Guess he has gone back on his own words, no real surprise to be honest.

"because they will never respond to steam messages"

Thats kind of a blunt statement for someone that has never even tried to message me ;p

Bumping on classifieds does matter, mainly for sellers. It does improve visibility (albeit to a significantly lesser extend than outpost bumping, but still), but theres another important factor here, that partially depends on the size of the market and on what kind of item it is.

Many people are impatient; if they want an item, they want it now. If a trader made a classified listing and never bumps it or looks at it afterwards, it indicates hes an inactive seller. Especially when said person has not been online for a while, it can very well be that his inbox is exploding from the trade notifications. Theres also a lot of people that dont use bptf a lot that make a listing and never look at it again. Until someone views their backpack, the listing remains even after he sold it.

Many people just send a bunch of offers to the cheapest few sellers and the first that sees it, gets it. Because of that, active higher sellers are still favored over cheaper inactive sellers. That's why I dont think its a good idea to base a suggestion on a single, inactive, low seller; even more so when that seller does not have the authenticator. This does not mean that they cant be an indication and that it means that value is too low by default; naturally when theres a full page of sellers at the same value, odds are that at least one of them is online or occasionally checks his offers. Its generally tricky to make an accurate estimate on the common trading point based on listings on the classifieds, so taking quality and quantity into consideration is the closest you can get here.

The same pretty much goes for buyers. If someone made a buy listing and never looks at it again, or if someone is just buying one, then thats not really a reason to exclude everything based on that buyer.

In this case, the buyer seems to have been idle for at least 3 days (judging by classified and outpost bumping), which is probably why theres automatic sellers trying to sell at his value. Surely it wont take a seller like that a day to sell at 3 when theres an active buyer at 3.

Having said all of that, I think that one buyer should not counter 3 sellers (2 of which have automatic trades). But then again, I rarely handle non-unusuals; this is just my general stance on how the classifieds should be used