Auction House

[Nefahrin]

Ok After losing a ton of money today on a stupid mistake (There, I said it so no one else has to :P)
Can we look into doing 3 things?
1. Confirm Buyout.
2. Not have the buyout and Bid button side by side.
3. Make the time remaining more accurate (I.E. 34 min left?)

I lost 300k PP today because I accidentally hit buyout instead of bid (Bid was only at 5k)
Yes, I could have been more careful, but comments like that aren't helpful, so keep them to yourselves.
I was outbid, Auction had only an hour left, which as we all know means anywhere from 3 hours to 3 seconds.
and I wanted to get my bid back in before the auction ended.

This error pretty much wiped out all the plat on that toon.
I'd like to see a confirm button at the very least.
Sort of like the destroy. Are you sure you want to use the buyout option?
A confirm buyout would be greatly appreciated, especially when people insist on putting extremly outrageous (IMO)
buyout prices.
Could I get Dev thoughts on this issue?

[Cheg]

Auction times are not fully accurate to stop last second sniping. I do believe i read that from a Dev many months ago.

[ThrasherGT]

Ok After losing a ton of money today on a stupid mistake (There, I said it so no one else has to :P)
Can we look into doing 3 things?
1. Confirm Buyout.
2. Not have the buyout and Bid button side by side.
3. Make the time remaining more accurate (I.E. 34 min left?)

I lost 300k PP today because I accidentally hit buyout instead of bid (Bid was only at 5k)
Yes, I could have been more careful, but comments like that aren't helpful, so keep them to yourselves.
I was outbid, Auction had only an hour left, which as we all know means anywhere from 3 hours to 3 seconds.
and I wanted to get my bid back in before the auction ended.

This error pretty much wiped out all the plat on that toon.
I'd like to see a confirm button at the very least.
Sort of like the destroy. Are you sure you want to use the buyout option?
A confirm buyout would be greatly appreciated, especially when people insist on putting extremly outrageous (IMO)
buyout prices.
Could I get Dev thoughts on this issue?

/signed
This would be a much appreciated addition.

[greystone306]

Auction times are not fully accurate to stop last second sniping. I do believe i read that from a Dev many months ago.

I would think if they changed from hour increments to thirty minute increments it wouldn't really help the snipers that much.. and anyway what is the big deal with that? people have different strategies.. so what if someone beats you by being able to put in a bid at last minute? right now 1 hour can mean anything from 1 second to 1 hour 59 minutes....

[Nefahrin]

Are we really that worried about last minute sniping?
I'd rather know how much time is left on the auction.
Do I have to stand there because it's ending any minute, or can
I go do something and come back in 15 - 20 minutes>

[Nott]

The only way I would be in favor of more accurate timing is if they also allow a way to bid my maximum without the maximum becoming the current bid. I think others have called this a proxy bid? It means that... lets say I want that 5k item and I'm willing to pay 300k for it if I have to... well I place my max bid as 300k but the bid goes to 5.1k. All things being equal, that's what I pay... but if someone else has, say, a max bid set at 10k, the current bid becomes 10.1k with me at the top. As long as someone else isn't paying more than my max bid, I will win the item without dumping my bank account to get it.

[Nefahrin]

Yes Proxy bidding would be the bomb
The Devs should visit Ebay for ideas LOL

[Phax]

Can we look into doing 3 things?
1. Confirm Buyout.
Yes, I agree this should be looked into, with a confirmation for bids as well.

2. Not have the buyout and Bid button side by side.
Yes. The buttons were intended to be moved when we did the UI updates to the AH, though when we add the confirmation dialog this shouldn't really be an issue.

3. Make the time remaining more accurate (I.E. 34 min left?)
The current timings are by design, and I don't see that changing.

Responses in green.

[Oreg]

Agreed with Phax.

That does suck for you Nefharin. I for one would not like to lose that amount of Plat.

[tihocan]

Thanks for the buyout confirmation!

[Lorien_the_First_One]

Thanks for the answers Phax. I look forward to the changes you suggest.

Just out of curriousity, why is it more accurate times are not in the game by design? Are you trying to stop last minute sniping? Would it create too much load somehow? Or something so complex it would make my brain hurt?

[Nefahrin]

Thanks for the answers

I too would like to know why we can't get more accurate times remaining and if Proxy bidding is in
the future.
It'd be nice to put in a max bid on something that ends while I'm sleeping and know, at least if I lost,
it went for more than I wanted to pay anyway.

[Wizzly_Bear]

proxy bidding
/signed

[Albel]

Thanks for the answers Phax. I look forward to the changes you suggest.

Just out of curriousity, why is it more accurate times are not in the game by design? Are you trying to stop last minute sniping? Would it create too much load somehow? Or something so complex it would make my brain hurt?

I can see two immediately apparent reasons, The first is of course to stop the non-committed from sniping (yes with the current system as long as you know how you can "snipe" the bid), the second being the timer, showing the timer as a countdown like with our buffs is one thing, but the next ice age will come before the devs do that, so the alternative is to just have the timer show up every time you refresh the AH screen, meaning now you have 20-50 times (arbitrary number) the people normally loading pages from the AH that are constantly (ie every few min) refreshing the screens to watch their auctions. Imagine the strain on the servers....


Anyways I also would like to cast my vote for Proxy bidding.

[apollojuly]

Well I was going to request relabeling all activity on the auction house from gold standard to plat standard. I just view everthing in terms of plat and I get real nervous that I will accidentally misread an item's price and overbid for something by a factor of 10.

But since everthing else from DDO is measured in gold (vendors, brokers, item descriptions, etc.) it wouldn't make sense to change just one thing.

I guess just double and triple checking the number that I am typing, along with a confirm would help.

[captain1z]

<<<--------- once upon a time "MY FRIEND" bought 1 amethyst screaming arrow for 10K pp and did not realize his mistake until he shot it twice and it didnt come back and a message said out of ammo. He was nearly broke after that.......hes so stupid and had he been able to read may have avoided that.


/signed (not that it would help "my friend" anyway)

[Mercules]

Please... No proxy bidding. Proxy bidding only favors those with plat. Who has plenty of plat? Plat sellers. Why would they buy things? To drive the prices up so that people will be more inclined to buy plat. Why does Proxy bidding allow this?

Plat seller picks a targeted item, say Collapsed Portable Holes to boost and picks a target amount to push it too.

Plat seller has someone log in each day and place bids on that item for his target price.

If someone outbids them this pushes the price for that item up.

If someone doesn't outbid them then the plat seller has the item for less than their target price and turns around and puts it up at the target price, making a profit when it sells. Yes they WILL sell it for that much as proxy bid means they will win all the auctions but those that exceed their price pushing the cost up. Yes, they CAN do this now, but they have to invest a ton of time(last minute bidding and monitoring) or plat(just forcing all of them to cost that much and thus not ever buying lower and selling higher).

I've used this tactic in a game where there was proxy bidding to raise the price of an item I had an easy source for and could make cheaper/faster than others.

[Kilgore61]

The current timings are by design, and I don't see that changing.

I presume it is felt this prevents sniping. In practice it fails and sniping is rampant.

It does have many negative effects on the game:
- It does prevent the casual gamer from knowing when to observe an auction to prevent being sniped.
- It requires you to sit at the AH for an hour at times, rather than playing the game, to have any chance of winning a popular item. This is somewhat of a double negative as it takes the player away from the game and makes one less player available to others for grouping.
- The exact time the auction ends can be determined by monitoring desirable items over time. Unfortunately, only farmers are likely to devote this much time to the AH, allowing them to get deals by sniping auctions for resale.

[Nott]

Please... No proxy bidding. Proxy bidding only favors those with plat. Who has plenty of plat? Plat sellers.

Plenty of non-plat sellers have plenty of plat too. I'm not one of them, but recently a guild mate entrusted me to pass 600k plat to each of two of his new characters. Is my guild mate a plat seller? I guess I can't know for certain, but considering he routinely gives valuable items away without asking anything in return, I suspect not.

Proxy bidding can cause prices to rise of people with plat to spend want them... that's the nature of any economy. If the trade is happening on the AH, at least it will remove 30% of that plat from the game... resulting in declining costs (or, at least, mitigating the cost escalation as more plat enters the game). If plat sellers want to drive prices higher by buying things for plenty of plat, I'm in favor of it -- it's a self-correcting problem, since it removes plat from the economy and since those sellers are only able to purchase these items by paying more than anyone else would to begin with.

[Dane_McArdy]

I'd be happy if they got ride of the Auction House, but that isn't going to happen.

So, I'm not really for proxy bidding, though better timers would be nice. I know they said it was by design, but can the design change from hours to maybe half hours? So when it says you have an hour left, it could be 90 minutes, or when it says a half hour it could be 30-60 minutes.