GAH refund mystery

[Founder]

This is a pretty simple function common to every single online auction and was present in real life auctions for probably hundreds of years before that, and it is called proxy bidding.

[Neferius]

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.

Your minimum bid is the last DISPLAYED minimum bid times 1.05 then rounded-up.
Of-course this only applies to items and NOT commodities (gems, mats, plans, etc.) Those function on a first-come, first-served system where the cheapest items are sold first.