I really think it would be a GREAT! Update if they put the actual time in the Auction House like 2h 30m and there is a refresh button and you can choose if you can put in seconds. mabey when under 1m it will go up 5 sec so it like a betting website. It would be VERY cool! Please give a 1+ on this!
Put more Accurate time in Auction House
Wed, 09/28/2011 - 14:24
Wed, 09/28/2011 - 17:20
#2
no then auction sniping would
no then auction sniping would be a big problem
The AH already extends bidding by something like 30 seconds every time someone bids, it isn't important to snipe at the last second. It is, however, important to be there when the auction ends since the vast majority of auctions (that aren't BIN'ed) are obtained by people who are bidding near the end. When it is important, I've been able to determine when an auction will end by watching for the transition between "long" and "medium", or "medium" and "short". By not having a more exact time listed, you hurt people who can't be around to watch the AH a lot of the time. This is just another example of how the AH was over-designed and poorly thought out. They added two mechanisms to try and solve the same problem, one that hurts the average player.
Heck, even the names "very long" instead of "over 1 day", etc. are a case of being poorly thought out and hurting the average player. OOO didn't announce how long these periods were, but people quickly figured them out. By trying to be too clever, OOO has made it so that people need to either figure out this information themselves, or go look at the wiki. Did OOO really think people wouldn't figure this out? gah.
Wed, 09/28/2011 - 17:57
#3
I think the rule is that
I think the rule is that remaining time is SET to 5 minutes (if it was less than that) when a bid is made, but the rules are secret so who knows?
The vague times are obviously intended to make it harder to snipe, but they were also obviously designed by someone who hadn't thought about that problem very long or very hard.
The basic problem of sniping is that you can't easily respond to a bid that someone else makes at the last second, which means you either have to make a really high preemptive bid so that no one will bother (in which case you are almost certainly over-paying), become a sniper yourself, or just hope that no one does that.
The basic problem of the current Auction House rules is that you can't easily respond to a bid that someone else makes at all, because there will usually be a large window of time between when you log off and when the auction actually ends, and even if you wanted to try to rearrange your schedule to be online when it ends, you can't, because that information is hidden.
The vague end times are a sloppy attempt to treat a symptom and they actually make the underlying problem worse, not better. If you want to determine a fair price for an item by having people make incrementally increasing bids in response to each other, then all bidders really need to be present during the last minute of the auction. Full stop. Which is probably why the vast majority of people seem to use the auction house as a storefront rather than an auction house.
And it's not like this problem hasn't already been solved several times over by people around the world. My personal preference would be to have Proxy Bidding, though displaying exact end times (while keeping the extension rule for bidding near the end) would be a step in the right direction.
Thu, 09/29/2011 - 04:22
#4
I think the rule is that
I think the rule is that remaining time is SET to 5 minutes (if it was less than that) when a bid is made, but the rules are secret so who knows?
You can figure out the AH rules by observation. Bidding clearly does not cause the remaining time to be set to 5 minutes, because that would cause any items to be bid on to be moved to the very end of the "very short" items, but frequently, bidding causes an auction to be moved only a few items down.
I agree with the rest of your post though... Proxy bidding would certainly help.
Thu, 09/29/2011 - 10:59
#5
I think you can currently see
I think you can currently see the end times, if you sort through all the auctions based on end time & the item you're looking for. There's *always* people there sniping the bargain ones on the first couple pages, and it ends a couple minutes later.
I don't like this suggestion though unless it comes with a portable auction house so I can outbid people in the Clockworks. I'd rather play instead of hoping I'm in Haven, not having anything I should be doing in real life, at the exact time to outbid any snipers on an auction I really want - or snipe them myself.
Thu, 09/29/2011 - 11:35
#6
I don't like this suggestion
I don't like this suggestion though {...}I'd rather play instead of hoping I'm in Haven
How would having more accurate end times be worse? Right now, if you play instead of hang out in haven, you can't bid and you can't know when you should bid. With more accurate end times, you can know when you need to come back to haven and/or log onto an alt.
Thu, 09/29/2011 - 11:53
#7
This suggestion is good for
This suggestion is good for those people who are often on the computer but don't have the time to constantly be on Spiral Knights. Instead of randomly logging in to check auction status, you can plan ahead for when you need to log in.
Sat, 10/01/2011 - 08:03
#8
I was wondering what the
I was wondering what the rationale is behind the oddly vague end times. I like the idea of just making them properly precise since there's already an automatic extension if remaining time is below some threshold, but I have really little experience with auctioning and its problems and solutions. I would like to have it all accessed from anywhere like the energy market, but for me at least it's not a big deal.
Like Antistone said, it's more like a bazaar than an Auction House, and I at least am fine with that. If I want something ASAP, or just can't easily get it from the Clockworks, I don't really need to worry about competitive bidding; I just buy it if I see a price I find acceptable. I would much rather buy it and get back to the game or go do whatever else I want/need/whatever than spend time camping out at the Auction House because that's the only way to have a good chance of being able to buy the item.
If I do have plenty of time, I prefer barter anyway. The Auction House doesn't handle that, but if I have something that might be of value (that I'm not using myself or acquiring specifically for some one who wants it) I can come to the Bazaar subforum and post an offer, so I am satisfied with the available options. Currency is essential for a proper market, but barter is a nice complementary option too; currency makes trade possible where otherwise it would not be, but it also makes negotiation necessarily competitive since the seller wants the price as high as possible and the buyer wants it as low as possible. Barter negotiation is more likely to be cooperative since it becomes plausible for each party to be trading something of low value to the current owner for something of much higher value. IOW, one player's junk might be another's treasure, but we all value money and I'd rather spend time playing the game or enjoying a conversation here than haggling.
lolololol
no then auction sniping would be a big problem