I've wondered this too, it seems like honestly all but the last day of an auction is just an advertising period.
I don't do a ton of auctions, I'm poor and not into G1s, but what is stopping people from just waiting to bid rather than getting in a bidding war?
Say, if I see someone bid against me twice on day one of a week long auction, why would I not sit on it for a week? There seems to be nothing preventing that. Snipe guards only prevent sniping, not waiting for day zero, and almost everyone asks for an LDP.
IDK, it's a weird system! It has to cater to a much smaller crowd than a regular auction site, but it's also online so you can't operate the same way an IRL auction might, which is often fast and means to build tension (at least for lower priced goods, animals or large volumes of cars, not top end fine art etc).
So yeah, while it's normal to set a starting bid under your reserve price in those kinds of auctions, it clearly doesn't work so well in FR. But I can't see how someone bidding the price on offer is cheating if the seller put it too low.
IDK, I've worked real world auctions but I'm totally disengaged from FR ones so this is fascinating to me, sorry for the TL;DR.
Re: Auction etiquette
I don't do a ton of auctions, I'm poor and not into G1s, but what is stopping people from just waiting to bid rather than getting in a bidding war?
Say, if I see someone bid against me twice on day one of a week long auction, why would I not sit on it for a week? There seems to be nothing preventing that. Snipe guards only prevent sniping, not waiting for day zero, and almost everyone asks for an LDP.
IDK, it's a weird system! It has to cater to a much smaller crowd than a regular auction site, but it's also online so you can't operate the same way an IRL auction might, which is often fast and means to build tension (at least for lower priced goods, animals or large volumes of cars, not top end fine art etc).
So yeah, while it's normal to set a starting bid under your reserve price in those kinds of auctions, it clearly doesn't work so well in FR. But I can't see how someone bidding the price on offer is cheating if the seller put it too low.
IDK, I've worked real world auctions but I'm totally disengaged from FR ones so this is fascinating to me, sorry for the TL;DR.