I actually had the impression that what the OP described is against the rules. After reading MasterWolf's post, it makes sense to me why it's not though. I'm not sure that mods can actually see all the edits made to a page (confirm?), but I think if they gets enough reports of the same person pulling stuff like this, they could at least have a word with them to remind them that being disingenuous isn't welcome here.

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Originally posted by scipio624:
I'm not for cancelling auctions altogether but I am a little jaded about participating in any on the future. The post was started because of a particular auction that got killed in the closing moments after a few bids back and forth between me and frankenskid. When I saw the auction was gone I contacted the auctioneer (someone who has been a member for several years with close to 150 refs) who stated they were unhappy with where the bid was at and wanted to close the auction because it wasn't high enough for him. I thought this had to be against the rules and he would at the very least get smacked for being underhanded and shady. He told me to go ahead and contact the mods, it was his auction and he could cancel if he wanted to (I felt he had this intention all along if his buy price wasn't met). I did hear back from a mod that although this is a practice he wouldn't encourage that it wasn't against the rules. I'm upset about a few things here. One, he put a minimum bid and clearly encouraged higher bids by posting who was "in the lead" to win the auction. Two, I actually spent time digging through boxes to find the cards he specifically used to count as points, then made it a point to be available at 11:50am on a Thursday morning so I could be there at the conclusion and bid to try to win. Three, feel that since he did this at least once (probably before as well but that is conjecture), that he will probably do it again since he showed no remorse and still has the card.

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Originally posted by JoshSherman:
And you're two of 56,000 members.

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Originally posted by frankenskid:

And it can be tracked by the admins which can view deleted or removed threads.

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Don't know where in the world you got this idea from, but it's very much NOT true.

Thanks,
Jazaray

__________________
A Plastered Dragon Original Limerick:
There was a nice lassie named Jaz
Many wished to have what she has,
A delicate face,
A soft warm embrace,
And a whole lot of bedroom pizzazz.

WeedIan: Jazaray is like MOTL's Mom.

__________________
There's no need to fear, UNDERDOG is here!

All your Gruul Nodorogs are belong to me. Trade them to me, please!

Report rules violations.

A sales acution is different from a trade auction by the very definition. A sale that can't go through would have notification, not just obfuscation, by deleting the thread. If they never intended to accept the minimum that they set in the first place, they should not have listed it. If there isn't much more than the minimum offered, that's the risk they take, and if they can't handle that, then they should have posted their minimums higher, or never have posted it in the first place. It's downright dishonest to say to someone, I would trade X for at least Y value, and I set the list of stuff I want, the prices for the stuff I want, AND if you don't offer me what I like from my want list I still won't trade it to you.

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Originally posted by frankenskid:
I would be willing to bet that even if the buyout had been reached, if it wasn't up to the liking of the person auctioning it off, it still would have gotten pulled. Again, the until you exchange addresses thing....

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Originally posted by B14ckM4g3:
Just to clarify: 56 000 people have signed up for motl. I would put money down that 10% or less are the only people that actually use this site. And less than 7% use this site for trading. And of that <7%, I would imagine <1% actually check other boards.

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Ok, but even if I give you those numbers, my point stands.

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Originally posted by nderdog:
The main reason that this has never been addressed in the rules is that it is virtually unenforceable. Just as we don't allow anything in the rules section of a list to count as evidence, the only "evidence" that could be presented in these cases is a lack of a list and maybe some screenshots of the trade auction before it was removed, if someone had the suspicion that it might be needed. The other issue is that not all minimum bids are equal, and mistakes can be made. Is it fair to the person posting their auction if they made a typo in their minimum bid total or the value of some cards? We have always treated all trade offers the same, and to single trade auctions out as being special needs to be carefully considered. Do we punish a seller if someone posts meeting their asking price but for some reason they choose not to go through with the deal? How would a trade auction be different than that?

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1)Unenforceable--Fine, put up an auction then stick to it, toss it, doesn't really matter. Doesn't make sense to me but now I know better then to invest time in an auction on here.

2)Minimum bids not all the same, typos, mistakes in listing--Usually an auction has an opening time and a closing time and you are absolutely correct, mistakes can be made. Being held responsible for a mistake like a typo isn't reasonable. What happened here and what is being complained about is entirely different, no typo, no mistake, just someone who was more familiar with the rules and killed their "auction" knowing that there was no downside for them to do so. He knew the bids, set a 3 day timeframe, upped his post, set a limit for cards he wanted at the points he himself put in place and encouraged bidding by posting who was currently in the lead to win his Itl Chains of Mephistopheles. So the "other issue" isn't applicable here, but unenforceable still rules over this so I'm just ranting.

3)Auctions and trades treated the same--I understand the rules would apply the same to both. I guess I am more upset about the auctioneer not having the integrity to follow through with something that he started. As I will now no longer ever deal with the auctioneer that brought this on, I would feel similarly unsettled by someone I was dealing with in a trade to go through the entire trade process (offer/counter/haggle/bargain then agree) only to have them cancel in the end because they didn't like the trade anymore.

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Originally posted by scipio624:
A question to the readers, hypothetical mind you. If you did post an auction, set points for cards you wanted and a minimum you would require for the opening bid, would you back out with 5 minutes left for any reason (other then the card being destroyed, traded, stolen)? I know the rules say it is ok, but what would you do?

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This is highly dependent on if you think it's OK to reject bids. If I didn't set a limit on a card, and they bid 40x of a card, I should have the right to reject it. I think I've canceled an auction before when there was little to no interest in it, and I wasn't going to trade my card for 1/4th value. But it's the same reason I won't do a $.99 auction on Ebay. I refuse to be "locked in" to an awful deal.

That being said, normally if I have a bid I accepted on an item, I will ship for that bid. But god rules always apply. You are not locked in until we agree by exchanging emails.

Let me ask you a hypothetical. You set a T/A for a foil X with a buyout at 20 and no one has interest. It sits for 3-4 days. WotC then unbans X and it shoots to $50. Someone comes on your T/A and bids the buyout. Are you locked in? This site is not a store. It's not ebay. It's for people to trade.

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Originally posted by MasterWolf:

Let me ask you a hypothetical. You set a T/A for a foil X with a buyout at 20 and no one has interest. It sits for 3-4 days. WotC then unbans X and it shoots to $50. Someone comes on your T/A and bids the buyout. Are you locked in? This site is not a store. It's not ebay. It's for people to trade.

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I agree, it's not ebay, but if you are going to talk about online auctions you can't not use them as an example of how things are done. As for your hypothetical, if my auction was going to end within the day then no, I would not cancel it. You can believe me or not, but if I think it would be wrong to cancel it. Just like I would go through with a trade that is all but finalized (everything done except exchange of address) even if a card(s) in that trade had a lot of movement in price that wasn't in my favor. It's just the right thing to do.

I can see we will have people on both sides of this issue, I am just voicing my opinion.

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Originally posted by frankenskid:
How ****ed off would you be if someone posted a trade to you for a bunch of low end stuff that you had to dig through boxes to find, for say an hour to find it all, and then once you had gone through all that effort, just says, nah you didn't offer me enough. Can you see how being disingenuous like that would get some people upset?

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Sure. But at the same time, this person is not at fault for the way you chose to (or not to) sort your cards. Any time you decide to spend a long time pulling a lot of cards out of your collection, you are assuming the risk that you did it for nothing, that's just the way it is. If that doesn't float your boat, your two options are sort your cards more thoroughly or don't dig through them.

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Originally posted by JoshSherman:
Sure. But at the same time, this person is not at fault for the way you chose to (or not to) sort your cards. Any time you decide to spend a long time pulling a lot of cards out of your collection, you are assuming the risk that you did it for nothing, that's just the way it is. If that doesn't float your boat, your two options are sort your cards more thoroughly or don't dig through them.

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When an auction is offered with a minimum bid requirement, it is a widely accepted belief (Obviously for the starting of this thread) that once the minimum bid is met, that the item will be awarded. A trade has no such expectation, and if no deal can be made, it's the way it is.