AH Over-payment Etiqette Question

Someone has just paid me 50k over the normal price for a square of Rainbow Cloth that I sold on the AH, Should I just send them the excess payment using the ingame delivery system,or would it be better to try and send them a tell first? I can't just keep the gil!

I would send a tell first. To make sure they get the money quickly and also to make sure they aren't an RMT. Back in the day an RMT bought a Vampire Cloak off me for 500k...Didn't feel bad for a second.

It is obviously a genuine mistake on their part,if you look at the AH buying history the person concerned had also bought 2 stacks of rainbow thread for the same price they paid for my rainbow cloth. I guess i'll have to try and catch the person in game.

I normally just send it back using the in-game delivery system and send a /t if they're online when I send it.

I have just sent it back to him/her,i've searched a few times and they appear to be offline atm so they will have the money as soon as they check their deliveries.
I hope if ever make a similar mistake that the seller is honest enough to return my over-payment.

Wow... a decent honest player! Nice going Shayala :)

Sadly most people seem to take every oppertunity to take advantage of situations like this, appears to be more people willing to be an arse and think only of their own profit and think less about the wider community or the people they're screwing. As i read in another post its called "capitalism", theres too much of that in this game lol but what can you do its human nature...

Karma. It's real, believe it.

Nicely done Shayala. :)

I will wait a day or so and see if the player contacts me. If they don't I will usually try to contact them.

If they contact me first and are rude about it -- no way in hell am I giving them a dime back. i.e. the time I purchase a Cursed Subligar -1 on the Bastok Auction House for 10,000 gil when it was selling around 25 mil, the person sent me a /tell in a few minutes "WTF GIMMIE MY STUFF BACK OR I WILL GM YOU YOU SON OF A ***!!". I saw a very rare item on the AH and knowing people like to brag about it for 1gil, 1337gil, I tried 10k and it became mine. Had they said something nice, I would have given it back. But no way in hell when I get called names for someone elses stupidity.

I just checked and the person concerned has picked up the gil I sent them back so my conscience is clear. I think I may have been a Catholic in a previous incarnation as I have a huge guilt complex :)
I couldn't have kept the gil they so obviously paid by mistake and been happy to use it myself.

i used to do this until i made a mistakes in purchasing. I never got any gil back, so i stopped.

Meh... I guess I'm the only one who keeps a general rule of thumb of 'Go *** yourself' when it comes to stuff like this... cause stuff like this doesnt happen to smart people. Smart people take the time to make sure they're spending their gil appropriately, and tend to be absolutely certain of the item they're bidding on.

Seriously, it's not my fault you were too stoned to take the extra second to make sure it was a stack you bid on and not a single.

Not to mention the game makes you confirm your stupidity like three times before it lets you bid on something and *** yourself out of however much gil.

That being said... no, I do not try to contact anyone if this happens to me. Whether or not someone contacts me after the fact... like the above poster said, it all depends on how they handle the situation. Being rude to me about your dumbass mistake is a good way to get laughed at and blacklisted. Being cordial will most likely get you back your gil.

I think the repetition of this game can lead to mistakes like this, especially in an extended sitting. I accidentally overpaid someone 10,000g on a bow one time and never got the money back. I did not cry about this, nor did I contact them about it. It's my fault. I was not stoned, drunk or intoxicated in any way. I had just been playing too long and the muscle memory of my hands took over. :)

I don't consider someone stupid for making this mistake. I myself have done it several times. When you are try to bid on an early item in a big list, sometimes the list resets to the first item after the list loads. Alchemy is the worst since all sorts of stupid items are listed under Alchemy. When you're buying 10-20 stacks of Slime oil every day, you don't always notice when the list reset after it finished loading. Since it's only one spot different and the confirmation still lists the same item, you don't always catch it in time.

I think I might have gotten money back on one occasion, but not usually. I still do try to send money back when it happens to me, but it's pretty rare.

There's a huge cultural discrepancy here, too. While Japanese culture in general stresses civility towards strangers more than Western culture does, they also have a much stronger sense of caveat emptor.

Japanese stores rarely have return policies, for example. Most transactions are still done with cash. Deals are usually final. As a result, it's usually much harder convincing a Japanese player to return your accidental overpayment than a Western player.

This sucks for me, because as a dual-native speaker of EN and JP, I frequently get /tells from English players asking me to help translate their attempts to get overpayments back from a Japanese player. (I have never, by comparison, gotten a request from a Japanese player trying to get money back from an English one.) I am rarely successful. And then either the English player blames me for the failure, or runs off and posts something nasty on a forum about perceived Japanese xenophobia.

Personally however, I have always returned the money when someone overpaid me by accident and asked for it back. Just so much less drama that way.

Last time this happened to me, I sent a /tell to the person I overpaid to see if he/she would return the gil, and keep 5k for my stupidity. It worked out^^

So while you've admitted to doing this several times... you still havent learned yet to wait the extra two seconds for the list to load before placing your bids, and thus preventing this issue entirely?

Would the same deal apply, if you went to buy something of value, such as an upgrade (like say... Haubergeon +1) and your list reset (or for some other reason) and you end up buying a NQ Haubergeon that would normally cost 2-3mil less? Would you not prefer to have at least some of your gil returned?

I honestly can't see the problem some people have with returning something that was an obvious mistake in the first place..

This is so ironic. Just a couple days ago I looked and there was 170k in my Delivery Box. Of course, I didn't put anything on the AH anywhere close to that amount. So I did the research. Fanbizen, a Japanese player on my server, who had probably meant to bid on the item for 17k(which i actually put on the AH for 18k) bid 170k. Now, I am by far not the richest person playin this game. At any one time, i usually only have about 50-60k on me. Which gets me by. I can't afford the good stuff. And when I need something that costs over 100k, it takes me over a week to get. One because, hey... I'm a taru non-DD, and two, I'm in the Navy, so a lot of time is spent away from the game. But i do believe in Karma. Anyways, I waited 2 days for him to either log on or to send me a message. I finally got a message from him saying...<Do you speak any Japanese?> to which i reply <I don't speak any Japanese.> I could sense that he was a little upset due to the language barrier. However, me doing the research, I knew that it was the gil that he was asking about. So I arranged to meet up with him and he only asked for 100k back. I ended up giving the difference between the item I put up for Auction and the amount that he paid me, which was 153k. So, basically I lost 1k but that's not the point of this game. This game, imho, is meant to be a place for people to be stress free. A place where we can talk about the crappy week we've been having, and just relating to those across the World. A "getaway" to just have unadulterated FUN! So, it's not the gil that is the core of this game. It's relationships that you build. Just my thoughts.

Yup, same deal applies. In response to your example Hitetsu: seriously... who the *** would even be considering making a purchase of millions and NOT be absolute certain about where thier money is going and what exactly they are bidding on?

And it's not necissarily a problem to return it, but it does become a problem (for me, anyway) when I have to take time out of my day to rectify a situation that could have been prevented if someone wasnt a retard.

This part of your post really hit home. I've said this many times as well in other forums relating to this game and this type of situation. People tend to lose sight of what a game really is. At the end of the day, we're ALL "humes" It's not always outright rude people's fault entirely as we all tend to "go with the flow" in anything we do in life. Same thing applies to this game it seems. We start out with best intentions and become so callous when we've been mistreated by others in the game that we end up becoming like "them".

Going against the grain to hold true to our values says a lot about a person's character though.

I personally /salute you Sheerluck, and anyone else that remains a person, while playing a game.