Maintenance is your friend

Maintenance (which I always spell incorrectly - but when it means 'the act of maintaining', why isn't it maintainance?!?) can be your friend.

With a guaranteed shutdown of 6-8 hours, there are going to be a lot of auctions which will close during that time. Because there are alot of silly people who have a reasonable buyout price with a ridiculously low bid price, a cunning investor will make a lot of speculative bids in the last few minutes before shutdown on these auctions - because for the next 8 hours you can't be outbid.

When doing any scan in Auctioneer you can filter results by time:

30 mins or less

2 hours or less

12 hours or less

No Filter (i.e. 48 hours or less aka all listed auctions)

I have this set to two hours or less during periods when I going to be scanning a lot (weekends, evenings etc) but change to 12 hours or less just before work and definately just before maintenance.

This means you may bid on items that close have maintenance is over but its not a big issue - but if you only look at two hours or less you will only get to make bids on around a quarter of all the possibilities.

Now of course you aren't going to be the only person doing this. I did a scan about 20 minutes before shutdown last night on my 'Rags to Riches' toon. I had a very quick look this morning when the servers came back up, and had won quite a number of these but about half had either been outbid or withdrawn by the seller.

This doesn't matter - as long as you have the capital to invest you can bid on anything and everything - which is the joy of have over 500g on him. If you win an item you will make profit - if you get outbid then no harm done because you get your bid back anyway. There is no way to lose here.

So remember that maintenance is your friend - and for me usually means an early night as well :)