I don't need to worry about listing fees as long as they are refunded for a sale. My ridiculously high priced auctions always end with a buy-now, no matter how many times I mark up the prices, bwahahaha!

But thanks for showing us the new formulas.

How should we calculate the listing fee?
The listing fee should be zero. Seriously.

Before you HWFO, step back and think about things.

* This is not a real-life auction, where the auction house has to store physical things and a listing fee is needed to keep it form turning into a free warehouse.

*this is not ebay where every auction is some unique thing that needs to be looked at by buyers. One red shard is as good as the next.

* the cr<->CE exchange works very well (as does the YPP PoE<->dub exchange) and it doesn't have a listing fee.

There simply isn't any good reason for having a listing fee. It primarily hurts new players who have no clue the price of drift wood vs red wood vs ironwood. As much as it is human nature to think that our favorite part of the game is the most important, the AH is never going to be the center of the game. You will never see advertisements about who fantastic the AH, people aren't going to say to their friends "you should play spiral knights, it has a great ebay simulator!".

Listing stuff should be as painless as possible for the vast majority of players who are only ever going to want to sell the materials that they haul up from the clockworks. They do not need to have to worry about actually losing 10 times as much on listing fees as the material actually is worth.

Sure, someone will go and list 100 auctions for 1 red shard at 1000cr. So what? With the sort options, most people will never see those auctions, just like people don't see the crazy offers on the cr<->CE exchange, That person will have spent a lot of time creating all those auctions, even as a prank, it will get old very very quickly. Their time is their listing fee. Oh, and the seller is also out of the use of those materials, that is another small cost, but that is really all that is needed.

Just rip the listing fee out of the game. It is a needless complication that just makes the game less fun.

I actually don't mind listing fees but the latest update is absurd. If you don't want to ever have listing fees be more than final value fee, then just take what's currently in place now and cut it in half. (i.e. @ 48 hrs it is 10%, 7.5% for 24 hrs, 6% for 12hr, 5% for 4 hr) I think this is pretty fair for everyone involved, still prevents junk auctions since 48hrs is 10%

However, it's generally better to keep the listing fee
Why?

There are only so much time for new players to learn the game. Which is more important, learning the difference between the various lumbers, or learning the differences in prices between driftwood/redwood/ironwood? A new player is going to want to sell everything they can to get crowns, it is real important that they don't get bitten by some irrelevant "feature".

What compelling reason is there for keeping a listing fee? How does it make the game funner for the *average* player? (And, the average player probably hasn't made it to the bottom of T1. The average forum poster is *NOT* an average player.)

Personally, I have no problems with a listing fee either, there have been very few times that I've paid it. But, indifference is not a compelling reason.

For now we're going to cut it in half.

1% listing fee if you have no items currently on auction
2% listing fee if you have one item currently on auction
3% listing fee if you have two items currently on auction
4% listing fee if you have three items currently on auction

I'm assuming you lot are more intelligent that your recent design decisions indicate and can follow the arithmetic progression going on there. You get perfectly acceptable listing fees and a process that limits the number of auctions a character would want to list.

Or, you know, you could just drop listing fees altogether.

Why didn't I see this post yesterday before writing this? http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/9641#comment-52612

Would have saved me a lot of time.

I was directed here after stating that I use alts to as a loop hole to the current auction system. Obviously, the current system is broken and cutting it in half would not fix the issue either. The reason is for 4 star and 5 star materials. These do not sell for a lot yet their auction listings are 400 and 1000 for 2 days postings. Now, cutting it in half would make them 200 and 500.

But let's see:

Miracloth sells for about 1000CR (or less)
Posting fee is 200.

Sorry but I would still rather buyout my own auction than losing 200CR because 10% of 1000 is only 100. This is worse for 5 star items that do not sell very well.

So the simple solution should be listing price should be:

4h - 4% of bid or buy out price (whichever is higher)
12h - 6%
24h - 8%
48h - 10%

The cap is 10% as this is the fee for buying out an item. Any listing fees higher than 10% would cause the seller to prefer buying out the auction himself.

Which leads to another flaw in the system...

NOT BEING ABLE TO CANCEL AUCTIONS WITH BIDS

I can see the reasoning but people can still buy out their own auctions so there is no reason to not allow this. If I list my item with a 10CR starting bid and a 2000CR buy out, I should be allowed to cancel my auction if I do not like the current bid because I would rather lose the 10% auction fee and lose over 10% of my item's value.

But you ask, what if the item did not have a buy out?
The answer is: Keep the bid price the same because people will simply also bid their item out to prevent any penalties for canceling auctions. Let me repeat, other than losing initial listing, DO NOT PENALIZE for canceling auction otherwise people will find ways around it. This is promote bid wars which are GOOD for an Auction House. If the item sells, well, you guys get a 10% cut anyways!

There are zero and one star mats that sell for 5 crowns each.
There are 2 and 3 star mats that sell for 100 crowns each, maybe less.
There are 4 and 5 star mats that sell for 150-200 crowns.

I have no idea what the star fees are based on, but for a substantial fraction of each star level they are way to high.

Many materials dropped precipitously in value with the latest update too, and we can quickly see that the reason materials went for -more- in the AH than they had been on /2 before the AH is simply that the AH sort put 'groups' of materials away from singles and made selling batches hard. Now that people can sell batches and they are sorted in prices are going back down to and even below their 'old' prices before AH.

It's really all supply and demand... it's worthwhile to more people to sell batches of 10 of something than it was to auction 1 at a time of something. Rarer materials never had this problem and naturally went down (mostly) from pre-AH prices.

I wonder if there might not be a rebound in the market when 'old' players finally empty out their backlog of extra materials, but I don't think it will be a substantial rebound if at all. Any rebound effect may well be countered by more and more players getting used to using the AH.

The upshot of which is to please make the star minimum auction listing much lower. It's painful to pay 100 per shard because they're now going to sell at 30 instead of 80 or 40 instead of 140. Though there's still hope for my start bids to be clicked even if the BIN is now looking absurd. As of this morning anyway, maybe there's been a rebound while I was out for the day, but I doubt it for the market force reasons I mention above; I think we're moving to the natural price. Also lowering the star listing fee will in turn drop the price of materials further - less risk means more people willing to try.

Honestly I'm not sure 0 and 1* mats need a minimum.

Also, the minimum really shouldn't be star based -anyway-, there's huge variance in a star level, and of course recipes and equipment should have a different minimum from materials anyway. Ideally, the minimum would be something like half of the listing fee for the average auction on that item that completed in the last 72 hours... but that kind of moving average statistics gathering is not a quick job!

The only reason for the minimum listing fee, after all, is to discourage people from simply putting up rather annoying auctions that start at '1' for a 10k item, making bidders do annoying work in order to reduce the seller's risk to near nothing. As such, the minimum really shouldn't be the listing fee anywhere -near- a majority of the time, but in the materials market it is. (In recipes and equipment, not so much.)

The only reason for the minimum listing fee, after all, is to discourage people from simply putting up rather annoying auctions that start at '1' for a 10k item, making bidders do annoying work in order to reduce the seller's risk to near nothing.

Yes, but with the sort options and filtering, chances are that most bidders won't even see these "annoying" auctions. The cr<->CE market is constructed well enough that it is impossible for crazy bids to be seen by anyone other than the person who placed them. I think that is the right solution to the problem of "annoying auctions".

As such, the minimum really shouldn't be the listing fee anywhere -near- a majority of the time, but in the materials market it is. (In recipes and equipment, not so much.)

While the listing fee for recipes isn't that close to the sell price, it is close to the profit you can expect. If the recipe doesn't sell, you have usually lost your only chance to break even on it.

So far, the strongest argument in favor of having a listing fee is basically "people deserved to be punished for making a mistake", but since it only hurts the seller, I don't see a need to punish them.

If ripping out the code to support a listing fee is too much work/too risky for a quick fix, just have a fixed listing fee of 5cr. Even for mats that don't sell for that much, a 5cr fee isn't really a problem even to new players.

The listing fee is just a security deposit against dumbassery.

Doesn't need to be some absurd amount, just enough to not make it worth it to screw around.
And certainly not enough to make it worth buying your own items to save losing it.

If someone lists Divine Avenger Recipe or the Sun Silver needed to make it with a starting bid of '1', a -lot- of bidders are going to see it when they sort for lowest bid price looking for something affordable, or when they sort by 'end time' ... such an auction would go on being 1-up'd for hours and hours and float around in 'very short'.

I don't see how having a listing fee has any impact on this situation. Such an auction would quickly get bids and therefore make any listing fee irrelevant.

But, to address this off-topic comment, the bid increment has been raised to a much more reasonable 5%, so I don't think it would be *possible* to be "1-up'd for hours and hours". In practice, someone will usually jump the bidding up to something that is more reasonable, probably still "very cheap", but no longer "stupidly cheap".