GAH refund mystery

[Kurki]

A strange thing happened to me on the GAH.

I was bidding for a cheap helm that had no buyout price set. I wanted to enter the bid 33,333 gold, but accidentally I entered 333,333 gold, six threes instead of five. Needless to say, that was the top bid, the one previous was somewhere around 30,000. No one bid over that amount, I won the item the next day, but here is the mystery.

When I got the item, I received a "refund" of about 230,000 gold, making the effective price of the item about 100,000.

Not that I'm complaining, but how and why did this happen?

[Doppel]

Your max bid is only the maximum amount you are willing the bid. If you bid a million gold and the second max bid is 10 gold, then if you win you pay 11 gold and get refunded the rest of your million.

[Kurki]

Aha I see, thanks for the clarification, that should also help when I next try to bid on something!

[Creqaw]

Your max bid is only the maximum amount you are willing the bid. If you bid a million gold and the second max bid is 10 gold, then if you win you pay 11 gold and get refunded the rest of your million.

Wouldn't that be easily abusable? Look up an item good that's worth... let's say 500k. The min bid is 50k. When the bid wars start and the min bid goes up to... 60k or so. You could just just bid a million gold to deter everyone else from bidding. This will results you in winning the item. Losing like 65k and getting the rest of the money back.

[Kurki]

This will results you in winning the item. Losing like 65k and getting the rest of the money back.

... makes you think ...

[Creqaw]

Someone that has spare money should try it. I can't afford to leave all my cash on AH in a bid.

[SWalker]

Not sure exactly what triggers a refund but I doubt doing this would work... you'll just make someone really happy with your 1m gold

[Creqaw]

Yeah, I doubt Blizzard would implement such an abusable feature.

[Doppel]

Huh? No, this isn't how it works at all.
It's very simple.
You place your maximum bid, if nobody bids more then you win and you pay the second maximum bid plus a minimum bid.
Placing a maximum bid of 1 million when the second maximum bid is 50k wouldn't deter anyone from bidding more then 50k since nobody can see that the maximum bid is 1 million. What happens is that people keep bidding and immediately lose against your 1 million, they then get their losing bid immediately refunded, and then bid again until either their bid exceeds your 1 million or they give up. If they give up at say 900k then you pay 900k plus the minimum possible bid above 900k and get refunded the rest of your million.

[TwiiK]

It's surely in place so people don't have to watch bidding autctions like hawks and can instead say: "Well, I'll go as high as 1,5 mill on this" and then go do something else and come back and see the outcome at a later time.

Do you know how the minimum bid is determined? That's the only part that seems odd to me.

Minimum possible bid above 900k would be 900001 so that can't be how it works, right? Is it percentage based?

Also, with such a system in place for bidding auctions it's weird that they haven't got a similar system for the commodity auctions. The first thing a colleague of me said when he saw the commodity auction system was: "This is going to overload their servers" and sure enough they had to take it down for weeks to try and remedy the problem. They could have just put in a purchase order system where you say that you want to buy 10 perfect square rubies for 10k each. If and whenever the price of rubies gets as low as 10k your purchase order is filled and the server load is reduced to a fraction of what it is, or at least what it was when I played.