[X] My Assistant

This is the thread for discussion of my auctions. For a while, most discussion had been going on in the Ask the Experts thread where I usually hang out, but I figured it was time to create a dedicated topic more suited to the purpose.

Feel free to make post suggestions, complaints, comments, or anything remotely related to auctions in general. The more feedback, the better - this is all for you guys, after all.

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Should the minimum bid increments be changed? Post #5+

Don't send trash that has no chance of getting bid on Post #60+

Limit of 3 proxy bids due to minimum increment advantage Post #94+

This post has been edited by Superlatanium: Nov 2 2016, 01:02

(at that point why are you even proxy bidding?)

So that I can win an item by +1k instead of +3%

assuming someone place 5m as their final bid, with normal bidding you'd need to crank out 5.15m for the win, but you can potentially use the proxy bidder to win by 5.001m instead.

That's a saving of nearly 150k.
Granted its not much for someone ready to splash 5m++, but savings is still savings.

I don't see this as a problem but wonder if its doable.

assuming someone place 5m as their final bid, with normal bidding you'd need to crank out 5.15m for the win, but you can potentially use the proxy bidder to win by 5.001m instead.

That's a saving of nearly 150k.
Granted its not much for someone ready to splash 5m++, but savings is still savings.

I don't see this as a problem but wonder if its doable.

And if someone places 5.002m you still lose.
I don't really see the big problem considering the 3% rule.

Say, is it possible for someone to repeatedly enter a proxy bid of

(current price *1.03*1.03+1000)

so that, that person wins by (2nd highest bid+1k credits) instead of (>=2nd highest bid+3%)

or better yet, just proxy bid (current price +1000)

As Sapo said. Just proxy bid yourself and it's not an issue. Proxy bidding (currBid + 1k) will always fail, it has to be at least +3% (or whatever the minimum is), even if you try a javascript / POST hack. (and if the person does that, everyone will see it and the person will be put on the shitlist)

Proxy bidders are only immune to the minimum bid increment the moment their proxy bid maximum is revealed, which no one knows beforehand. If a manual bidder bids exactly +3%, they'll be open to exploitation that way. But if they bid roundup(+3%) to a nicer round number, like many do, then they start winning.

repeatedly enter a proxy bid

Remember that all that really matters is each player's secret max bid. Unless each player's secret max bid is almost exactly the same order of magnitude (which is very unlikely now that we're using +3%), the outcome will be the same.

If someone goes to those lengths, they're probably making things a lot more inconvenient for themselves than they're benefiting, anyway. Also, I'll see it and I'll tell them to knock it off.

any thoughts on letting sellers set an (initially hidden) reserve price?

any thoughts on letting sellers set an (initially hidden) reserve price?

That would be very annoying.
Let's say I have 10M budget and 2 items I'm interested in.
If both combined go over 10M I will probably need to give up one of the two.
In case one has a reserve price I will, for sure, not bid on it because I don't want to risk losing both items (if others outbid me I see no problem in getting nothing, if I commit to an item and still not get it because the seller wanted more credits I'm definitely not ok with the result).

I may even actively boycott items with reserve price attached because honestly, fuck reserve price.

any thoughts on letting sellers set an (initially hidden) reserve price?

It wouldn't be difficult (just slightly more tedious for me), but why have it hidden? Sounds like it would mostly just annoy potential buyers, without all that much reason for it. Better for the seller just to put a (reasonable) visible start price. (and if it's not reasonable, I probably won't list it)

Butcher option will increae base attack damage(I'm not usre by how much. Is it 2% per level?) so buyers could have hard time trying to figure out if that rapier is better than the other.

Also, showing next minimum bid value could be handy.
For example:
[WEA01] 50k (Next minimum bid: 80k)
[WEA02] 823k (Next minimum bid: 865k)
etc...

If it's possible, can your script calculate the base stats of the weapons/armors given excluding forges/potencies, because sometimes you see weapons that say things like 95% ADB when actually they're near bottom of the barrel, just forged/butchered up to look like they have top of the line ADB instead.

Oh.
Is the strict selection already finished?
What's with all these estocs, longswords and katanas of balance? And Focus staves with 20% mdb, non shielding plate....
Does that mean that I can send again my warding stuff?
*sarcasm*

This post has been edited by ppp82p: Jul 20 2016, 20:52

Butcher option will increae base attack damage(I'm not usre by how much. Is it 2% per level?) so buyers could have hard time trying to figure out if that rapier is better than the other.

It's possible, I just need the free time to code it first, it'd be a modification of the Percentile Ranges script

Also, showing next minimum bid value could be handy.
For example:
[WEA01] 50k (Next minimum bid: 80k)
[WEA02] 823k (Next minimum bid: 865k)
etc...

You can see that on the item list. For something valuable, it's in the bidder's best interest to proxy bid instead, and all of that'll be taken care of automatically. For less valuable stuff, it's easy to do +50k. I'm pretty hesitant about adding more text to the lines, I've run into the post length limit a number of times.

What's with all these estocs, longswords and katanas of balance? And Focus staves with 20% mdb, non shielding plate....
Does that mean that I can send again my warding stuff?
*sarcasm*

Yeah, I know there's a decent amount of junky stuff, this week I already returned a whole lot of gears people sent that were even worse.
A few of them are of a bad type but have IW10, which should make them a bit more valuable. We'll see. Someone already thought it was worth IWing to 10, so it's not too difficult to think of someone else wanting to try it for 50k or 80k or something.
I know people prefer Slaughter, but Katanas in general are pretty popular. Maybe a couple people will be interested in Ethereal non-Slaughter, maybe not. If not, then I'll know not to accept those types of gears later.

Focus staves with 20% mdb

[Sta03] Legendary Tempestuous Redwood Staff of Focus (317, MDB 20%) (seller: hekiga)

At level 317, I think most players would be very happy if they were able to find a Legendary-grade staff in the first place. That's definitely low level enough to try listing and see what happens, don't you think? Lower level players are the ones who can utilize Focus best, after all.

non shielding plate....

Yeah, they're Mithril Protection instead. I was thinking about rejecting them but I'm not 100% sure that absolutely no one would want them. Probably not, but I felt like trying it out and see if anyone's interested. If no one bids then I'll know to reject them in the future. I wish Mithril reduced burden by more than it does...

Note that this stuff generally hasn't been auctioned before; it's not stuff I know for certain no one wants. Since the auction had room and I want to see what the ending bids will be, I gave them a chance. Note that me not rejecting some item type/level during one auction doesn't mean it's something I'll accept later, usually it just means I want to see what the ending price will be so I'll be more confident about what to do about something like that next time.

Rejecting stuff is much more tedious than letting stuff be added, by default everything in my inbox is added automatically.

Allowing people to outbid others from 1k with proxy bid is not so different from sniping. (I didin't realize such a thing was possible)

So proxy bid is not "the best way" to bid in an auction, as you can avoid the minimum bid increment, it's as weak as manual bid but in a different way. And you can do that multiple times: proxy bid 101k then 202k then 303k....and everytime try to avoid a minimum bid. Saving 50k on 1 item is not that great, but if you do that all the time on 20 item you save 1m. (avoid 3% on 5~10m worth item it's quite huge)

Allowing people to outbid others from 1k with proxy bid is not so different from sniping. (I didin't realize such a thing was possible)

No it's not.
If I proxy bid 101k I'm not sniping a later bid of 100k because I bid more and earlier.
If the current bid is 100k I cannot proxy bid 101k because it's later and not 3% more.

How is that even close to sniping?

I get outbid of 1k??????????????????

Whenever you see an increment that is lower than the normal minimum bid increment, that means you've hit the proxy bidder's maximum bid. If you bid again after that, you'll be winning.

Yes, proxy bidders have only a 1k minimum bid increment after their first bid submission. The reasoning is: for example, if player A proxy bids on an item for 1000k on Wednesday, and then player B bids on the item in the last hours of the auction for 960k, A deserves to be winning more than B even though an ordinary next bid would be at least 1010k.

Same thing for if a proxy bidder places a max bid (for instance) of 900k on Wednesday, and then someone bids in the last hour for 900k. The earlier bidder (who also isn't trying to snipe) deserves to get priority more than the person who is manually bidding and sniping.

Allowing people to outbid others from 1k with proxy bid is not so different from sniping. (I didin't realize such a thing was possible)

So proxy bid is not "the best way" to bid in an auction, as you can avoid the minimum bid increment, it's as weak as manual bid but in a different way. And you can do that multiple times: proxy bid 101k then 202k then 303k....and everytime try to avoid a minimum bid. Saving 50k on 1 item is not that great, but if you do that all the time on 20 item you save 1m. (avoid 3% on 5~10m worth item it's quite huge)

The proxy bidder is subject to the minimum bid increment when they submit the bid. After that, it's true they might win when only bidding an additional trivial amount over someone else, but

• their lower bid increment also means a higher chance that their new winning bid (their maximum) is lower than other players' secret maximums
• when other players see the bid increment was lower than the next minimum bid, that's an indication that the proxy bidder's maximum has been reached, so it only takes one more bid for the other player to start winning on the item, which is not unlikely given a 50k or 3% increment
• other bidders can counter by not bidding predictable multiples of 1000k or 50k, by not rounding to nice-looking numbers, etc
• other bidders can also counter by proxy bidding themselves, which they should probably be doing anyway if they have an idea of how much they value the item themselves, and want to keep themselves from being sniped, and don't want to carefully hang around the auction in the last minutes to counter-snipe

In other proxy auction systems, I made sure never to bid nice round numbers. If I bid 10,000 on something, chances aren't too low that someone else bid 10,000, and if they bid that amount before me, they would win. If I valued something at around the order of magnitude of 10,000, I'd probably proxy bid for 10,340 or something like that.

Many times when I did this, I found that I outbid others who had bid predictable amounts of more round-looking numbers like 10,000 or 10,100 or 10,200. Smart bidders will do the same thing in hentaiverse auctions.

I think that the current mechanic for resolving clashing between a proxy's max bid and a standard forum post bid is blatantly disadvantaged to the standard post bidder.
This is because even if the proxy bidder tries to circumvent the minimum bid requirement by guessing, the worst consequence for a wrong guess is that proxy bid won't go through and they'll have to adhere to the 3% min. bid. This effectively gives the proxy bidder unlimited guesses, putting the onus of increasing the bid price solely on the manual bidder. This is more than encouraging people to proxy bid; it is discouraging people to bid with standard posts. As good as a proxy bid system is, I don't think discouraging people from manual bidding is a good principle to adhere to, nor a good precedent to set.

Maybe we can limit the times a person can place a proxy bid on a single item to 3.

Since bidders are supposed to enter their secret max bid, 3 chances should be plenty.

As good as a proxy bid system is, I don't think discouraging people from manual bidding is a good principle to adhere to, nor a good precedent to set.

That's actually the point.
Proxy bidding saves time (no useless bid war with minimum increments) and should definitely be used by more.
I strongly disagree with your point of view (which is not even supported by any arguments, why is discouraging manual bidding a bad principle?).

@LOL50015: I see no drawback to that (proxy bid should be used to set your true max bid or very close, if you ribid three times you're not using the feature correctly) but I don't think it's really needed since manual bidders usually magically decide that they want to bid (with their true max value) a few minutes before the end of the auction, and proxy bidding is turned off during extended time.

I think old system bid is better , super

regular and normal bid system

That's actually the point.
Proxy bidding saves time (no useless bid war with minimum increments) and should definitely be used by more.

Firstly, given that the current system allows both methods of bidding, taking the more direct and traditional method shouldn't be punished. They should both be equally viable, or else there seems to be little point in actually allowing people to manually bid; we might as well just forbid everyone from manually bidding.

Secondly, the current method of proxy bidding isn't exactly the most straightforward especially to newcomers (see the every expanding rules and requirement of bidkey). We should aim for system that is simple and straightforward,

I think that the current mechanic for resolving clashing between a proxy's max bid and a standard forum post bid is blatantly disadvantaged to the standard post bidder.
This is because even if the proxy bidder tries to circumvent the minimum bid requirement by guessing, the worst consequence for a wrong guess is that proxy bid won't go through and they'll have to adhere to the 3% min. bid. This effectively gives the proxy bidder unlimited guesses, putting the onus of increasing the bid price solely on the manual bidder. This is more than encouraging people to proxy bid; it is discouraging people to bid with standard posts. As good as a proxy bid system is, I don't think discouraging people from manual bidding is a good principle to adhere to, nor a good precedent to set.

Since the minimum increments are quite small, the amount of error (and the ending price advantage that proxy bidders get) is tiny. The ending price is still almost completely determined by each player's secret maximum bid. The minimum bid increment is there to keep players from intentionally bidding trivial amounts (accomplishing little but annoying other bidders on the item) - but given that proxy bidders are submitting a proxy bid that is already the minimum increment or (more likely) higher, and given that other bidders can immediately see if they've outbid a proxy bidder or not, I think it's not a restriction they need.

Proxy bidders having no required minimum bid increment only provides the proxy bidder an ending price advantage when the highest two bidders' secret maximum bids (call them proxyMax and manualMax) are within [3% or 50k] of each other (which is very rare for non-Mats), and when the proxy bidder submits their true max bid before the manual bidder bids near their maximum, and when

proxyMax >= manualMax: when the maximum bids are within [3% or 50k] of each other, we can assume this happens 50% of the time; proxy bidder wins the item, at a price advantage of (proxyMax - manualMax). Assuming a uniform distribution of secret max bids, then in this quite unlikely situation, the proxy bidder gains an ending price advantage of 1.5%. That is quite tiny.

Note that in the past, for a very long time, minimum bid increments were 10%, resulting in much larger discrepancies. I think that, except for a certain few [Mats], players' secret maximum bids are almost never that concrete, anyway; players themselves may not quite know where exactly they want to stop bidding until the very end, and even then they're probably pretty indifferent to an ending price of, for example, 1666k vs 1716k.

This is also making the unrealistic assumption that the revealed proxy bidder's max bid won't incentivize the manual bidder to bid just one more time and consequently win the item. (But if the manual bidder knows there's a pretty decent chance that the proxy bidder has reached their true limit, they'll probably bid again to win, given the small minimum bid increments)

Another justification for the proxy bidders having a tiny advantage is because they're submitting their bids earlier. In a similar vein, ordinary bidders who submit their bid before others' may have an advantage; there might exist a maxBid > currBid, but maxBid < nextMinimumBid(currBid), so despite someone else being willing to pay slightly more, the earlier bidder wins the item, for an ending price smaller than the other player's maximum bid. Manual bidders usually have the annoying habit of waiting until the last hour of the auction to snipe their desired item. Proxy bidders usually submit their bids well in advance. I like treating those who aren't sniping better than those who are sniping.

Anyone can proxy bid. I've even spent a bit of my own funds to hire translators for the auction rules and features, and in each of the the translations, it it said that proxy bidding is strongly recommended over standard bidding for items one is seriously interested in. If users don't wish to take advantage of proxy bidding despite my pushing it and despite the much greater convenience it provides for them and others... well, I'm tempted to say that that the outcomes are on them.

I push proxy bidding because it helps everyone when there are fewer snipers and when fewer players have to go through the tedium of re-bidding.

I think old system bid is better , super

regular and normal bid system

Do you prefer every player (in this international forum) being required to be awake and available during the last hour of an auction to have a decent chance of winning items at a good price? Do you also prefer frequent tedious bidding and re-bidding? If proxy bidding was not an option, I don't see why bidders would be happier.

Secondly, the current method of proxy bidding isn't exactly the most straightforward especially to newcomers (see the every expanding rules and requirement of bidkey). We should aim for system that is simple and straightforward,

It's true proxy bidding isn't completely straightforward, but it's described at the top of every auction, and everyone looking at the current winning bidders will often see others with proxy bids. It's not the simplest process, but it's not hard at all to understand or to see why it's useful.

If everyone spoke perfect English it would be much easier to communicate the usefulness of proxy bids and the straightforward process. If there could be automatic authentication from E-H that would make things even simpler. Unfortunately, both of those are completely impossible. Despite that, having the proxy system and the annoyances that go with it (like bidkey) is better than any alternative I've been able to think of.

Firstly, given that the current system allows both methods of bidding, taking the more direct and traditional method shouldn't be punished. They should both be equally viable, or else there seems to be little point in actually allowing people to manually bid; we might as well just forbid everyone from manually bidding.

It's punishing either way.
If I proxy bid 1M I shouldn't be sniped by a manual bid of 999k (at least I don't expect to, like someone bidding 999k does not expect to get outbid by 1M).
At the end of the day it's either you punish manual bid or proxy bid, you can't have the cake and eat it too.

Secondly, the current method of proxy bidding isn't exactly the most straightforward especially to newcomers (see the every expanding rules and requirement of bidkey). We should aim for system that is simple and straightforward,

The expanding rules are there both for manual and proxy bidding so I don't really see the difference.
Bidkey is an annoyance and I can agree with that but so is bidding 10 times for little increments or get sniped because you had other things to do or you simply forgot (I got my current helmet by bidding at the cinema 2 minutes before the start of the film, and I didn't even know I got it until 2h later, literally a major pain in the ass).
And really, bidkey is just sending a pm to Super (and Super usually replies super-fast).