Auctions and those last second bidsnipes.

Karlach

Most of us have seen it, some victims to it, some instigators and some both.

You're winning an auction and then with less than 5 seconds on the clock someone outbids you and wins and you've no time to reply.


While the argument is that you should have probably increased your bid by more in the first place, or done so at the last second, with people actively looking to drive prices up on items they don't want, it's understandable to see why people are reluctant to do this.

So I had an idea.

The person who loses any auction (ie. second highest bidder) has a very limited window, real life day at the most, to buy a copy of the artifact for the winning bid +10% This means the auction winner keeps their prize at the price they paid, but at the same time if the other person really wants it, they have a window of opportunity to pay that bit extra and have one themselves. It's limited in both time and availability as only one person is given this choice.

I also considered the idea of blind auctions for artifacts as opposed to the current bid up to the deadline system as an alternative, with the highest bidder winning at the deadline mark.


Anyway, thoughts?

Xenthos

If people are actively seeking to drive up prices, and bid more than you're willing to- they will win and be out their credit supply.  It's a risky proposition.

A blind system is unlikely to work; they want people competing against each other (and raising the prices).  The higher the price, the better!

I don't really mind the "being able to buy a copy" idea, but it does have the potential to be gamed.  "Hey, I'll outbid you by 1 credit, don't go quite as high as you were planning to and we can both get it instead of driving the price up".  Even so, that's more credits spent overall, so probably not too much of a worry.

PS: Please sleep.

Karlach

I did sleep. I napped before the auctions. It's now daytime and I have stuff to do.

Yeah I realise people can game it, but only to some degree. You need to know the other person bidding and if it's a three way war then you're going to lose control on the value.

Xenthos

Yeah.  At most it would only lower the price by a small bit (a few hundred credits on the big ticket items) while bringing in far more than that when person #2 buys a copy for themselves.  That's why I think it's a plausible idea.

Lerad

I thought the idea behind this system was that you could bid all the credits you were ever willing to spend on the item, and you could be assured it will not go for less than that to someone else if you aren't able to be around at the end? People who get outbid or sniped at the last moment will then fall into 2 categories:

1) They did not bid the maximum they were ever willing to spend, and are thus frustrated that they could not have had another chance to raise their bid.

2) They DID bid the maximum they were ever willing to spend, and... got outbid.

Well, the solution is simple. Bid the maximum you are ever willing to spend, and so be it if someone snipes you. Wanting to spend as little as possible (and thus not bidding your maximum willing price) is a risk you take yourself, and if you get sniped because you were thrifty and wanted to save a few credits by bidding only a little above what your competitors currently are bidding, then you'll have to live with the prospect that you might get sniped at the last moment.

I don't see a need to change the system to cater to people who don't wish to place their maximum bids in a system that allows them to do so.

Shuyin

Yeah I don't see a need for this either. If you're not going all in on an auction, then there will be some risks that you will have to take.

I recommend just constantly bid increasing during the last minute of the auction if you don't want to go to your maximum all at once if you want to compromise between putting all your credits in and just barely winning.

You can also take advantage of the fact that players seem to bid in multiples of 5, 10, 25, 50, or 100, depending on how big the item is, so using odd numbers like 33 might help too.

For example. this last auction, I figured people were gonna bidsnipe me with my current bid of 225, so I bid increased by 26 to 251 given my experience with auctions and how much I figure this thing is worth to everyone. And what do you know, someone bid a multiple of 5 (225) and so I kept my lead by 1 credit.

14   WON         251/     251 Shield Amplifier                         Shuyin        0

Rivius

You revealed your sekretz!

Raezon

Auctions are often meant to limit the number of an item that is in the game (sometimes as the only item of its kind), unlike artifact sales. In these cases, the first idea wouldn't work, as we truly intend for there only to be 1 (or X) items of that type in the game. If we are ok with releasing more than one, and think there is desire, we typically do more than one auction of that item at a time. The desirability of the item in an auction also plays into decisions to release it as a purchasable item, or to auction it again later.

I'm not trying to shut down discussion, though, just commenting on viability. Feel free to continue.

Karlach

I can appreciate the desire to keep things rare, hence why I limited it to purely second only, if anyone could purchase it at 10% sell cost it'd be a terrible idea.

It's not really something where I'm going "This sucks and it needs to change" more ideas bouncing about in my head and I thought I'd gather opinions on. Thanks for the feedback though!

Enyalida

The way to stop real sniping is to randomize the end time slightly. Give it a random close time that can go 5 minutes in either direction. You'd still need to be on pretty close to the end, but no more 5-seconds-before-close bidding, unless you just get lucky.

Lendren

Lerad said:

I thought the idea behind this system was that you could bid all the credits you were ever willing to spend on the item...
Well, the solution is simple. Bid the maximum you are ever willing to spend, and so be it if someone snipes you.

There's only one problem with this approach (apart from the fact that, psychologically, so many people don't and can't get it): when there's multiple auctions for the same item, you don't want to bid the highest you're willing to pay on the first one when the second one might be going for less.  The recoding required to address this, making it so instead of three auctions for the same item you have one auction with a quantity three and the top three bids win, is probably way more effort and complexity than it's worth, though.

Shaddus

If an auction has a bid within 2 minutes of closing, extend the auction by two minutes.

Enyalida

(Why not just randomize the end time by 5 or so minutes in either direction. Impossible to get a bid in at the last second any way but luck, there wouldn't be any way to tell when you need to 'shoot')