Greatest Length

[cutiebunny]

What's the greatest length you've ever gone to obtain artwork? Have you traveled hundreds, if not thousands, of miles just to attend a convention or go to a store? Maybe you arranged some seven way trade in order to get that dream cel or sketch you've had your eye on, like, forever? Or perhaps getting up way too early or staying up far too late to catch a dealer's update is the pinnacle of your sacrifice to this hobby?

Compare and contrast! Let's see who's the most masochistic (artwise...) on this board

..........

I'm guilty of a lot of the things I just listed. I've traveled hundreds of miles to go to conventions and stores. I've spent hours in line waiting for sketches, skipping meals in the process. And I've lost count of how many times I've woken up just to bid on stuff. But as much of a hassle as some of that stuff was, nothing was as crazy as bidding against myself on an auction.

Several years ago, there was a cel I had to have by any means. And, I knew it was a cel that others wanted just as desperately as I. So I had to make it look unappealing to others, and the one way I could do that is by jacking the price up to a level where few would consider purchasing it. Using multiple deputy services, I threw in bids against myself, jacking up the price of the item. In the end, though, I did win the item...but only because I managed to internally outbid another bidder.

Yes, I am certifiably insane. But I think some of you knew that already

[sensei]

I never went that far, so I'm a certifiable also-ran. But I did once bid on an item using both SMJ and Rinkya to make the other bidders think two Americans were fighting it out for a nice item.

Otherwise I tend to lie low, bid low, and hope for the best. Not very efficient, but somehow a lot of nice stuff chose to live with me anyhow.

[rosesleep]

Several years ago, there was a cel I had to have by any means. And, I knew it was a cel that others wanted just as desperately as I. So I had to make it look unappealing to others, and the one way I could do that is by jacking the price up to a level where few would consider purchasing it.

GRILL, I'm going to take notes from you!

[ReiTheJelly]

I'm not super savage in my collecting habits. I think the most I've ever done was fly from MI to CA to attend Anime Expo in the hopes of meeting CLAMP (which I did). The next in line is probably putting an expensive cel on my credit card, rather than withdrawing directly from my bank because a paycheck hadn't cleared yet. I like to think that I'm rather restrained with my collecting and I hope I'll never reach such a wildly obsessive level that it would be considered outrageous amongst other collectors.


[edit] I remembered one story that would be considered sort of extreme. Back in summer of 2004 a cel collector was auctioning off their collection on their personal website. The auction was for either 7 or 10 days, I can't remember. I put in my high-bid early on, but e-mailed the seller with my phone number and asked her to call me if I'd been outbid. The auction ended the same day I was driving with a group of university students from MI to WY (a 1,600 mile drive) for summer field courses out there. I kept my cell phone on and by the window the *entire* trip and freaked out every time I lost the signal or it lost my provider's tower and it started roaming (back when they used to charge $$$$ for roaming), or when I'd get a low-battery signal. The other students in my van thought I was nuts, since it was the first time any of them had ever met me. ^_^; It was very stressful, but I ended up winning the item I wanted, so all is well.

[Keropi]

I haven't bought a number of things from dealers just to get early looks at stuff before others like my friend used to do, but I have bid against my self a lot.

I'm sure I've bid against my self at least 25-30 times. Sometimes I did it because the price was too low and I wanted to decrease the chances of someone bidding against me at the very end of the auction. I'd rather fight it out early rather than late. But most of the time I bid against myself because I didn't want someone to win the auction for less than my high bid. Stepping up the bidding with multiple deputies meant that even if the other person won for less than what I bid it wouldn't be by MUCH less than my high bid. If I lost for only a LITTLE less than my high bid, it wouldn't be such a big deal.

It was a scorched earth policy. If I can't get it for cheap than neither will you.

[ToriPagac]

i once refreshed a image a insane amount of times so a person who owned it would give it to me this was during a weekend and one of the days was spent at my brothers wedding!http://tori.rubberslug.com/gallery/inv_ ... mID=259297 the cel in question my eyes burn thinking about it

[darksuzaku]

mmmm, lets see, probably the "worst" i have done is bid in multiple auctions to raise the final price when all the auctions were ending at the same time. The goal of that was to ensure that at least i would be able to get one of the auctions for myself. In my first days of bidding in yahoo japan with a personal account, when i found myself in a situation where i could only afford 1-2 of lets say 5-6 auctions i only placed bids on the 1-2 that i wanted most. By doing that, several times i found myself letting go the other auctions for a cheap price just to find then the winner of the auctions in a bid war against me. Sometimes i won, sometimes not, but i felt like an idiot when i paid 4-5 times more than what the other guy paid for a sequencemate of an auction that ended minutes before. True, the one i won was a little better, but not to the point of being worth 4-5 times more -_-. At some point i decided i wouldn't let that happen to me again. So, when i find myself in that situation i bid on all or almost all the auctions. The goal of this bidding pattern is mainly to make the auction you really want to end first (YHJ auto-extension helps with this). After you ensure that you have won the auction you mainly want then you may continue for others or let them go, but if you let them go, by this time the other auctions have all their prices raised, at least not much cheaper than what you paid for your auction (and that's because you are probably not the only one using this bidding pattern -_-). All of you who know the identity of your rivals are really very lucky, at least in a situation like this you can try to talk things beforehand.

Oh, and i remember once bidding against myself. It was lots of years ago before celga opened their gold service for personal accounts. They never had automatic bidding and i didn't have an alternate deputy service. They didn't allow internal bidding wars either. When i e-mailed them with my bid (I believe it was 50000Y or so) they replied that i was second in line because they had received a previous e-mail from somebody else (it was a lower bid than mine, but they didn't tell me the amount). So that meant they would be bidding for the other person and if he got outbidded they would bid for me. Talking about it with some friends one of them told me that he had a YHJ account that he rarely used and offered to place a bid to outbid the other guy, so i asked him to place a bid of 49000 yens. At the end i won the auction for the 50000Y of my maximum bid.... and nobody else bidded besides celga and my friend. The question i asked myself for a long time was how much i had overpaid for that cel.... in other words, what was the other celga's user bid. -_-

[star-phoenix]

The most i have done really is stay up late or wake up really early to bid on an auction. I guess forking out a large amount of $$$ on a huge wishlist item is also considered "going to great lengths". The longest time I had waited on a particular piece (not in my gallery yet) took 2.5 years of me staring and negotiating with the owner, who had recently taken it off the market for reserve for another buyer, and then suddenly contacted me and agreed to sell at a lower price. I was extremely excited when that happened.

[Gonzai]

Flew from Chicago to Tokyo (with two other collectors in tow) to spend a day and a half outside
a crappy storage unit, in God awful weather, digging through boxes of artwork looking for a
particular character. Paid way too much money for it, then got to haul it all over Tokyo before
going to the airport and having to re-arrange suitcases 5 times in order to get it all to fit so that
I would not have to pay oversized baggage charges.

If that is not going to great lengths - nothing is.

Oh, forgot to add that I purchased it in Yen, and made payments. This was at the point when the
yen rate was dropping sharply, so every month was like sticking the blade in a little bit further.

[toonybabe]

About 3 years ago, I sold my junker car so I could afford one of my wishlist cels. And last summer I blew my first 3 paychecks from my "big girl job" on another wishlist cel. Both of these cels were from the same series from which production art is extremely rare. The justification was that I was not allowed to buy another cel for the rest of the year.

[kizu]

I never bid against myself to artificially raise the price up (I do bid against myself to safeguard against those who snipe using the same deputy), however I always end up having to bid against others so the price typically goes up. So I try to bid my highest and don’t play games. Besides I hate to think that I didn’t get market price for the cel, one can argue my price (if the winning bid) is the market price but that’s not entirely accurate.

If I really want something I make sure I’m there to bid whatever the means (celphone *cough*). I also try to be patient in bidding and come in early and not come back until the final few minutes. I also bid my highest when I want it. I tend to be cheap or economical when it’s just things I like because I like many things. But if I love something I’ll pay for it – dearly if needed.

The greatest length I’d done was quite a few years ago. I exchanged some highly sought after OP cels and money for one of my wishlist cels. It was a pretty complicated 3 way transaction and I don’t even recall how I got the money. All I know is I didn’t rob anyone. LOL. I’ve done similar deals like the above but I guess I remember this one most vividly as a small part of me still wished to have been able to keep the OP cels for myself. But then again I’d seen those cels appear once or twice in other galleries and I think to myself I can have the opportunity again someday, so it’s not so bad. It would’ve been worst if I had passed on the A1E and had to just sigh and regret it for all my collecting days.

[irmgaard]

Hahhahaha!
I haven’t done anything too interesting to get my cels…
but I do remember the time I bid against myself….


I’m pretty sure most people have an idea about how much an auctioned item is worth to them, though sometimes, during the auction, that amount changes. You think, “That’s too much for that. It‘s not worth that to me.” or, especially when a bunch of sequence mates would show up at the same time, “Nah, I’ll wait until another one comes.”; or, conversely, you’d decide, “This is one I really want.”

I usually use one or the other of two well known YJ deputy services, and both provided good service. Their differing fee structures meant that sometimes one would be a better deal and in other instances it would be the other -- but back in the day, only one of them gave a price break on internal shipping and wire fees if you got multiple wins from the same seller. Therefore, if I was bidding on two or three cels from the same person, I’d typically use that one. I remember one morning a whole bunch of cels I was interested in were ending at about the same time. Because there were so many, I had a blank bidding form for each deputy open, and was using the actual YJ search pages for each series to keep track of the auctions’ status. I was ahead on three of them, two from the same seller on the account with one deputy, and the other, from a different seller, with the other deputy.

It was really early in the morning and I’d been out late the night before, so as I blearily looked over the auctions I was interested in, trying to decide if I wanted to bid more or not for the ones I was losing; I checked one of the ones I was winning, and, with only two minutes left to the auction’s end, I thought to myself, “That’s one I really, really hope to win. I’ll just put some more on that one to be sure.” So, even though it wasn’t anywhere close to the maximum of the bid I had on it, I placed a higher bid on the auction, and, without refreshing the page, went to pour myself more desperately needed coffee….

Come back a minute before it‘s supposed to end, refresh the page and, sure enough, the auction’s price is a lot higher and the time to the end has been extended. Who is bidding against me? Why, it’s…me …with the other deputy.

If I remember correctly, I wound up winning two auctions (including the one above) that morning …both from the same seller…one with each deputy…for the maximum “You’re an idiot.” fee!

[Keropi]

Now that I think about it. I remembering using three deputies to bid on YJ 2-3 times. Boy...that was a long time ago. Ah...the good old days of being competitive.

It did seem to make the other bidders stop bidding on it though.

[ladydouji]

Gee after all your stories I think mine seems tame.

It was a few years ago and I worked in a call center where we weren't given internet access. I lived close enough to work that sometimes I would drive home and have lunch. At the time one of my dream cels was up on ebay and the ending time was one where I was supposed to be at work. I put in my high bid, and went to work. At lunch I went home to eat and check on the auction. I had been outbid. Realizing that I wouldn't be able to focus on work thinking about the cel I called off sick for the rest of the day and started camping out on the auction. There was a minor bidding war and I ended up paying a bit more than my original max and spent a month eating ramen, but it's still one of my favorite cels.

[irmgaard]

Now that I think about it. I remembering using three deputies to bid on YJ 2-3 times. Boy...that was a long time ago. Ah...the good old days of being competitive.

It did seem to make the other bidders stop bidding on it though.

Thanks Keropi! I never thought about it that way. I can pretend that I scared off everybody else , and that's why no one else bid after my boo boo bid...

because that feels much better than that fact that I was already winning, ...and I just wasted a bunch of cash by not paying attention to which deputy I was already bidding with.....

Haven't made that mistake since; but still, it was a costly lesson.