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Postado em 6 de julho de 2026 - Atualizado há 1 mês
TNT confirmed in the Patch Notes that a cancellation lock has been implemented. Once an auction receives its first bid, it can no longer be canceled after the initial 5–15 minute grace period. Thanks for listening!
TNT released a big Auction House update this Monday, July 6. While most of the changes are welcome, one of them is pretty concerning.
TL;DR – TNT’s new Auction House update is mostly positive, but allowing sellers to cancel auctions after bids have been placed is a major concern.
It lets sellers back out when they dislike the final price, wastes bidders’ time, and makes auction results less reliable as a reference for real item values.
Over time, this could weaken trust in bidding and make it easier to create price manipulation in the Neopian economy.
The Auction House has always been one of the best ways to see what items are actually being sold for.
Unlike the Trading Post, where items can be relisted over and over at unrealistic prices, auctions usually showed real competition between buyers. Players could look at recent auctions or itemdb’s Auction House History to get a better idea of an item’s actual value instead of relying only on listings that may never sell.
Some players even use Auction House history (on itemdb or even via discord bots!) as their main reference when pricing items. That is healthy for the economy. It means less room for price manipulation, whether from unrealistic Trading Post listings, people repeatedly relisting items, or even price estimates from sites like itemdb itself.
The Auction House was also a place where players could sometimes get great deals — with a bit of luck, quick reactions, and several minutes of fighting against other players (and bots heh).
Today’s update introduced the ability to cancel auctions.
That can be useful in some cases. Everyone has forgotten a zero when creating an auction one time…
The problem is that sellers can also cancel auctions after they already have active bids.
A seller who is unhappy with the current price can simply cancel an auction a few minutes before it ends. They have to pay a 25,000 NP fee if there are bids, but every player who spent time watching, bidding, and competing for that item still loses their effort.
That feels unfair. Once players have started bidding, they are joining an actual competition. They should be able to trust that the item will go to the highest bidder when the auction ends.
From the outside, it is not always possible to tell whether an auction ended normally or was cancelled. An auction that disappears may have been completed, but it may also have been cancelled by the seller for whatever reason. This not only makes Auction House history but also itemdb as a whole less reliable
Players acting in bad faith could take advantage of this to create misleading price signals. They could let an auction receive bids, make it look like there is demand at a certain price, and then cancel it before it actually sells.
For most players, this may not be a huge issue at the end of day. And for itemdb, we could simply add a disclaimer to Auction House History and move on.
But the bigger problem is trust.
Cancelling an auction before anyone had time to bid on it is understandable. Cancelling after players have already invested time and NP into competing for it is different.
The Auction House works best when both sellers and bidders know that the rules are fair. Allowing active auctions to be cancelled makes bidding less trustworthy, makes price history less useful, and gives bad actors another way to manipulate the market.
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