Market Mechanics Mystery

Okay, so this is probably basic stuff for a lot of you but it's been nagging on me for a while now. Just how does this damn thing work?

Set Up :

McGuffin Enhancement is currently selling for 120 inf.

Hero A wants to make some money quick and lists his McGuffins for ten under the current price.
Hero B wants to make better profit and lists his McGuffins for ten over the current price.
Hero C then hears about his buddy making some money and decides to undercut, so he lists his for just five over the current price.
Last of all, Hero D intends to list his for twenty under the current price but miskeys and lists them for way too much.

So, in order :

Hero A puts ten McGuffins on the market for 110
Hero B puts ten McGuffins on the market for 130
Hero C puts ten McGuffins on the market for 125
Hero D puts ten McGuffins on the market for 1000

Buyer One comes along and sees they are selling for 120 and decides to lowball. He bids 100. He doesn't get a McGuffin. So far, I understand the process.

Buyer Two comes along. He looks at current prices, bids 120. He gets one of Hero A's McGuffins because everyone else has their listed for more. Again, I can follow the action here. No mystery.

Buyer Three comes to market. Buyer Three must have McGuffin NAO! He bids 10,000.

So here's the question.

Does Buyer Three get one of Hero A's McGuffins, since Hero A listed his first?

Does Buyer Three get one of Hero D's McGuffins, because Hero D's price is closest to what Buyer Three bid?

Or does Buyer Three possible get one of Hero B or C's McGuffin's because the Market search function data seek finds the first location on it's physical drive that matches the parameters of 10,000 or less and hasn't been defragged in a while so it just happens to find one of theirs first?

Does anyone actually know how this works?

[ Edited for Formatting ]

They get it from Hero A, but not because he listed his first. The fact that Hero A listed his first means nothing. It matters a little bit if the prices were tied, though not in the way you might expect, but as long as the prices are different the order in which they were listed doesn't matter.

The nearness of price isn't relevant either.

The defragging shouldn't matter, unless things go terribly wrong with the hardware on which the market server is running.

The buyer will buy the cheapest item listed. That's it. If you want to sell quickly, list low. Whatever is listed lowest will sell first, to any bid which is higher than the list price.

Edit: Incidentally, there are some guides stickied at the top of the forum. Some of the mechanical questions are probably answered somewhere in there. I haven't read my own guide lately, but I think I covered that. It seems like the kind of thing I would have covered.

Highest bid goes to lowest seller, so Hero A sells his for 10,000 (minus 1,000 in market fees).

Actually, it turns out he's useless, he's just a mind control dominator whose powers are fully devoted to making you think he looks like he knows something. He hasn't got a clue.

But yes. Lowest price gets the sale, every time.

So until A's stock is all sold, everyone bidding 110 or over buys from A.

Now, let's say Z comes along and bids 100. He gets nothing. And you come along and list something for 1. You get Z's bid at 100, because it's the highest bid and your listing is the lowest price, and the bid equals or exceeds the listing.

Result: Anti-flipping works. Fill your market slots with bids on something at 123 inf, and list everything you get in stacks at 1 inf. You will get anywhere from 10 inf on a stack (leaving you out 50 inf in listing fees!) to 600k or so on a stack, because your stuff always sells before anything listed at a higher price, but people just bid whatever looks reasonable.

What happens is, someone comes along and they've already got 1000 in the window so they just click, and someone else sees a bunch at 123 and then one at 1000, so they figure they'll bid 2k so they don't have to wait, and pretty soon someone's bidding 100k on the 7th of the 200 rubies you have listed at 1 inf.

I should point out that the phrase "currently selling for 120" disguises a truth about the markets that experienced players (or at least experienced marketeers) know, but neophytes m ight not fully understand. Nothing is every really "currently selling." We only know what it was sold at in the past. That only tells us what the last bidder bought at.

Suppose, in the situation above, someone comes in and bids a million for a bunch of those items. The last known sells will show five sells for a million. Technically, that means it was "selling" for a million, but that actually says nothing about what the lowest price for the item was. It could have been 120. This is sometimes even used as a market trick in combination with aggressive flipping. Buy five for more than it costs and then put a bunch up for sale. Sometimes you can get people to start bidding the higher price just out of habit and make all the influence back and then some.

At any moment in time when a sale isn't literally being executed at that instant, there's always going to be bids to buy starting at some low number and increasing to some maximum value, and a bunch of offers to sell that start at some low value and get increasingly high. There has to be a gap between the highest bid and the lowest ask (sometimes referred to by its stock market terminology called "the spread").

I say all of that to say this: when we colloquially talk about what an item is "selling for" we usually assume the spread is narrow, and we can approximate the truth. The truth is that if you want to buy right now, you have to pay at least the minimum ask. If you want to sell now, you have to ask for no more than the maximum bid. Those numbers are different. Sometimes very different: it can happen with many items that the spread gets very wide. A piece of salvage can sell now for no more than 500 inf, but to buy it right now could cost at least 10,000 inf, making it hazy to say what it is currently "selling for."

If you ever see an item trading history show 100, 10000, 100, 10000... that's probably what's going on: impatient seller followed by impatient buyer followed by impatient seller for an item with a big spread.

I'm surprised by how big the spread is on some stuff. I was trying to buy some piece of common salvage the other day. There were many thousands for sale and 0 bids, and yet I couldn't buy one for less than 10,000 inf.

We should do that again some time. It's still a bit mysterious.

Basically, we determined that when a bunch of people list the same thing for the same price, then the order in which the sales take place depends on the order in which the items are listed. It's not FIFO. It's not LIFO. It seemed to be a random order, but it was always the exact same sequence.

Of course, there's a chance that the market merge or the interface update have affected that behavior.

Nope, it definitely had nothing to do with the individual who placed it, only with the position in the queue. It was something like the fourth person to list an item was always the seventh person to sell the item, no matter who that fourth person was.