OpenFUT/docs/FIFA17_TRANSFER_MARKET_WIRE.md

FIFA 17 Transfer Market — wire findings

Reverse-engineering record for the FIFA 17 UTAS transfer-market surface, kept so future agents do not reopen settled questions or re-guess enum spellings.

Every claim carries a confidence tag:

Tag	Meaning
CONFIRMED	Observed from our own FIFA17.exe client or live host capture
FIFA17-HISTORICAL	Supported by contemporaneous FIFA 17 implementations (lorenzh/fut-api, futapi/fut v0.2.18 — the last pre-FIFA-18 release)
INFERRED	Best explanation, not directly captured
UNKNOWN	Requires instrumentation; do NOT implement from guesswork

Authority reminder: FIFA 17 field names, enum spellings, sentinel ids and empty-state shapes come from captures or the Python oracle — never from a modern FUT toolkit. Later-FIFA API drift is a known hazard, and reversing a container type or inventing an enum is the documented client-freeze class.

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The auction record (auctionInfo[])

What we emit today, on /tradePile, /trade/status and market browse:

{
  "tradeId": 1000000097,
  "itemData": { "...full shaped card...": "", "itemState": "listFS" },
  "tradeState": "active",
  "buyNowPrice": 15000,
  "startingBid": 150,
  "currentBid": 0,
  "offers": 0,
  "bidState": "none",
  "expires": 3600,
  "tradeOwner": true,
  "sellerId": 33068179,
  "sellerName": "CAGE",
  "sellerEstablished": 1,
  "watched": false,
  "coinsProcessed": 0
}

Field	Confidence	Note
tradeOwner (bool)	FIFA17-HISTORICAL	Exists in FIFA 17 auctionInfo. That it is the Actions-panel gate is UNKNOWN pending live confirmation.
sellerId	FIFA17-HISTORICAL exists; type numeric is INFERRED	Set to the configured persona so it agrees with tradeOwner. Never baked in.
sellerName	CONFIRMED it must be the player	fut_account.py annotates the persona property as "Blaze PDTL.DSNM / LSX GetProfileResponse Persona / UTAS sellerName". EA's "EASFC" here is wrong for an own listing.
offers	FIFA17-HISTORICAL	0 valid for active/unbid.
bidState: "none"	FIFA17-HISTORICAL	Valid for active/unbid. Other observed concepts: highest, buyNow. Do NOT "fix" this.
expires	FIFA17-HISTORICAL	SECONDS REMAINING, not an epoch. Historical durations: 3600, 10800, 21600, 43200, 86400, 259200.
itemData.itemState: "listFS"	UNKNOWN	Plausible and unchanged. Public FIFA 17 material gives no trustworthy enumeration. Do not guess replacements — capture.
itemData.untradeable	FIFA17-HISTORICAL field; our blanket false is INFERRED	See "Known debt" below.
marketDataMinPrice / marketDataMaxPrice	do NOT add	These entered the public parser only after its FIFA 18 migration.

Why the differential could not catch the missing fields

Our record's key set was identical to the Python oracle's, so field-for-field parity was green. The oracle omits tradeOwner / sellerId / offers as well, because its remove flow was never driven by a real client either — the only historical live datapoint is a counts-tile bug. Oracle parity is therefore necessary but not sufficient for any flow the oracle never actually served.

The differential now asserts we cover every oracle key AND that our extra keys are exactly {offers, sellerId, tradeOwner}, so the deliberate superset is pinned while a new unexplained divergence still fails.

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Routes

Route	Confidence	Behaviour
GET …/trade/status	CONFIRMED the client polls it continuously	Live auction-state refresh. It previously fell through starts_with("trade") into the buy/view arm, where the tail has no numeric id, so every poll returned {"auctionInfo": []}. Now a real handler: optional tradeIds filter, else the whole active pile. Unknown ids are absent, never an error.
DELETE /ut/game/<sku>/trade/<id>	FIFA17-HISTORICAL	The spelling contemporaneous FIFA 17 clients use, no body, no meaningful response body. Previously landed in the buy/view arm and silently cancelled nothing while returning 200. Now maps to MarketCancel.
DELETE /ut/delete/game/<sku>/trade/<id>	CONFIRMED (oracle)	The oracle's spelling; retained because the differential exercises it. Whether FIFA17.exe ever uses it is UNKNOWN.
POST …/auctionhouse	CONFIRMED	List for sale. The client sends only itemData.id; the server resolves wire id → Core instance → card_id/resourceId and enforces ownership.
GET …/tradePile/counts	INFERRED	Five scalar ints (count, maxAuctionsAllowed, offered, selling, sold); a DISTINCT deserializer from /tradePile. Exact FIFA 17 semantics of count (active auctions vs whole pile) is UNKNOWN — we report active auctions and deliberately did NOT speculate.
PUT …/item (move)	FIFA17-HISTORICAL	`{"itemData":[{"pile":"trade"

Pile encoding

• MOVE commands take a string pile ("trade", "club") — FIFA17-HISTORICAL.
• Returned itemData.pile is documented numeric in FIFA 17 auction data — FIFA17-HISTORICAL.
• The numeric mapping is UNKNOWN. Do not unify the two representations, and do not derive a mapping from unrelated pileSize keys.

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Q2 — Transfer List item that is not currently auctioned

A real FUT state: an item in the Transfer List with no active auction (freshly moved, or expired unsold). CONFIRMED to exist as a concept (the external hub spec §27, and move-vs-list being separate operations).

Its wire representation is UNKNOWN: tradeId 0 / omitted / null, tradeState value or omission, and itemData.itemState are all unestablished.

Consequence, and the reason this matters: our /tradePile renders only active listings, so keying the /club exclusion on the trade pile stranded 4 cards in no screen at all (hidden from the club, absent from the Transfer List). Commit f2c4927 keys exclusion on the active listing instead, which is self-healing. That is a workaround, not fidelity — the faithful model needs the unlisted state represented.

Required capture (four states, full structural diff, not just a shortlist):

A. moved Club -> Transfer List, NEVER listed
B. actively listed
C. listing expired unsold
D. listing sold

Diff at least: tradeId, tradeOwner, tradeState, bidState, expires, offers, currentBid, startingBid, buyNowPrice, sellerId, sellerName, itemData.id, itemData.itemState, itemData.pile, itemData.untradeable.

Do NOT drop the unlisted state from the model just because its encoding is unknown.

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Deferred, with reasons

• 5% transfer tax — INFERRED architecture only: auction closes → Core settles → seller credited gross × 0.95, with auctionInfo continuing to carry gross. No trustworthy FIFA 17 field named tax/netPrice/sellerProceeds was recovered, and no separate settle operation. Not blocking; do not couple settlement to clearing the sold auction without a capture.
• Bid / Transfer Targets — not implemented. Watched / active bid / winning / outbid / won / expired are distinct states and must not collapse to a flat list.
• Unassigned — FIFA 17 had a dedicated Unassigned service; the exact FIFA 17 URL is UNKNOWN. Our 29-item purchased pile is this state and is currently rendered inside /club. Do not manufacture a route from a modern toolkit.
• Match CREATE / READY / PLAY — UNKNOWN and explicitly not portable from public FUT web-app work (the web app could not start matches). Instrument the real client from Play Match to kickoff before implementing.

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Known debt

shape_item reports untradeable: false for every owned instance. Correct today (Core models no untradeable items) and necessary — a hardcoded true greyed out both list buttons — but it will misrepresent SBC / promo / loan rewards once those exist. untradeable belongs on the owned-item instance as authoritative state, not inferred from definition, resourceId or rarity.

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MEASURED in the live client — 2026-08-17

Read out of the running FIFA17.exe (pid-resolved, CardsDLL slide proven against the on-disk FNV prologue) with fifa17-recon/tools/trade_gate_probe.py, which extends gate_byte_probe.py to vtable slot +0x270 as the transfer-market analysis asked for. Read-only: /proc/<pid>/mem O_RDONLY + pread.

Gate	Python era (2026-08-06)	Now	Owner
IS_TRADING_ENABLED model+0x1fd2e (slot +0x270)	0	1	settings struct +0x28; was zeroed by userInfo.feature.trade
TRADE_PILE_SIZE model+0x1fd1c	0	100	userMassInfo.pileSizeClientData key 2
watch-list size model+0x1fd20	0	50	same member, key 4
storeEnabled model+0x1fd2f	1	1	control
IS_FRIENDLY_SEASON / IS_DRAFT_MODE / packOpeningAnimation	1	1	controls

CONFIRMED: every CardsDLL-supplied input the transfer-market analysis named as a blocker is now open. The Rust host does this by construction — it emits userInfo.feature as {} (no trade member, so the kill switch at 0x180174f19 never arms: it fires only when atom 0x330 inside 0x11c parses as exactly 1) and it already sends pileSizeClientData keys 2 and 4. Serving tradingEnabled: 1 in the settings configs array would NOT have worked, because that tail runs after every member is parsed and would overwrite it.

What this rules out

The Transfer List Actions panel not opening on an own listing is therefore not:

• an ownership field — FIFA 17's auctionInfo has no tradeOwner/sellerId atom;
• IS_TRADING_ENABLED, TRADE_PILE_SIZE or the watch-list size — all measured open;
• the cancel route — DELETE ut/delete/{ns}/trade/{tradeId} is the PE's spelling and is what we serve;
• tradeState / bidState / expires spellings — all three are the PE's own vocabularies and values.

Per the analysis's own falsifier ("if the byte reads 1 and the screen still refuses, the exe-side predicate has a term we have not enumerated"), the remaining term is exe-side UI script, which CardsDLL does not own and the server cannot set. Status: UNKNOWN, and it is now the narrowest it has ever been.

Confirmed fidelity bug found on the way

expires was a frozen 3600 on every poll, so the client's live countdown never moved and an auction could never run out. Now derived from created_at + duration (duration taken from the ISStart body), clamped at 0, with an aged-out active listing projecting as expired/none — FIFA 17's relistable state. Verified live: the standing listing correctly reads expires: 0 once past its hour.

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RESOLVED against the live client — 2026-08-17 (supersedes the tags above)

Driven by the real FIFA 17 client end to end: list → expire → relist → active, with the operator confirming each UI state. Live-client behaviour OUTRANKS both the Python oracle and contemporaneous Web App implementations wherever they disagree.

tradeOwner — do not re-litigate this

tradeOwner exists in the FIFA 17-era FUT API:
    FIFA17-HISTORICAL

tradeOwner required by FIFA17.exe Transfer List Actions:
    DISPROVEN for the current client path

It is absent from the twelve atoms FIFA 17's auctionInfo deserializer (0x18013e410) reads, so the client value-SKIPs it at 0x180135ff0. It was implemented, deployed, observed to change nothing, and REMOVED. A future agent rediscovering the old Web App sources will find this note before spending deployments on it again.

What actually gated the Actions panel — all lifecycle/state bugs

CONFIRMED — FIFA17.exe live client

Own Transfer List interactivity does NOT depend on tradeOwner in this path.

trade/status polling is LOAD-BEARING for Transfer List state. The tail carries no
numeric id, so it fell through the `trade…` buy/view arm and answered every poll
with an empty auctionInfo. Route is ISVIEWTRADE:
    GET ut/{ns}/trade/status?tradeIds=a,b,c

auctionInfo.expires is SECONDS REMAINING *and must evolve with wall-clock time*.
A structurally valid but FROZEN value breaks lifecycle behaviour: the auction never
ages into expired/relistable, which is the state where Re-list appears.

Relisting must PERSIST. FIFA 17 relists by re-sending ISStart (POST /auctionhouse)
for an item that already has a listing row, so the primary-key conflict IS the
relist. Swallowing it as success left the stale expired row intact and produced a
client-visible lifecycle failure behind an HTTP 200.

Known-good own active auction (frozen fixture)

Captured at docs/evidence/market-lifecycle-2026-08-17/, including _index.json._countdown_proof which records expires decrementing (frozen: false) so the live clock is machine-checkable rather than asserted in prose.

tradeState        = active
bidState          = none
expires           = decrementing (seconds remaining)
sellerName        = CAGE
auction record    = 12 atoms
response envelope = 4 members (auctionInfo, credits, duplicateItemIdList, total)
ISViewTrade body  = 2 members (auctionInfo, credits)
pricelimits       = BARE ARRAY (container type is load-bearing)

Do not "improve" this shape without a live-client retest.

The development rule this established

A response can be structurally plausible, pass differential parity, and render perfectly while still being behaviourally wrong, because FIFA expects an evolving server-side state machine rather than a static object that looks like one. The frozen expires is the canonical example: every field was the right name, type and vocabulary, and the feature was still broken.

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INVESTIGATION CLOSED — active own auction is not seller-actionable

Do not reopen without new direct FIFA17.exe evidence contradicting the lifecycle below. The correct FIFA 17 lifecycle is:

ACTIVE AUCTION      tradeState=active, expires>0/counting down
                    -> seller CANNOT withdraw it through Transfer List actions
                    -> the item is not seller-actionable while the auction runs

EXPIRED UNSOLD      tradeState=expired, expires=0
                    -> the item becomes actionable again
                    -> relist / return-to-club / other expired-item actions

Confidence tags

CONFIRMED — live FIFA17.exe:
    active listing with ticking expires is NON-selectable
    expired listing IS selectable
    relisting makes it active and therefore non-selectable again
    no cancel request is ever emitted by the client
    expires must advance with the wall clock
    no button prompt is offered on the Transfer List for an active auction

CONFIRMED — local RE corpus:
    every CardsDLL-side prerequisite passes (IS_TRADING_ENABLED=1,
        TRADE_PILE_SIZE=100, watch-list=50, item+0x49 tradeable)
    MAY_BE_REMOVED is a CONSTANT 1 — it cannot be the gate and the server
        cannot move it
    the eight-flag array FUN_18003e370 publishes is the CLUB-CARD Actions menu
        and contains NO transfer-auction cancellation flag
    the auction parser is limited to the known twelve atoms

HISTORICAL FUT / FIFA17-era:
    active auctions are committed until sale or expiry
    expired Transfer List items expose relist/return actions
    FIFA 17 trading guidance tells players to relist once auctions expire

UNKNOWN, and no longer required for backend fidelity:
    the exact Flash/ActionScript branch that makes active cards non-selectable

Explicitly out of scope now

Do NOT add auction fields, change itemState, revisit tradeOwner, probe MAY_BE_REMOVED, add an active-auction cancel feature, or disassemble Flash in order to make active auctions selectable. Three of those were already tried and refuted; the rest are ruled out above.

Return-to-club transition (implemented)

A pile move to club now ENDS any active auction on that item. Without it the pile reads club while the listing row stays active, so the card is filtered out of /club (exclusion keys on active listings) AND still rendered in the Transfer List — the move silently appears to do nothing. reserved (mid-sale) and sold rows are never touched, so a card can never be both sold and returned.

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Q2 — the unlisted transfer-list item, MEASURED 2026-08-17

The operator moved a card Club -> Transfer List without listing it (PUT /ut/game/fifa17/item, no POST /auctionhouse). State captured immediately, read-only. Fixture: docs/evidence/market-lifecycle-2026-08-17/.

Server truth at capture: trade pile held 6 items, of which 1 had an active auction and 5 were unlisted.

Surface	Unlisted item	Actively-listed item (contrast)
/tradePile auctionInfo	absent	present, tradeState: active
/tradePile/counts	not counted (count 1, selling 1)	counted
/club	present, clubPlayers unchanged at 1965	absent (excluded)
itemData.itemState	free	listFS
itemData.pile	field not emitted at all	not emitted
itemData.untradeable	false	false

Finding: we do not represent the unlisted state anywhere on the wire. Such an item is byte-identical to a club item; only the host's own pile store knows it is in the trade pile, and nothing the client receives says so.

Still UNKNOWN (do not guess): the FIFA 17 encoding of that state. The PE documents returned itemData.pile as NUMERIC with an unrecovered mapping, and tradeState decodes through a closed table walk (active=1 inactive=2 expired=3 closed=4) where an unrecognised bidState is silently swallowed as none — so a wrong enum yields a plausible-looking but WRONG UI. The corpus explicitly warns that inactive decodes but "no client path treats it specially; do not emit it".

Open discriminator, needs the client only: after backing out of FUT and re-entering, does the Transfer List still show an unlisted item? If it does not, the move is not durable from the client's point of view and the state must be represented; if it does, tradePile is auctions-only by design and there is nothing to fix.

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Domain boundary: pile membership vs auction lifecycle

Two SEPARATE facts, but several mutations require a COORDINATED transition. Both limbo bugs this session came from conflating them, so this is modelled explicitly and covered by tests rather than patched route by route.

Mutation	Pile	Auction
Club -> Transfer List	becomes trade	none necessarily exists
list item	stays trade	becomes active
clock runs out unsold	stays trade	becomes expired (projection; no row mutated)
relist	stays trade	active again, clock restarted, new prices
return expired item to Club	becomes club	any active association MUST end
sold / reserved	—	MUST NOT be ended by a generic move-to-club

Invariant, stated so it can be tested rather than remembered: an item must never be simultaneously excluded from /club and absent from /tradePile. That is the limbo state, and it is reachable in two ways, both now closed:

1. Excluding by pile rather than by active listing (fixed in f2c4927) — the pile can hold items with no auction, and /tradePile renders auctions only.
2. Moving to club while leaving the auction active (fixed in 4e31fb9) — the pile says club, the exclusion still fires, and the card shows in neither place.

Tests: returning_an_expired_listing_to_the_club_ends_its_auction, a_pile_move_never_disturbs_a_sale_in_flight, club_excludes_listed_items_and_paginates_the_visible_set.

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Q2 representation — narrowed to ONE candidate by elimination (2026-08-17) — SUPERSEDED, see the final section

Re-entry discriminator result: CONFIRMED BUG. After fully leaving and re-entering FUT, the active auction reconstructs correctly under LISTED ITEMS, but the unlisted TRANSFER LIST section is empty — item 100000059 does not survive. The immediate post-move visibility was client-local only, so our representation cannot durably reconstruct trade-pile membership.

The representation is now pinned by elimination over PROVEN facts, not chosen:

1. Only one route can own a trade-pile list. The complete CardsDLL route table (.rdata 0x18021df80, 45 routes + 3 empty admin slots) is dumped verbatim at docs/evidence/market-lifecycle-2026-08-17/cardsdll-route-table.txt via fifa17-recon/tools/route_table_dump.py (static, read-only, VA→offset resolved through the real PE section table). Row 30 ut/%s/tradePile is the ONLY trade-pile route. There is no trade-pile items route.
2. That route carries only auction records. FutGetTradePile (0x180170810) deserializes the shared IS-list body (0x18013e7f0), whose auctionInfo elements go through 0x18013e410 — the twelve-atom auction record.
3. pile cannot be set from the wire. pile (atom 0x226) has NO arm in the item deserializer FUN_18013fe00 (checked in all four dispatch forms); item+0x60 is assigned by the OWNING LIST, reading 1 for every /club item and 6 for every /purchased item. So membership is conferred by arriving in the list, never by a field we can add.
4. Of the twelve atoms, only tradeState can express lifecycle.
5. tradeState's vocabulary is closed and has exactly one unused value. The table walk at 0x180229e40 decodes active=1 inactive=2 expired=3 closed=4, anything else -1. active, expired and closed are all already spoken for by the observed lifecycle.

Therefore an unlisted trade-pile item can only be an auctionInfo record with tradeState: "inactive". That is the sole encoding the client's own parser can accept for "in the pile, no auction" — reached by elimination, not invention.

Status: INFERRED-BY-ELIMINATION, not yet CONFIRMED. One binary question remains, and it is about client rendering, not encoding: does the Flash Transfer List place an inactive record in the unlisted section? The corpus's warning that "inactive decodes but no client path treats it specially" was established for the market PRESENTATION function (flagA/flagB), where inactive is indeed unremarkable — that is consistent with, and does not contradict, using it for list membership.

Ruled out on evidence, do not retry: adding itemData.pile (inert, no deserializer arm), a second route (none exists), and tradeId: 0 / invented itemState values (unnecessary — tradeState alone carries the distinction).

Acceptance test for whatever lands

move item Club -> Transfer List
leave FUT entirely
re-enter FUT
item appears in the unlisted TRANSFER LIST section
item can be returned to Club
no auction exists unless explicitly listed

Plus the active lifecycle must remain unchanged: active listing under LISTED ITEMS, expires counting down, active non-selectable, expiry making it actionable, relist working.

Revised domain invariant

Core pile membership is NOT equivalent to /tradePile visibility. Core ownership/pile state and auction lifecycle are separate authoritative facts; the wire may expose them through different FIFA 17 resources. A transition is complete only when a fresh FIFA session can reconstruct the same user-visible state — re-entry is the acceptance test, not the immediate post-mutation response.

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Q2 — LIVE-CONFIRMED: tradeState: "inactive" is the unlisted representation — SUPERSEDED, see the final section

Operator-observed in the real FIFA 17 client, 2026-08-17, with the bounded one-item probe (OPENFUT_FIFA17_UNLISTED_PROBE). Fixture: docs/evidence/market-lifecycle-2026-08-17/inactive-row-live-confirmed.json.

The observed inactive UI contract

Wire	Client presentation
tradeState: "inactive"	row placed under the right-hand TRANSFER LIST section, NOT under LISTED ITEMS
startingBid: 0	Start Price = 0
buyNowPrice: 0	Buy Now Price = - (absent)
currentBid: 0	Current Bid = - (absent)
expires: 0	Time Remaining = - (no timer)
bidState: "none"	no bid presentation
itemData.itemState: "free"	renders as a normal owned card

An active row in the same body continued to render separately under LISTED ITEMS, so the two sections are driven by tradeState and the experiment did not disturb the known-good active path.

Token provenance: dumped from the client's own {const char*, int} table at 0x180229e40 (active=1 inactive=2 expired=3 closed=4) — see cardsdll-vocab-tables.txt and fifa17-recon/tools/vocab_dump.py. Nothing here was guessed.

Regression test: market::tests::unlisted_candidate_is_a_non_active_pile_row pins the whole tuple, plus that the row is never emitted for an item outside the trade pile and never duplicates a real auction (unlisted_candidate_never_duplicates_a_real_auction).

Expired -> Club coupled transition, verified

Operator returned the naturally-expired Ronaldo to the club. Server state after:

listing 1000000097   state = cancelled     (the coupled transition fired)
pile    Ronaldo      = club
/tradePile           Ronaldo absent
/club                Ronaldo present, itemState free
hub                  clubPlayers 1964 -> 1965, auctionCount 1
counts               {count 1, selling 1, sold 0}

All of that is durable store state rather than a client-local view, so it survives a session boundary by construction. Pending the operator's final exit/re-enter confirmation before this is tagged CONFIRMED.

Counts observations so far (semantics still UNCHANGED and unresolved)

State	count	selling	sold
1 active	1	1	0
2 active	2	2	0
1 active + 1 inactive (probe)	1	1	0
unlisted pile items (no probe)	not counted	not counted	0

So count currently tracks AUCTION entries, not total Transfer List membership. Do not change this until the full state set (empty / unlisted / active / expired / sold / mixed) has been observed — it remains an open question whether FIFA 17 expects count to include non-active pile members.

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Q2 status downgrade + the "Expired" differential EXPLAINED (2026-08-17) — SUPERSEDED, see the final section

Phase C was a PARTIAL pass. Corrected conclusions:

tradeState "inactive"  = CONFIRMED section/lifecycle discriminator
                         (rows persist across a fresh session and land under
                          TRANSFER LIST, not LISTED ITEMS)

complete ACTIONABLE unlisted representation = was UNKNOWN; see below

The visual differential, and its cause

	one-item probe	generalized rows
Start Price	0	0
Buy Now / Current Bid	-	-
Time Remaining	-	Expired

Cause: route coverage, not a field. /tradePile advertised the unlisted tradeIds, but GET …/trade/status (ISVIEWTRADE) answered them from the market store ONLY — and an unlisted pile member has no listing row, so the poll returned an empty auctionInfo. Observed live as route=market-status requested=1 returned=0 repeating for the row the operator had selected (tradeIds=1000000122), while the same id was present in /tradePile.

The client polls /trade/status for the row it is displaying, and an empty answer degrades it: Time Remaining renders Expired and no actions are offered. The earlier probe showed - simply because the client had not yet polled that id — the logs at the time show only tradeIds=1000000097. So expires, tradeState, itemData.itemState and pile were all innocent, and NO field was changed.

This is the same defect class as the original trade/status bug: a route the client polls being answered with an empty set. The corpus predicted it — tradeId must resolve across /transfermarket, /tradePile, /watchList AND /trade/status. We had stability but not coverage.

Fix: both routes now share ONE pile enumeration (Server::resolve_trade_pile), so an id advertised by /tradePile always resolves on /trade/status. Verified live: the six inactive ids went from returned=0 to returned=6. /trade/status still answers only the ids actually asked about, and a real auction always wins over an inactive row for the same id.

Regression test: trade_status_resolves_the_unlisted_ids_tradepile_advertises.

Investigations NOT needed as a result

itemData.itemState and numeric itemData.pile were queued for PE recovery on the assumption the encoding was incomplete. The cause was route coverage, so neither was touched and neither is implicated. If the actions still do not appear, those remain the next candidates — and itemState's vocabulary should be dumped statically with fifa17-recon/tools/vocab_dump.py (already validated against the tradeState table) rather than guessed.

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Q2 — RETRACTED, and CLOSED as unrepresentable (2026-08-17, RE of the FUT front-end)

Everything in the two Q2 sections above is superseded. The tradeState:"inactive" projection has been removed from GET …/tradePile and …/trade/status, and the UnlistedCandidate machinery deleted. Live after the fix: total 7 → 1, only the real auction, inactive rows 0, coins unchanged, and all six former rows still present in /club (invariant intact).

Why the earlier conclusion was wrong

It was LIVE-CONFIRMED that the row renders. That was never in doubt, and it is not the same claim as the row being usable. The rows were never actionable, and could not have been:

Fact	Confidence
tradeState reaches ONE native branch, cmp …,0x4 at 0x18013e619 ("is it closed?"). inactive(2) and expired(3) take the same edge → bit-identical flagA/flagB. Exhaustive 22-site census of [reg+0x88] reads across the PE.	CONFIRMED
tradeState is handed to the movie verbatim as the Flash property STATE (publisher 0x1801bf030); the action gate is in the APT/ActionScript FUT front-end, not CardsDLL.	CONFIRMED
The trade-pile movie class partitions rows with getCardsInAuction/isInActiveAuction (traces initPile() - IN AUCTION: / - NOT IN AUCTION:), and only auction rows reach PreCheckCardOptions → handleTradeCardAction.	CONFIRMED (interned AS symbols + trace strings, live)
A client rule excludes non-auction pile rows from the action path (Category C).	STRONGLY SUPPORTED
The gate term is STATE == 2.	NOT PROVEN — STATE, CARD_OFFERSTATE and the RESERVEDPRICE/MAX_CREDITS pair all differ together in every row we can observe
In the shipped game, unlisted pile rows were a CLIENT-SIDE transient built by the movie from a TO_TRADEPILE Flash message (FUN_1801be6a0), never server-delivered.	STRONGLY SUPPORTED

This fires the corpus's own pre-registered falsifier E3 (plan-2026-08-06-transfer-market.md:368-373): the native predicates all pass (IS_TRADING_ENABLED=1, TRADE_PILE_SIZE=100, tradeable=1) and an expired row in the same section IS actionable, so "the Flash layer has its own gate and CardsDLL is no longer the right place to look" is now an observation.

The corpus said so before any of this was written, at plan-2026-08-06-transfer-market.md:731-733: "inactive decodes but no client path treats it specially; do not emit it." The projection was built anyway, and the earlier reasoning above (that the warning "was written about the PRESENTATION function") was motivated rather than evidenced.

Consequence for the product: a server cannot put an unlisted item on the Transfer List in an actionable state. /tradePile carries only twelve-atom auction records and pile has no deserializer arm, so anything rendered there must be a real auction. Unlisted trade-pile membership is now internal state with no wire expression; those cards live in /club, which is where the client can act on them.

Open: itemData.itemState: "listFS" is not a FIFA 17 token

Independent of the gate, and CONFIRMED: listFS occurs 0 times in CardsDLL_Win64_retail.dll (md5 4de3493131d7d2ff7f8b360c5ac9b655) and 0 times in 4.26 GiB of live process memory; it decodes to −1 through FUN_180166660, observed live on our listed row. FIFA 17's value for a listed item is forSale (5), from the 12-row table at 0x180229cc0. We emit listFS on /tradePile and /trade/status, and so does the Python oracle (utas_server.py:3921) — which is exactly why the differential never caught it: oracle parity is necessary but not sufficient.

Fix B — forSale PROMOTED, live-confirmed on the expired path (2026-08-17)

Shipped alone, then validated by an operator FIFA 17 session against the already-expired row 1000000155 (res 158023, 93 RW).

Claim	Status
listFS is not a FIFA 17 token and decodes to −1	CONFIRMED (binary + 4.26 GiB process scan + live row)
forSale is FIFA 17-native, value 5	CONFIRMED (12-row table at 0x180229cc0)
An expired row carrying forSale is still ACTIONABLE, and Return to Club works	LIVE-CONFIRMED — operator returned the card; server verified below
The result is durable (a fresh session reconstructs it)	CONFIRMED server-side: /tradePile total:0, /tradePile/counts all zero, card present in /club (1965 → 1966 items, itemState:"free"), zero duplicate ids, listing cancelled in the store and projected as closed (4) on /trade/status
An ACTIVE seller row carrying forSale renders correctly	NOT YET OBSERVED — no active listing existed during the session; /transfermarket has always emitted forSale on active rows, so this is expected-safe but unverified
CARD_OFFERSTATE is the Flash action-gate term	STILL UNPROVEN — this change does not test it, and the result does not bear on it

What this rules out: CARD_OFFERSTATE is not a gate term that requires −1. An expired row decoding CARD_OFFERSTATE = 5 remained actionable, so the earlier worry — that every actionable row we had ever seen carried itemState = −1 — was a coincidence of our own bad token, not a client rule. It narrows nothing else: STATE and the RESERVEDPRICE/MAX_CREDITS pair are untouched and still confounded with each other.

Wire A/B (docs/evidence/market-lifecycle-2026-08-17/itemstate-forsale-ab.json): on the same expired row, exactly one field changed — itemState listFS → forSale. tradeId, tradeState, expires, startingBid, buyNowPrice, currentBid, bidState, sellerName, sellerEstablished, watched, coinsProcessed, the atom count (12), and the whole itemData card are byte-identical; coins unchanged; Fix A's zero inactive rows intact.

Risk was lower than it first appeared, for a reason worth recording: the market SEARCH route (/transfermarket) already emitted forSale, so the client has been decoding forSale (5) on a live path all along — only the seller's own pile carried the invalid token.

Differential consequence: market query tradePile moves from PARITY to DIFFERENT-BY-DESIGN, pinning oracle == "listFS" and rust == "forSale" so the divergence stays visible. That assertion previously demanded parity and passed while both sides were wrong — the mechanism by which this defect survived every differential run. Where the FIFA 17 binary contradicts the Python oracle, the binary wins.

Revert is one line if the live A/B fails: both auction_record_as(l, "forSale") calls in market.rs back to "listFS", rebuild, restart prod-host. On failure the rule is to revert and go to the AVM1 gate work — NOT to compensate with another field change.

Claim boundary: this is protocol correctness of one token. It is not evidence about the Flash decision tree; STATE, CARD_OFFERSTATE and RESERVEDPRICE/MAX_CREDITS remain confounded.

Proving the gate (not yet done)

Disassemble the AVM1 action buffer of tradepile.isInActiveAuction (and PreCheckCardOptions): either walk from the interned symbol at 0xb84d7498 to its APT function object in the live process, or extract external/ion_fut/screens/trading/tradepile from ui.sb + the cas archives offline. Nothing else in reach separates STATE from CARD_OFFERSTATE from the price pair, because all three differ together in every observable row.