlee knot reesponsable four misspelling ore bad punkyouateshun"

Such maturity...*...sigh...*

same here - especially when AS is putting that bid down 31 41 etc. seconds. i have been on ebay since 98, i can definately make a snipe within the last 10 seconds 100% of the time. under 5 seconds probably 85% of the time. if AS is throwing stuff out with 40 seconds to go, many people can make multiple retalitory bids - exactly the situation you don't want when sniping.

whether AS has more information or not is not the point - it's what you do with the information. in this case AS sniped with 41 seconds to go - sounds like it did not make the correct guess as to when it should have bid based on available information.

i have taken multiple bmw driving schools, i AM better than the average driver. and the average sniper.

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Originally posted by Chatter163:
Such maturity...*...sigh...*

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i don't understand -

1. do you think we are wrong saying we can beat a 41 second lag time?
2. do you think we are wrong to file a valid complaint on a paid service?

i like auction sniper, it's the only sniping service i've tried yet though. a friend is telling me he has better results on another. i'm stubborn so sticking to this one for now - i'm just pointing out that i believe there is room for improvement on a service i am paying for.

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Originally posted by taveirne:

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Originally posted by Chatter163:
Such maturity...*...sigh...*

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i don't understand -

1. do you think we are wrong saying we can beat a 41 second lag time?
2. do you think we are wrong to file a valid complaint on a paid service?

i like auction sniper, it's the only sniping service i've tried yet though. a friend is telling me he has better results on another. i'm stubborn so sticking to this one for now - i'm just pointing out that i believe there is room for improvement on a service i am paying for.

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What you may understand, taveirne and boone62 (who appear to be one and the same person), is that some of us here are tiring of the whining and the incessant need to have the last word. Your repeated insistence that you CAN do better (and the irrelevant declarations that you ARE a better driver) seem quite immature and beside the point.

Any positive contributions that you may have made expired already. If you think you can do better elsewhere, then go. And you can drive yourself there, too.

Lets recap... I'll not quote whole messages, but the general gist is:

sivlee: if my bid had been placed at 10 seconds, I would have won for $10 less.

puppy: maybe, maybe not.

sivlee: respectfully disagree, it would be almost impossible to place a bid at 10 sec or less.

taveirne: I agree with sivlee, but I can bid with just a few seconds left and be ready to place yet another bid.

Sara: We know what we are doing and are very good at it.

yadda, yadda, drag racing, yadda, yadda...

sivlee: I agree with taveirne.

That's the original 'players' so I'll stop here, and stand by my original statement.
‘Maybe, maybe not.’

p.s. sivlee, and taveirne. Thank you both for expressing your displeasure without going off the deep end like some do. It was a pleasure reading this without getting my eyebrows singed.

Chatter163.....You are the one calling into question other peoples maturity....NOT me. You basically called me a liar....Implied that I was doing something fishy....I do not know you...you do not know me...I admitted I made an error and yet you are the one to continue....accusing me of being someone I am not.

Again, I apologize for exaggerating on the length of time with AS. However....I stand by all of the other comments I have made....

I can only give you some unsolicited advise..."If you are not part of the solution...then you are part of the problem"....

The whole purpose of my statements and questions was to ask a question as to why things were operating the way they were and to reinforce others statements that were having the same problems. I was not asking someone to make comment on my integrity, life is to short for that.

I am now done posting on these forums...I can not stand it when people start accusing others whom they have never even met.

As far as myself and taverine being the same person....I do not need to hide behind anyone else or make up names...my name is Boone has been since I was born. Whomever taverine is does not concern me and I am sure I do not concern them.

"Deafaahnutlee knot reesponsable four misspelling ore bad punkyouateshun"

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Originally posted by Chatter163:

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Originally posted by taveirne:

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Originally posted by Chatter163:
Such maturity...*...sigh...*

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i don't understand -

1. do you think we are wrong saying we can beat a 41 second lag time?
2. do you think we are wrong to file a valid complaint on a paid service?

i like auction sniper, it's the only sniping service i've tried yet though. a friend is telling me he has better results on another. i'm stubborn so sticking to this one for now - i'm just pointing out that i believe there is room for improvement on a service i am paying for.

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What you may understand, taveirne and boone62 (who appear to be one and the same person), is that some of us here are tiring of the whining and the incessant need to have the last word. Your repeated insistence that you CAN do better (and the irrelevant declarations that you ARE a better driver) seem quite immature and beside the point.

Any positive contributions that you may have made expired already. If you think you can do better elsewhere, then go. And you can drive yourself there, too.

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i am just trying to improve a system i am now paying for - we all come out winners if the system is improved. especially if other systems work better - put in ebay sniper and you will get quite a few options in google. you must not understand business if you think auctionsniper should just sit on the present algorithm/performance when situations like this can arise. then again, some of us strive to be the best and some of us are happy being part of the herd. if you want to draw assumptions that certainly sounds like one i can draw about you. i'm not boone i'm just agreeing with him - he has already stated many successful wins and that he likes the service. i don't agree with a $10 refund but i do agree with improving the doing code changes to get a more accurate snipe.

now you're driving boone away from the forums (maybe even AS?) and working on me, we're just trying to provide feedback to improve the system - so far contributing a lot more than you seem to be from what i've seen.

btw
because of a billing problem today i manually sniped (and won) 2 auctions

I have to agree with Sara, they adjust the snipe leads at certain times for a reason. They know statistically when the servers are going to be slower, they know the schedules, and they probably have some realtime monitoring as well. For anyone to say that they can beat a 30 sec snipe by hand is missing the point completely. Of course you can beat a 30 sec snipe, anyone can. The 30sec lead was and adjusted lead made by their system. AS only adjusts the lead under certain conditions. Can you on average beat and adjusted lead of 30sec when the Ebay servers are loaded or there are system events occuring or when there is an internet lag? Probably not.

Remember you're probably only going to hear complaints from the exceptions where an adjusted lead results either in an auction loss or subsequent bid that increases the win cost. We don't hear about all the times that adjustment was responsible for the win.

Perhaps AS should make a user selectable option to turn off the lead adjustments. I'd be interested to see how many people go with fixed leads and then lose on 2, 5, 8, or 10 second snipes then. My guess is that AS already knows what those stats would be and the lead adjustments are a result of that knowledge. Of course all this feature would do is cause a completely different kind of complaint.

Remeber there is no such thing as guaranteed latency on the internet. Ever. AS is just trying to increase your odd's of getting your snipe in successfully - despite the chaos.

-sk

my theory is that AS is polling ebay for response time and adjusting it's snipes accordingly. however those once in a while times where you refresh something and it takes a long time on the item hiccups are throwing off the algorithm and causing it to bid say 30 seconds earlier. sure the response time for round trip - me making a request, the server processing the request, the server returning a page - might take 30 seconds, but i'm curious as to how much of that time it takes for me to actually *place* a bid. i/AS doesn't need a bid verification page to complete the bid, i believe the bid portion is already complete once we have sent the request to the server. being so i'm curious as to the actual time out of that 30 seconds that it takes AS to send and ebay to process the actual bid request.

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but I can DEFINATELY gurantee you that I can beat an Sniper program that bids 30 to 40 seconds before the end of the auctions....

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No you cant. Your lack of understanding of the problem ensures that I am correct and you are wrong.

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The bottom line is that I can bid as close to the end of the auction as AS does.

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No you cant. If eBay is running 12 seconds slow, and you want to place a 6 second snipe, yours will miss and ours will not. You just dont snipe enough to see these problems, so you believe there is no problem. If eBay always ran 100% perfectly, and your internet connection to them always ran 100% perfectly, then you could do as well as us. However, neither of those are likely to ever happen.

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i have been on ebay since 98, i can definately make a snipe within the last 10 seconds 100% of the time.

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You are wrong, as per the others you dont understand the root problem. We place more snipes in 20 minutes than you've placed since 1998. You have insufficient data, we on the otherhand dont. If eBay is running slowly 100% of your snipes wont go throgh. But nearly 100% of ours will. That means you'll miss every snipe, and we'll make almost every snipe.

Believe it, ..... or not...

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i AM better than the average driver. and the average sniper.

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Not sure about the driver part, but I believe just about anyone reading these boards is surely a very good sniper, certainly well above average.

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whether AS has more information or not is not the point - it's what you do with the information. in this case AS sniped with 41 seconds to go - sounds like it did not make the correct guess as to when it should have bid based on available information.

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That is true. Our corrections arent always correct. However they result in the highest probability of the person winning the item. Because if the bid is late there is a 0% chance you'll win it.

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i am just trying to improve a system i am now paying for - we all come out winners if the system is improved.

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And we'd love to do so. Obviously we dont get paid if you dont win, so it's always in our best interest to make sure we do all we can to see that you win.

Currently eBays slowness causes many bids to be placed with extended lead times. Which opens the possiblity of being outbid by a manual sniper. Unfortunately not correcting for eBays slowness means a high chance your bid wont be accepted by eBay before the auction ends. Thus a 100% failure rate. The best current alternative is to place certain bids at a time when they have a nearly 100% chance of being accepted in time by eBay. This ensures the highest chance of winning.

I know you all think you know better but I've got the #'s, and you dont. We often bid with 30+ seconds and bids are still missed. What do you want me to tell those people? "Oh I'm sorry. We adjusted your lead time to 36 seconds for you, but eBay was so slow it wasnt enough."

If I told them we knew eBay was running slowly but we still placed their bid at 5 seconds how angry do you think they would be? How angry would you be? You'd be in here yelling at us to increase it. Well that's what we do.

What I ought to do is take your email addresses and send it to the 300+ folks who had 35+ second lead times yesterday adjusted by us and whose bids were still late! If I had to guess they would rather we had placed their bids with a 60 second lead time. But again, we can only use the best data we have. But even that isn't 100% and thus 300+ snipes with 35+ second lead times at peak times Sunday night were accepted by eBay only after the auction had ended.

But then I come here and read how you do it, you could enter a 5 second snipe when we couldn't. No you couldn't. Most of the time yes. But at times like these your chances of winning would be 0% and ours would be more like 85%. And most of the time during slowdowns we're up near 97%, and you'd still be at 0%.

Better yet would be to send the hundreds of people a day who we snipe with 30-45 seconds whose bids are only accepted by eBay with 2-3 seconds left in the auction. But you think you could do it with 5-10 seconds and still get it in, ha ha ha, not a chance.

Yes, probably 975 times out of a 1000 a 5 second lead time is enough. But the rest of the time it's not and if you dont adjust you will miss, and we wont. Unfortunately unless your sniping tens of thousands of snipes a day you wont know.

My 2 cents worth is that AS must do something right because I set my snipes as advised and have never lost an auction because a snipe was not placed in time!

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and they probably have some realtime monitoring as well.

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Yes, in addition to other methods we monitor snipes in real time and adjust snipe lead times based on the snipes by other users that were placed directly before yours. Thus an eBay slowdown at an odd time where we werent expecting one would be corrected for.

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For anyone to say that they can beat a 30 sec snipe by hand is missing the point completely. Of course you can beat a 30 sec snipe, anyone can. The 30sec lead was and adjusted lead made by their system. AS only adjusts the lead under certain conditions. Can you on average beat and adjusted lead of 30sec when the Ebay servers are loaded or there are system events occuring or when there is an internet lag? Probably not.

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Ahhhh. Finally! Someone that understands. Yes, most of the time a 5 second snipe can be done by anyone, you or us. It's that small % of items that need adjusting where we will succeed, and a manual sniper would fail. We currectnly adjust most snipes on quarter hours. If you dont like our lead times please snipe these manually for now, we will completely understand.

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Remember you're probably only going to hear complaints from the exceptions where an adjusted lead results either in an auction loss or subsequent bid that increases the win cost. We don't hear about all the times that adjustment was responsible for the win.

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Which would make for a very cool feature. A "Snipe Rescued" feature. Whereby we'd tell you when we adjust your lead time and that resulted in a saved snipe. That would be really neat. I think we should add it but it's one of those things that isn't an absolutely needed feature, sorta an extra. So the programmers may not be too hot on adding it right away.

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My guess is that AS already knows what those stats would be and the lead adjustments are a result of that knowledge.

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Hundreds a day, which is why we dont give the option. If we did and people used it, and then they lost, they'd be in here complaining. Asking why we even gave them that option if we knew it would lead to them losing more often. It's like offering a russian roulette check box. Most of the time you'd be safe checking it. But why take the risk?

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Of course all this feature would do is cause a completely different kind of complaint.

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Exactly. You and I think a lot alike. Or you must have some experience in this field, business, or customer service. It seems like you've thought this through very thoroughly. Or maybe I just like you because you understand my thinking. In either case I like your post, and hopefully it will help others to understand our side of things a little more too.

[This message was edited by Sniper Sara B. on February 16, 2004 at 02:45 PM.]

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now you're driving boone away from the forums (maybe even AS?) and working on me, we're just trying to provide feedback to improve the system - so far contributing a lot more than you seem to be from what i've seen.

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We certainly dont want anyone to leave. Only to understand why we do what we do. We'd love to improve on what we have and decrease the lead times to be as close as possible to the origial set by the user.