BidBud.com - Sniping - Character Assassinations

Character Assassinations		These myths are direct personal attacks on snipers and their quality of character and morality
#	Myth	It's not true because...
8.1	Snipers are mean-spirited rotten people. They love stealing things away from good decent people. They are full of hatred and intolerance. They hate everybody in the world, other snipers and even themselves. They are miserable excuses for human beings, scum of the earth, undesireable members of the eBay community and so on. They are just like Hitler and Satan. Other words that have been used are ones I won't repeat.	Again, I can only speak for myself, and I consider myself to be a pretty nice guy. Most of the snipers I have encountered on the chat boards seem pretty decent to me, so I can only assume that this particular comment comes from jealousy. Lowballers, upset at losing, resort to name-calling and personal attacks. Here's a thought to keep you awake at night. If you demand that I change my bidding tactics specifically so that you can win at my expense, then aren't YOU being the selfish party here?
8.2	Snipers are immortal ogres who do nothing but sit at their computers 24 hours a day, going without food or sleep, buying up everything in sight just for the joy of taking things away from people who deserve them more.	As a sniper, I can guarantee that I only snipe items that I really, really, really want! It's hard to decide who deserves an item more. For the record, I'm cranky if I don't get my nine hours of sleep every night, and I eat more than enough food every day. Besides, you don't need to be at your computer all day to snipe. The irony of this myth is that sniping actually allows you to spend LESS time online, and that many of the solutions propsed by anti-snipers, for this reason, would require them to spend MORE time online.
8.3	Snipers are mean and hostile to anybody who dares disagree with them and their way of doing things. They believe that their way of bidding is the ONLY way. Direct from the land of small price.	The mere existence of this web page disproves this immediately. Snipers, more than anybody else on eBay, even more so than eBay itself in a few cases, go out of their way and bust their buns EVERY DAY to help people on a variety of topics. Whenever anybody posts questions on things like retractions, Dutch Auctions, Reserve Prices, etc., it's always the snipers who leap in to give advice. Many of us such as myself, dr.gizmonic, tiptie, englandboy and Sir Snipes A Lot have web pags devoted to explaining things to eBayers, and not just about sniping. We rarely get angry at those who disagree. It's the anti-sniper who continually demands that the entire system be changed for their exclusive benefit. They're the ones who almost always resort to name calling and angry remarks. It's true that some of us are rather blunt, but that rises out of frustration at the fact that anti-sniping posts and complaints appear over and over and over again. Always the same complaints. Always the same unfounded reasoning. It's hard to put on a happy face all the time, but we try, and often succeed. If I was this way, why would I have this web page and why would I have an entire page devoted exclusively to the defeat of snipers at auctions? Every sniper I know (including myself) acknowledges that there are a variety of bidding styles out there, and as long as they follow eBay's rules, they are all valid. We believe that sniping is the best way, but not the only way. When snipers debate bidding philosophy, we're inclined to educate people on eBay and defend sniping. We will criticize other bidding methods as inferior to sniping, but we never ever judge them invalid or wrong. As long as you follow the rules of eBay, I honestly don't care how you bid, and neither do other snipers, although we will happily teach our bidding philosophy if you so desire. Overall, we snipers are very open about bidding. Bid any (legal) way you want, just allow us the same privilege. I do believe that sniping is the best way, though, and as you will see in the Mechanics section, sniping is more successful than it would be because so many people DON'T snipe. If everybody sniped, then snipers would win less often, and prices would rise. If you're interested, I have identified five separate bidding strategies, not counting invalid ones that are against eBay's rules. While some are better than others, they are all valid and acceptable, and they each have their own advantages and disadvantages. You can read about them on my bidding stratagies page. here
8.4	Snipers are clueless morons. They are stupid ignorant buffoons who have no idea what's going on with anything. Contributed by eBay user jrsetters.	This is probably the ultimate of the "sour grapes" myths. People who have lost to snipers many times are usually the ones who spout this line, probably as a defense mechanism. They don't want to admit that their bidding strategy fails against snipers, so instead they turn it around and make fun of them. However, consider the logic behind this myth. Snipers (and my implication all Proxy Bidders) are the most stupid, brain-dead people in the Universe, yet they consistently win auctions. Anti-Snipers are ultra mega super geniuses, the most brilliant people the world has ever seen. They are skilled at everything, yet every time they bid in an auction against a stupid idiot sniper, these rocket scientists get the pants whipped off of them, and despite their massive intelligence, they remain perpetually unable to figure out how this happened, why this happened, or how to prevent it from happening in the future. Let me put in another way. If I'm so stupid, then why do I win 97.6% of the time?
8.5	Snipers are deadbeats, auctioneering houdinis who bid at the last second, then vanish, never to pay or be heard from again.	While I can only speak for myself, and I've never failed to pay a winning bid, the anecdotal evidence amassed to date indicates that snipers are among the best customers on eBay. Most sellers love them, and nearly all say that they pay promptly in a friendly manner. This is because snipers are very serious bidders. We know what we want, we know how much we're willing to pay for it, and we know how to win.
8.6	Snipers have a moral obligation to bid in such a way that others, who are not as good as they are, can have a chance to win. contributed, in some vague indirect way, by eBay user beery1@attbi.com Note that beery never directly said this, but it's strongly implied in a lot of his posts from his anti-sniper thread.	This myth gets more into a life-based philosophy rather than sniping, but it's an interesting question. I believe that, on a basic level, we all have a moral obligation to help and assist our fellow humans. Through donations, charities, churches, etc., we can donate food, clothing, medicine and other sundries to those less fortunate than we are. I think that this is a duty of ours, although it should not be forced upon us. It's when we choose to do good of our own free will that marks us as honorable and good people. However, I think that this myth takes it a little too far. I don't believe that we should be expected to hurt or otherwise lessen ourselves, either to boost others up (rob from the rich and take from the poor) or just to lower ourselves so that everybody is reduced to the lowest level. In other words, if I have skills on eBay that others have not yet learned, I should not be expected to throw those skills away just because others don't have them, and only so that I can become as unskilled as everybody else. The fact is that I (and other snipers) know how to use eBay better than most. I sincerely believe that this creates a moral obligation upon us to teach and to help others learn to use the system as well as we do. We gladly do this, through our web pages and our daily efforts on the chat boards to educate people and show them how to be more effective eBayers. However, I will not, not for one second, force myself to be a worse eBayer just so that others can have a better chance of winning against me. That's not "honorable". That's just plain silly.
8.7	Snipers are always pushing Proxy Bidding as a way to beat their bids. But if it's so great, why don't they use it themselves? Direct from the land of small price.	On ocassion, we do use it. I'm not always at my computer (see the immortal ogre myth below), and I will sometimes enter an early proxy bid and leave to go and do whatever. However, I do not ALWAYS use this method because as good as it is, it's only the second best strategy on eBay, while sniping is the absolute best. Why shouldn't I use the best strategy whenever I can? Proxy bidding and sniping are nearly exactly the same. In fact, they are completely equal when they go head to head. The only difference is that bidding late protects us against nibble bidding, shill bidding, enemy bidding and parasite bidding. Therefore, sniping has no special advantage against any other proxy bid, but it DOES have defensive advantages against other valid and invalid bidding strategies. We often hold up Proxy Bidding as the only way to beat sniping (aside from sniping itself) and it is. Lowballing, by definition, and its derivatives, will lose nearly every time to snipers. The only way to beat a sniper is to enter a higher bid, and you can just as easily do that early (pure proxy bidding) or late (sniping).