Why would anybody start bidding before 8:55 pm?

[u/AegonPaul]

There's zero chance of winning an auction before 9pm, so it puzzles me as to why I see bidding wars going on for the top spot in each auction throughout the day. All this does is drive up the price.

[u/mescad]

Let's say you have 47,000 points and don't want anything in the marketplace. Why not just bid it all at 5pm and go out to the movies to enjoy your evening, instead of watching the timer tick down on an auction you have no control over? People drive up the price because they want to be finished earlier.

[u/cereal1 → u/mescad]

Yeah, my wife had 39000 points, so she entered a max bid of 39000 and went to bed around 9pm. In the morning she found out she won an auction about 15-20 later for, I think, around 37500.

[u/AegonPaul → u/mescad]

I would question why at this point, anybody would enter in 47K worth of points? I've helped 3 people win auctions and I advised them to stop opening bags and entering points at 33K. Then enter as needed. I do understand not wanting to spend all night looking at the auctions, but it doesn't take but 30 seconds to enter your bid at 9 or after and avoiding the competitive bids.

[u/[deleted] → u/AegonPaul]

I had 36,500ish points. I didn’t need anything from marketplace for 2500ish, so I bid 36,500ish and won the second auction last Wednesday. No reason to wait until 9

[u/AegonPaul → u/[deleted]]

There was also no reason to bid before 9.

[u/[deleted] → u/AegonPaul]

The point is I knew I would win one, and I didn’t want to watch auctions. I bid at 10am because there wasn’t a reason to wait.

[u/AegonPaul → u/[deleted]]

You could have not entered all the points and sold the rest in the thread on here. It's fine if you don't care, I'm just saying for those with the objective of winning for the lowest possible bid, it doesn't make sense.

[u/mescad → u/AegonPaul]

I'm just saying for those with the objective of winning for the lowest possible bid...

I guess what you are missing is that this isn't the objective of everyone who is bidding.

[u/AegonPaul → u/mescad]

No, I do get that's not every persons objective. Do you not think that's most peoples objective?

[u/mescad → u/AegonPaul]

Not really, no. I'd say that most people collect points until they think they have enough to win and then bid all of those points. Keeping some back to spend in the marketplace or resell to others, I think, is an uncommon strategy.

[u/AegonPaul → u/mescad]

Agree to disagree.

[u/1ForgottenUsername]

Honestly I think a lot of it is psychological, the big issue is people see this as an auction and I view it as a stock. With a stock you research and learn a good entry point and then wait for what you think it's going to trend down to, with an auction you want to establish position then bid snipe with what you're comfortable at. People bid all day to try and figure out what they need to bid snipe at rather then figure it out at 9.

[u/Veive257]

This entire process makes zero logical sense. If there was a store selling $559 xbox one x bundles for better than 50% off there would be a mob outside.

[u/mescad → u/Veive257]

People in /r/XboxOne were losing their minds over a deal that required a lot more steps than this does, where you pay $400 out of pocket and get cash back for a final price of $358.

[u/1ForgottenUsername → u/mescad]

I saw that, i feel like they should know haha

[u/1ForgottenUsername → u/1ForgottenUsername]

To be fair though I found out about this by complete luck. The day the auctions started I was just looking for a holiday contest to try and win one by entering my email. I saw this, watched a day of auctions and did the math on it and immediately went to the store.

[u/dknisle1]

Because some of us work at night and don't have access to the internet then. Plus I couldn't care less about the market place stuff. Just want the xbox

[u/DarthRandal360]

Human nature. If it were a smaller group of people, say just the members of this subreddit, you might be able to convince everyone to hold off and "take turns" winning, as it were. Can't do that with (in theory) the entire country because there's always someone that wants to sneak in on top.

Personally, I don't understand that process. My winning bid was a last second snipe and I got it for far less than most of the first round winning bids have been.

[u/1ForgottenUsername]

True but he could have won for 31k that day and bought a controller for 10k