[Cupid]

It is always the highest accepted bid that wins on Ebay.

Gixen has always placed just your maximum bid, and bid only once from each server. If you have the same offset for both that can result in Ebay registering two bids of the same amount since it can't block bids of the same amount coming from different locations at the same time.

It's possible that more Ebay users snipe these days, I haven't seen any figures that indicate this might be the case, but since it's the sensible thing for all bidders to do it would not surprise me.

As demonstrated by the case earlier in this thread, the more snipers there are the more likely that an earlier bid (not a later one) will win the auction, primarily due to the bid increment rule. That might seem counter intuitive but it's the reason why I've always preferred offsets greater than the default of 6 seconds, because I always was interested in the same items as other snipers.

Losing an auction by one bid increment has always been the most likely outcome on Ebay since it is the maximum that Ebay forces a buyer to pay no matter how much more they actually bid. It's certainly not an indication that there is some way of detecting the amount of the next highest bid and just placing one that is exactly one bid increment more than it.

It's also worth noting, and perhaps not often acknowledged, that over time buyers tend to get better at estimating the true value of the items they are interested in, this in turn may well result in less reckless/lower snipe bids being placed on them. The perception might be that, 'I seem to win less these days' when the reality is that in the past you just paid more for the items than others were willing to.