Difference between offset (Main) and offset (Mirror)

[Guest]

What is the difference between offset main and offset mirror? I understand that the offset determines when the bid is placed (the number of seconds before the auction ends). But what is the point to have two offsets?

Also, I don't understand the reasons why it is not suggested from the site to set a very low offset (like 2 seconds). Isn't it better, so that manual bidders can't react with an higher bid?

Thank you

[Cupid]

If you set both offsets the same, both servers attempt to place the bid at the same time, sometimes Ebay accepts both, and that results in two bids of the same amount appearing in the bid history. Some regard that as an indication that you are using an automated sniper, which they don't want to give, so they set their offsets to be different on the two servers just to avoid that happening.

It also makes a difference as to which server wins the most auctions, the one with the higher offset attempts to place the bid first so will be the one that wins the vast majority of the auctions for you. The one that attempts to bid later will usually get blocked by Ebay because they generally only accept one bid of the same amount from the same id (except as noted above), so only gets its bids accepted when the first attempt has failed, for some reason. If you don't mind it being random which server wins, that's not an issue either, of course.

As to low offset versus higher ones, it's been discussed many, many times, here are just a few:

https://www.gixen.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10882
https://www.gixen.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10840
https://www.gixen.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10804
https://www.gixen.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10371
https://www.gixen.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10587

... more can be found using the search functions of this forum.

To summarise, higher offsets can give better results when there are many snipers (due to the bid increment rule) or when your bid is exactly the same as someone else's (due to the first bid rule).
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Mark