Twilight Forums

Holy crap. With all these messages, we need a way to mass empty our mailbox. I deleted 109 messages today, from messages mostly over just the past couple days.

Preferably a check-box method like KoL uses as opposed to just a "delete all" button. I have a couple I'd like to keep.

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The churches are empty / The priest has gone home / And we are left standing / Together alone
--October Project: "Dark Time"

Hey guys, this is garcia1000, Janus was very nice and agreed to post this for me because my forum account hasn't been activated yet!

I have an idea for an auction house system that would improve upon the current system. For this post, I will first lay out what I think the deficiencies in the current auction house system are. Then, I will present an idea that addresses these deficiencies. Thirdly, I will guess at some other consequences of implementing this idea. Lastly, I will suggest ways to reduce the burden of coding the additional features.


1. CURRENT PROBLEMS WITH AUCTION HOUSE

I didn't want to say problems because I think the auction house is great, but as with everything else it is always possible to make improvements. Here are things that both buyers and sellers wish for:

Buyers encounter several problems. Firstly, they do not wish to wait 12-24 hours to receive an item. Therefore, many buys do not bother placing bids on items (especially since it will escrow their chips) and instead use the 'buy it now' feature. This reduces the activity of auctions.

Secondly, they don't want to have to stay logged in as the auction nears its end. The problem of 'snipers' who bid 1 chip above the previous bid occurs. This wastes buyers' time.

The net effect is that many buyers don't use the auction at all, and instead use only the 'buy it now'.

Sellers also encounter problems. Because of the low liquidity, if they use the auction feature, they are not guaranteed a selling price that is close to market value. Often, they will sell at an unreasonably low price. To control for this, they will set a minimum price. But because of the previously mentioned factor (buyers don't want to wait and be outbid and so on), even if they get bids that are higher than the minimum, it may still be lower than a reasonable market price!

They will use the 'buy it now' feature because the convenience premium offered to the buyer means that the selling price is higher. However, because sellers don't want to put a price that is much too low, they will tend to put in auctions at a price higher than what they think is fair value. In turn, buyers don't want to buy at a price higher than fair value. Because of this, there are less trades and the auction house is less efficient than it should be.


2. HOW TO ADDRESS THESE ISSUES

These issues can be addressed by reducing market inefficiency and increasing market liquidity. How to do this?

I think that the key insight is that currently, the 'buy it now' is actually the main price setter and the main way to clear trades. The 'buy it now' function, however, is only one way - only sellers can set the posted prices. This leads to the problem of sellers setting prices higher than what they think it should be, and buyers refusing to buy at those prices.

This can be solved by letting buyers set prices.

For example, let's take silver stars. Let's say that prices have been in the range of 40,000 to 70,000 chips per star recently. Under the current system, if you are a seller, you would put a 'buy it now' price of 70,000. You stand a high chance of not getting a sale, because buyers don't want to pay that much.

Under the new system, you would still set a 'buy it now' price of 70,000. A buyer, however, could now set a 'sell it now' price of 40,000. Any seller who wished to could instantly click the 'sell it now' button, and receive 40,000 chips in exchange for a star. Now, instantly, with just two people, we already have an indication of the approximate price for a silver star!

With more people, prices become more efficient. If you have two additional sellers, one willing to sell at 80,000 and one willing to sell at 60,000, they would list their prices. Now the price range has shrunk to 40,000-60,000. With more market participants, the spread narrows, and activity increases. Buyers and sellers both have an incentive to list at prices they want.

Additionally, this also solves the time problem. People who urgently need chips or need a particular item can sell or buy at the current price, instantly. For their urgency, they pay a slight premium. People who are not in such a rush will list their items for sale at a price slightly lower or higher than the current market prices. They receive a better value for being willing to wait.


3. OTHER CONSEQUENCES

As with any proposed change, there are unintended consequences. Here are some that I envision:

Market prices will flucuate less. This should, in general, be a good thing.
There will be less opportunities to trade profitably at the auction house. For example, I have made around 100,000 profit in chips by buying high and selling low. It will be more difficult under the new system. But I think overall it is a good thing.

Market liquidity will increase. Because people will be more willing to list things, there will be more trading of less liquid items. I think this will be a good thing.

People may build bots to arbitrage market inefficiencies. I think this could be a bad thing, but the bots would also increase market liquidity.


4. HOW TO IMPLEMENT THIS EASILY

At first, this idea may seem daunting because of the amount of recoding required. Here are some ideas to reduce the coding work.

Reuse some code. For example, the current 'buy it now' mechanics for selling a silver star are that you put a star in escrow at the auction house. At the end of the auction, you get chips in return (or the star in case the auction was unsuccesful). For the 'sell it now' option, you would do exactly the reverse. You would put chips in escrow, and at the end of the auction you would get a star.

It seems that the coding would be complex, but conceptually it is simple. Because you are setting a fixed number of chips, you can treat the amount of chips as one item. So instead of putting item 'A' in escrow and receiving item 'B' at the end of the auction (where 'B' is a set amount of chips), you would put item 'B' in escrow and receive 'A'.

If we use this system, it eliminates the need for traditional auctions. The current system of traditional auctions would be superseded by the price setting of the market system. By removing the traditional auctions and going to a pure 'buy it now'/'sell it now' system, the coding would be greatly simplified.


Thanks guys I hope this was a good read. If you have any more questions, send me a message in-game because my forum account isn't active. I based this idea on auction markets as seen in real-world stock exchanges.

I came here to post a similar idea, but a bit more simple. This would be a sellers market, where sellers that wanted an item could make an offer. If somebody wanted a particlar item, say a chuck of plasteel plating, they could make an open offer for a set number of plates, and the funds to pay for that would be escrowed just like the auction house takes the chips when you submit a bid.

This would be a free service to advertise, but if the seller got their item then they would pay a purchaser's commission to the house instead of the seller. Or both side could pay a commission, sort of as premium for the improved speed and liquidity. This is better for the sellers than the autosell, and better for the buyers than waiting for the auction to end. Overall, it makes for a more efficient market.

Simple yet awesome. When I get a message saying I was outbid, give me a link, in the message, back to the page where I can bid on the item.

I support this idea. The problem I see with it, though is you would almost need to have some sort of selector to choose what you want, and to have it work right, it would need to have every tradeable item listed, which could be a bit spoilery, especially with new content.

Also, I think buyer's market was the intended phrase.

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Well, I've got a hat!

sorry if this was mentioned already

maybe a way to combat prices going out of control would be to have a reverse auction

another good byproduct would that it would make selling large quantities of an item much easier

eg lets say you are sellin a batch of 1000 lovers lockets for 10000

people generally wouldnt need a large batch like that

however in a reverse auction you could sell it piecemeal at varying prices

The greatest current competitor to the Auction House is the auto-sell, so to make it more equal you might be able to eliminate listing fees in some circumstances.

bidding is 5% of net profit not gross profit if starting price is within 20% of auto-sell and time is greater than 12 hours and "buy it now" is suitably high -- no listing fee
The Auction House makes it's money on the float : "check kiting" , free checking . basically it is getting an interest free loan.
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r192029 ... sit-Policy "You'd be shocked how much money is made on float. I know of at least one financial institution that counts float on $150B as a major source of revenue."

"buy it now" is 5% of gross profit and still incurs a listing fee unless the auto-sell is the same exact price as what you could get in a shop or otherwise pretty high.
out of last 20 active days : average the top 15 average sold prices. no listing fee if "but it now" price is greater than 118% of that average.
You want to encourage people to set high auto-sell values but not too high.


Have timeout start on first real bid, not when first put into system
allow auto-sell if nobody bid within 36 hours
allow cancel if nobody bid within 72 hours
allow a self-bid to start the timeout
This allows the float idea to be plausable and makes the system clock itself.
1,3,12,*18*,24, *30* . it's a daily game so some options, that are slightly greater or slightly lessor might work out quite well.

Cornuthaum said "If I could put them up for three days at once (instead of one day three times successively) I /know/ at least half a time as many of the items would've sold.

Ryme, I greatly appreciate the shorter options - it really makes 'short time burst sales' possible, but, please, could you bring back the 2/3 days options?"

Ryme said "I've been meaning to add 3 days back into the mix. I could maybe see five days or a week--though before the short term options existed almost everybody was complaining that even three days was too long and stuff just sat there because nobody wants to bid on something that they *might* get in a week. "

The starting the timeout on first bid, might help things self-clock.
Also if you let the starting price be closer to the average selling price then less time would be needed for the auction to arrive to the final price.

10,100,1000 bid above should be a simple percentage, maybe increase the percentage as the auction comes to close to help mitigate against sniping. Also shouldn't be as needed if you allow people to set their starting price to close to the average without penalties.

Another anti-snip thing might be to extend the timeout to at least 12 minutes if someone bid with less than 12 minutes on the clock.

Sniping not really an issue and you are most likely leaking end-time information anyway with your current method.


sanity check -- min,median,max within 20 active days
give suggested "starting" price and "buy-it-now" price.
starting price should be range of 95% of worst low in the 20 days to 105% of average of the top 15 average sold price in the last 20 active days
if someone sets prices outside that range, make them click a check-box confirming that's what they wanted
auto-sell range should list what gives no fee and maybe suggest a number that is between the average and the max sold prices that occurred over last 20 active days

no listing fee if things are not only sane but beneficial to the auction house
auto-sell price should be <= 122% of max sold price of last 20 active days
auto-sell price should be >= 118% of average of 15 highest average sold prices of the last 20 active days, unless that's greater than what someone could pay for in a normal store.
You want to encourage people to set high auto-sell values but not too high.



auto-loting
"quantity will be lumped into one package, not in multiple separate auctions."
some things aren't useful in large lots -- provide an auto-loter

disallow auto-sell on frayday; The greatest current competitor to the Auction House is the auto-sell, make it unavailable over the weekend.

auto-sell prices
ranged 5 to 180
melee 1 to 180
accessories 15 to 150
boots 5 to 120
caffeine 1 to 120
full body 1 to 175
gloves 5 to 200
helmets 5 to 175
offhand 1 to 190
pants 5 to 200
shirts 5 to 200
talismans 1000
transportation 10 to 600
software
assembly parts
welding parts
usables
combat usables

I'm in a hurry at the moment so I appologize for not having this written as well as I'd like.

Post again when you can. I can tell you put a lot of thought into this, but there's an awful lot there, kinda jammed together, and a lot of sentence fragments, with things written as statements that I think are supposed to be suggestions, so I'm having trouble sorting everything out.

I can say fairly firmly:

1) 3 days is an option in the AH.

2) Anything that requires me to track historical data or create averages isn't something I'm inclined to do right now.

3) Given the choice between having items listed or autosold, it's much less resource intensive to autosell, so I don't see much reason to encourage auctions instead. Yeah, at the moment resources aren't an issue, and yeah, it's a chip sink to auction instead of autosell, but that could change pretty easily in the future.

4) I can't make money on float, because nobody's giving me interest on the chips that I'm holding from players.

If an item sells, the seller loses 5% of the final price. If it doesn't, they lose 5% of listing. For high-end items, that potential loss keeps people from asking for too much. You can try over and over to sell a Silver Star for 200k, but each time you fail you lose 10k. Sooner or later, it's not worth it. But what stops a player from adding offers like "Dur, I wants a silver star and I'll pay a whole 100 chips for it!" over and over? With no potential for monetary loss (and no reasonable way to build one in), I foresee a glut of stupid offers (especially on high-end items) if TH ever gets big enough. Plus, all offers would have to be tracked a la normal auctions, increasing the server/database load. Another possible problem is with rare items. Say I want a specific talisman and nobody wants to sell. Then 15 other people all decide that they want the same one. Then two are sold. Then 15 more people ask for it. Even if everyone makes reasonable (market) offers, there is a potential for nearly every player to request items that no one wants to sell.

The only way around both these problems that I see is have each item have only ONE "offer auction" for the whole game. No one can make an offer for an item less than or equal to the current one, with increments similar to normal auctions. The high bidder can then cancel and start the auction over (possibly with some sort of fee involved), or a seller can supply the item for the offered price, thus ending the offer.

Personally, I don't see this as necessary or even particularly useful, but it is a workaround if it's a desired feature.

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Lord Milkman

Never confuse passion with asthma

i didn't at first. but i was used to seeing the time remaining. now that i've gotten used to that change, i do like it. Ryme said that the reason for doing that was that it was never supposed to display the time remaining and that if it were displayed, there would be plenty of sniping and stuff like that (i won a few auctions by getting into last minute bidding wars when it still displayed) and he didn't want to see that sort of behavior. and i kinda agree with him now.

and for the low-end items there are so many floating around some are bound to have a "buy now" price, no matter what the item. you just might have to do a little more looking.

and if you want to do direct trades, see if anyone's in the trade channel and go for it. there's nothing stopping you. the auction house setup prevents scamming of the type you typically see in KOL, you can't price-switch an auction.


i second that emotion

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The boat oar. Chuck Norris' one true weakness.

I'm finding that minimum bid increases moving to +1000 at the 5000 mark is way too high. I bid on a pair of Brays at 6000, hoping to pay 3000 apiece. They were raised to 7000, meaning 3500 each. I'd gladly pay 3600 for Brays, but 4000 apiece is quite steep, and more than I think they're worth right now. When the minimum increase is more than 10% of the current bid, you're really inflating things too quickly. Move it up to 10k or even 20k before the minimum bid hits +1000, and perhaps have some finer gradiations. +200 and +500 gradiations. With the millionaire auctions like Hero's Capes, +10k bids may be more appropriate. I know this is more work, but it certainly would improve my AH experience.

I'd like to suggest some sort of temporary window for sellers where they can retrieve their item that they just submitted to the auction house, if possible. I've definitely put the wrong item up for auction at the right price (another item's price) or added a few zeros on the initial bid and had the auction fee get deducted. Perhaps a one or two minute window after which they hit submit where they'd get all of their chips back if they cancel the auction. This should be easy to implement since time is a bit of info stored on auctions, I'd think? I assumed that the listing fee is there to prevent auction house spam and flooding with overpriced items, and not to punish typos/misclicks.