AUCTION FRENZY

Action at the Auction House is normally sedate, even soporific; the great majority of items on sale never attract so much as a single bid, and bidding wars are as rare as beryl shards. The only exception occurs when somebody posts one or more items for sale with a ridiculously low opening bid and no buyout. Sometimes this can happen when the poster genuinely has no idea of the value of an item, at other times it may be from nothing more than curiosity, a sense of fun or the desire to stir things up. When one of these unique opportunities is discovered, most players wait until the last moment possible before putting in their bids, so as to avoid being outbid. A degree of uncertainty is provided by the fact that the AH indicates the duration of a sale in hours only, so that the indication "1 hour" could mean anything from 60 minutes to one second to go...

Usually, when the seller's intention is to provoke a bidding war, he or she will arrange for the sale to time out sometime in the early evening, when most players are online; this morning, however, saw a sharp bidding war on three items posted by Robinn on the Laurelin AH at a time when most players were fast asleep, some recovering from Friday-night excesses and others from overlong Rift raids. The principal item concerned was a single-use Engraved Beryl Earring Recipe; currently fetching an average 2.5-3 gold at auction, the recipe (when critted) yields an Etched Beryl Earring which brings around 13 gold at the moment. Yesterday, it was being offered at the unbelievable starting price of (I think) around 18 silver. The same player had posted two Engraved Beryl Necklace Recipes starting at around 20 or so silver (average AH price 1.2 gold).

The items had certainly been noticed, but by late last night only a handful of bids had been posted on all three; the real bidding war, as expected, began this morning during the last hour and ended up as shown above: a total of 66 bids brought the earring recipe to 1.96 gold and the two necklace recipes to 525 silver each with 53 and 51 bids respectively. I don't know whether 66 separate bids on an item constitutes any kind of record, but presumably both the seller and the final winners went away satisfied: the seller because he walked off with 3G (less commission) having presumably enjoyed the whole process, and the winners because they had secured what was still a relative bargain, even though the initial prices had been driven sky-high. In my case, having acquired one of the necklace recipes for 525S, I was able to sell it on for 1G within five minutes. Not as heroic as killing drakes, but moderately profitable, and should take care of the rent for a few months...