Since this happened to a few people last night and it is a KNOWN issue, I figured a quick warning post was in order.

If you click “buy” on something in the trading post, and the button becomes greyed out, you HAVE actually bought that item – even if the TP hasn’t yet taken your money and the item isn’t yet listed in your “bought items” panel OR in the “stuff to collect” panel. If you click buy again, it will purchase it a SECOND time, and again for every time you click buy. At some point later, the TP WILL catch up with the transactions and take the money from you (generating that “WTF…where did my money just vanish to?” moment 🙁 )…and then later again the bought items will eventually appear for collection (or a refund will appear if you were fortunate enough that the price changed between clicking buy and when the server processed the order – I’ve had that happen once too, though I’ve also had the item AND a partial refund arrive because the price dropped instead).

It can take 24+ hours for items affected by a TP lag spike to appear (or a server restart) – and NEW purchases CAN be delivered first before old ones that were caught up in slow processing finally get delivered.

I know it’s slow and laggy at present – I’m expecting that ArenaNet will get that sorted out over the next few weeks. Just be aware not to re-click/re-try purchases/sales on the TP when it lags, or you’ll end up with extras/no money left when the TP catches up.