So, question: Is the listing fee/sale fee percentages getting any lower? I still think 10% is a bit too much. I know you guys want to avoid "joke" auctions, but a fee this high isn't really needed for that; 5% or so is already enough to discourage those. 10% ends up only harming the sellers. A lot.

And also, no changes to the minimal increase on bids? Some auctions end up never really rising that much because you end up being encouraged to bid only 1% higher.

On either case, I like the outbid change. Easy to miss, maybe, but it's certainly better than a billion mails. And if you're on a bid war on something, you'll probably need to pay attention to the auction house anyway.

1. If UVs could be read without mouseover, it'd go a long, long ways to making UV searching easy - and people selling good UVs would have less fear of being simply lost in the shuffle (a fear that, combined with the fee, may be keeping some of them out).

2. In practice, the feel of the total fee structure is twitchy-making. We're:

-Paying a hefty percentage
-Paying a notable fee up-front (which might not get refunded, even on a middlin' decent price)
-For a very limited-time auction.

....Any one of those would be eminently bearable, I think. Even quite healthy. Two would be squirmy, but might be decent. All three at the same time, I think, is a bit over the top. Not outrageous or actively nasty, but also not the "All trade is drawn to the auction house, because why would you go any other way?" that I suspect it's meant to be.

I know you dont have time to implement this atm but being able to see the lowest price for an item you are trying to sell would be really nice. At the moment its a tedious game of search item, scroll through all of them(patch is going to make that part faster) commit the bid/buyout to memory, go to the sell tab, and post the item.

I would LOVE it if you could get rid of, or sort your auctions so you don't have to go through the hundred or so closed auctions I have that have already finished.

Sounds like it should be a checkbox kinda thing.

Hey I don't know if this has been mentioned and is going to be fixed. But last time I wanted to outbid myself and add a 1000 crowns, it said insuficient crowns because i didnt have the full 12000 in my invent. I mean like it should just add the 1000 if you know what I mean OP.

Well anyway I hope this gets fixed and i can get a reaction to this. Thanks in advance guys

I actually feel like the listing fee formula is unfair to higher priced items vs lower priced, I dunno, I guess that is just me, although I haven't sold anything below 500 crowns. The 10% that is removed is much more noticeable when dealing with larger amounts (obviously). Would like to see the listing fee laxed across the board.

I still think the minimum bid increase should be higher.
Or at least permit it to be set when creating an auction.

Although this isn't eBay, what eBay does is they actually charge less for the final value fee the higher an item sells for. That way if you sold something worth $100k, you don't pay the same 5% that someone who sold something worth $20 did, you only pay about 1%. I think eBay learned early on if you keep the fees constant throughout all auctions, you lose customers on both ends since that value tends to satisfy only the median (simple majority) of users. A majority is not a good way to do business though, hence the different fees.

At the same time, you can't go hoping to sell stuff on eBay for $1. You sell things worth more, or you sell in bulk. I realize in SK, often people only need 1-2 swordstones, not 5 or 10, so the eBay example may not be the one to follow, but that's where SK has the upper hand in this closed system (the sorting by quantity will help find the smaller auctions). It's not like OOO makes money directly from the AH, so fees are more of a sink than anything.

For bid increments, the same idea applies. Low values should only require small increments, but by the time you get to 10,000 crowns, the bid increment should be something like 200 crowns.

For sorting, I'd like to see the sorting options stack. e.g. you choose to sort by UV and by price, so it lists items by UV, and within that, by price. This might be messy though.

Thanks for the update on what's coming. I appreciate it!

Personally, I'm a fan of the fee structure as it is - it provides a bit of friction, and serves as a crown sink, which seem like good things to me. I really like the idea of an opt-in message-rather-than-mail thing, and would even like to see it extended. I'll often wander by the auction house, bid on anything that looks interesting and cheap, and wander off. This means that when I log in, I have a huge stack of mail to wade through, each containing some (usually small) amount of money. If I could click an option that said that being outbid while offline meant that the money just came back to me silently, I'd go for it in a heartbeat.

If you are online when you're outbid, you'll get a chat message and your crowns will refund directly to you.

Yes please. I don't care if I'm afk, I can check my current bids when I come back. If I miss the message, I can probably still notice later that my amount of crowns increased. But seriously, if it's that important to know instantly when I get outbid, I suppose I'm on top of the auction anyway. The instant refund (CE market style) is awesome.

If you're offline then you'll get the mail as before.

Hopefully not exactly as before. Do you think you can condense all the refunds into one mail? You got outbid on the follow item(s): blah, blah and blah. That would be great.

forgot something important:

Sort by Variants should sort the higher variants above the lower ones (max>VH>high>moderate>low)
and searching for particular variant types somehow would be nice but not necessary. (if you also make the UV type/level visible without hovering over the item[a tiny colored bar with a single word like gremlin, attack speed, charge time, shock, elemental, etc would be enough])

The outbid mail is fine. It gets confusing if there are multiple means of getting your crowns back.

I like the outbid mail, it makes me feel wanted.

several comments:

* sorting by stars should list the 5* first, they tend to be rarer and therefore more interesting than 0* shards and pop-guns.

* sorting by unit price is great, but I'd also like to see the unit price if at all possible. Actually, those numbers written in the materials can be real easy to miss or miss-read, having a separate column for quantity would be great.

* Be able to add 10 mats by hitting shift-click.

* I would really like to see the listing fee be reduced. Yes, on low-priced materials, the current fee structure can cause the listing fee to be several times the expected sell price, but even for high priced items, the risk associated with not selling is just too large. There just isn't enough of a play base to even things out. It is all to common to see an identical material sell for twice as much as another auction just a few minutes later, or one not sell at all. People aren't crafting every possible item all the time, if no one needs a particular material and you won't sell, it doesn't matter if are several people needing it a few minutes later. If there were thousands of players crafting/buying, this kind of thing wouldn't happen often, but there aren't.

* it would be very very nice if you could see completed auctions to give people some clue what things are selling at. This would help both buyers and sellers.

* the list of things bid on really doesn't need to be reversed so much as the things that are ending soon need to be put at the top. Scrolling to the middle of the list to see what is happening is a pain

* It would be real nice if you could cancel your auction with zero penalty within the first 5-10 minutes of listing. If you hit the wrong number of zeros, you are screwed.

* It would be real nice if there was a much wider range of listing times, from only 30 minutes to at least 3 days for a weekend. It would be nice to be able to list something in the afternoon to and have it end prime-time tomorrow night, rather than the current options of 12hrs (middle of the night) or the next day in the afternoon.

I like the mail, just not he outbid stuff since it can fill up an inbox quick.

That was a very comprehensive and enlightening post. Much appreciated.

Too bad about the UV thing - that would have been great if it weren't so complicated. (Could there be a simpler way to sort-of fix it? Like convert the text after the "-" into a number value using a switch statement? read: find the text after the "-" with a regex (if that's even stored in the database! I'm really just scraping in the dark here.. Probably shouldn't tell you how to do your job but I'll just leave this last suggestion :P) and then use the switch)

@wrs: You can sort by stars from most to least if you click on the "sort by stars" a second time. That reverses the order. That goes for all the other options too, but I don't know why you'd want to do that otherwise.. haha! I liked many of your other suggestions (besides listing fee - see @Senshi below). Also as to the comment about the shift + click, this is just a guess but I'm betting that that's more of a UI thing, and wtfwtf is really working on the Auction House by itself, and may not have even been part of the UI design for trading. I've just learned how you can do your own small(ish) part of a very large project without knowing ANYthing about how another part works, except to trust that it _does_ work. This can make for a tough time in debugging (you usually learn at least something about your partners' code, but not necessarily enough to change it). And I learned this from a 3-man team, so that suggestion may be a suggestion to a different group. Possibly put it in suggestion forum with title "Trade UI improvement?" or something.

@betrael I'm assuming that when you win an auction, or your item doesn't sell, it will still be in your mail, so the only thing that changes to mail will be when you're outbid. Rest assured (I think).

@Senshi The thing that people need to learn is that they don't need to set their minimum bid price to something even close to the buyout price. If they set their minimum bid price to 1 crown every time, the item _will_, if the system is utilized properly, get bid up to something around where it's worth! I saw a quicksilver mail go from 10k to 500k+ with just bids. If there is a demand for the item, it will get bid up. If there is no demand, then what it was sold for is what it was worth. If you don't think you want to sell the item for what it's worth, than you shouldn't put it on the auction house anyways. I realize in cases where there are massive amounts of repeat items it might get lost, but even here people should be sorting by minimum bid prices and bid on the cheapest ones anyways. And if you're absolutely uncomfortable with putting the listing price to something so low, put it to the bare minimum that you would _not_ be upset with if it sold for that price.

Rather than changing the listing 10% price, maybe we should have some kind of NPC give an auction house tutorial, much like for filling up the stratum with gems. That way it can be accessible for people who don't understand what I just explained.

Thanks again for the feedback wtfwtf :). (By the way I guess you didn't like my semi-jesting idea about the radix sort for tiers of sort? I think it's kinda a weird way to do it but I would, as a programmer, think it a kinda fun thing to attempt. (And they run in O(n)* time!!)

*well radix is something a bit more complicated... but in this case with the constants being almost always less than the number of items being sorted, it would be roughly O(n) ;)

@Abhorsen... I was talking about and I believe wtfwtf_ok was talking about the fee for a successful auction, not the listing fee. I certainly agree that it's smarter to have a low starting bid as well as a 'buy now' price, but that's rather beside the point. 10% on a -successful- auction is a hefty percentage, and for high-end items a hefty amount of crowns. Pushing people hard to -not- use the auction house and to avoid the 'extortionate' fee creates opportunities for scamming, and encourages spam-selling. (Heck, trade-chat is -dedicated- to spam selling, but at least it can be turned off, but this spam-selling is spilling into the town square.)

Now that I look again... that's interesting and seems a bit contradictory and maybe hints that the statement isn't as absolute as it seemed on first reading.

..And it sounds like you have more expertise in the area than I do. But it sounds like the problem is more about supply being much much more than demand. If there's no demand for an item within a certain time period (and it sells for one crown), it's essentially worthless. Personally I believe this would happen more with materials and (useless) recipes than anything else. So I would advise not to sell materials until (read: if) they introduce some kind of much needed materials sink. I guess all I can say is it's really not worth it to sell materials unless you're sure there's a demand for them (if there aren't already +15/20 just sitting there not moving, even if you price competitively.

I've never really sold anything to vendors (I just horde them until maybe they're worth something with a materials sink) so I wasn't aware that was already implemented somewhere. If it is, it doesn't make much sense not to implement it everywhere. But as I was saying, that might not be as easy as flipping a switch. That could be something someone different wrote specifically for the Vendor UI. Just speculation. If so, it would be nice to get that implemented across the board.

As to the stars, it sorts by default similarly to everything else... And who knows? Some people might only ever look for the lower tiered items. Read: If you're sorting by gear, and you're new to the game, and you have no idea what anything's named (and don't know about the wiki), it's easy to just click "coat" then "sort by stars" and boom, you have a lot of options priced competitively. This might sound very specific to you, but a large portion of the people playing have just started. There are more and more every day.

So, "uh", maybe it's more intuitive to have them all have one default (great to least vs. least to greatest) even if this slightly inconveniences you because you have to click it twice.

So, about my suggestion to reverse the listing order. If you are auctioning many items, you only want to see closed auctions occasionally when you want to see a price something sold for or didn't sell for before, but often want to see if you have bids on your items and/or what items you still have up for sale. If you are buying many items, you mostly want to see if you've been recently outbid, and only occasionally what you payed for an item in the past or what happened to an auction you were away for the end of.

Even when you do want to see closed auctions, either order you're going to scroll to the middle of your list - almost certainly you want to see -recently- closed auctions, so there's no real advantage to sorting oldest-first that I can see. Sorting newest first helps the other cases and doesn't really hurt when you have to scroll to the middle anyhow.

About auctioning mats - with the current system, you can auction mats reasonably well by putting a start price about 1/10th of the buy now price, assuming you are choosing a reasonable buy now price. You will fairly often sell a 50 crown mat for 5 crowns when the price dips and the AH has too many auctions ending at the same time, but that's much less of a loss than paying a 200 crown auction fee on -not- selling the mat. Fairly often a bunch of my mats will get bids on them within an hour of being listed, and a few of them will sell for something very close to the starting bid (because nobody starts a bidding war until 'very short', so it's chancy whether my auction gets a bidding war. If it doesn't, 2-3 bids is the most that can be reasonably hoped for before 'very short'.)

TBH, I'd rather have had a 'market' than an auction house. Post your item for sale for an indefinite period of time, pay a listing fee, and penalty to delist it to prevent junk listings, sort by lowest price first by default, pool multiple sellers into the same price... just like the right side of the CE market with a different fee structure, one such page for each material or recipe. Doesn't work so well with equipment since that has ways to be unique and isn't just a commodity. I suppose that since the market format really can't be made to work for everything, and the auction format can be made to work for everything if awkwardly... well, auction is what we got then. I like it a lot better than /2 :)

2 day auctions on high end materials are quite a bit chancier than low-mid materials, because, well, 5* recipes are crafted -much- less often than low stars. Hundreds of times less often with all the UV hunters out there. If you get undercut just a few times that can be enough to prevent you making the sale, but then, if you have a 1/4th - 1/10th value starting bid someone will helpfully buy it for resale and save you the auction house listing fee, which depending on the material's value relative to the listing fee may be worth it to hedge your risk (at least it is to me, at a gut level. I haven't done a risk analysis or anything!) With the adjustment to listing fees, half value will hopefully become a more reasonable starting bid for balancing the risks. (The reverse situation where ten people decide to craft the same 5* gear in the same hour, of course, probably happens as often as two days with few crafters ... but IMO, you'd be crazy to list more than one of the same 5* mat in the same 2 days unless it was one of a handful of reliably fast-moving ones.)

I'm not really a big fan of the auto refresh each time you click "My Auctions" because it stalls my computer for a few seconds each time and probaly puts more stress on your servers than required, the refresh button is more than adequate imo. Essentially once your auction is up and a bid has been placed you no longer have control over it until it ends anyhow, so refreshing your own auctions doesn't really seem to have huge benefits.

Could you make a kind of search that searches in multiple categories?

Like, search all weapons and recipes, but nothing else. Or search everything but mats.

Something along those lines would kinda come in handy.