I think something really should be changed with the minimum bid thing. I'm definitely guilty of the whole waiting until the last few minutes to bid sometimes, but I don't do it to intentionally make it harder for other players, I just don't want to be refreshing a page for ages. - normally I'm against people who defend "exploits" like this but this really feels like a flaw in the system design.

Here's how I see it:
For any given item I have a max price I'm willing to pay for it but I also ideally want to pay as little as possible - I imagine I'm not the only one who thinks like this, and I don't think it's wrong to think like this either(isn't it kind of the point of auctions?).

If I immediately put down my max price, there's a good chance someone else will just add +1. To which I'm going to go "I'm not gonna lose this over 1PC" and continue to bid, which is great for the seller! but all I've done is screw myself over. So it literally is the best strategy to just keep adding minimums.

Except the next problem comes with the snipe-guard system. So you can keep adding +1s, but what if you don't have the time because of any myriad of other things you need to be doing irl? If someone else has the time to keep returning +1s, You can try 2 things:
- Add higher bids in hopes you get past what the other person is willing to pay faster - So essentially this auction system becomes a contest of money and time - but as far as I know auctions are meant to be a contest of who's willing to pay more for the item, not who's willing to pay more to not have to watch a web-page for 30 more minutes (or who's willing to spend more time to get a better price)
- If you're an endgame player with a bunch of disposable PC, you can dump a ridiculous amount on it - which isn't a bad thing by itself. I know it annoys some people, but it is kinda how auctions are supposed to work. But this brings us back to the problem of you're not just paying for the item anymore, you're paying to avoid the time wasting.

So then there's the issue that refreshing a page for 10 minutes isn't engaging, and people probably have other stuff they can be doing outside the game. So what I'll do is place a bid, refresh for a minute or so, then if no one else has bid I'll set a 9-10 minute timer, go do something else and check again when the timer's up. Which leads to the "waiting to the last minute" issue. When people +1 and/or wait until the last minute for whatever reason, it creates a vicious circle because all you can really do is play their game.

As for suggestions:
I really like the idea of a minimum bid potentially based of the rarity of the item or the current top bid, but i still think there'd be some problems with snipeguard time wasting

The house idea concerns me, but this is only from my own experience - when I was a new player I basically sold very little because, well, I didn't have much and what I did have I needed (especially plant products and ingredients). For potions and evobars and such I frequently needed to buy things. I worry new players would have access to very limited auctions. I think something like this would hopefully come with additional features to enable trade like the usershop search suggestion. but again, this is only my own experience and I am a bit of a hoarder
Additionally, now that I have a bigger house with more pets that can hoard at a time and more plant slots, I have a lot more surplus stuff that I am happy to throw on the AH, usually only a few PC more than the sellback price just in case anyone else wants it. I wouldn't want to take away access to stuff like that from newer players. Once more though, this is 100% just from my pov, I don't know if Komodo or others have access to the actual statistics of who's selling/buying what and what sort of crossover between "houses" there is, since that could seriously help make a better judgement on this idea.

The usershop search thing has been discussed a bunch, but I'm not sure it'll be all terrible when, like others have pointed out, other sites with open marketplaces seem fine. Maybe an open marketplace instead of usershop search would be better, and it could have stricter limits on purchase amounts?

Some thoughts I've had:

- After snipeguard is triggered a certain number of times, reduce it to 5 minutes or something (make it very clear on the page that this will occur, "in X more bids, snipeguard will be reduced to Y minutes")

- What about increasing the minimum bid by X% for every minute or so after snipeguard is triggered? People intent on getting the best deal will have to actively engage in the bidding, and there's less reason to wait if you're willing to bid higher

- Something like Ebay's auto bid system.
For example:
-There's a stack of Voxels for a starting bid of 200PC on the AH, and you're willing to pay up to 400PC for them. So you enter a "max" bid of 400PC, so the system puts in the 200PC starting bid for you.
-Someone else sees this auction, which is currently at 200PC, and is willing to pay up to 300PC for them. So they enter their "max" bid of 300PC, however since you've already placed a higher max bid, the system will auto bid for you at 310PC.
-Another person comes along who used *all* their voxels hunting albino colocrows so they're pretty desperate. So they put in a max bid of 600PC, and as this is higher than your "max" bid of 400PC, the system then bids 410PC for them.
This way, people who want to fight with minimum bids are only using their own time, but the responses will potentially be quicker so there's no need for timers or refreshing waiting for the other person to respond.
Though I don't how much work or how feasible a system like that would be to implement.

- Also the more I think about it I just don't really see why snipeguard has to be so long at all? I think it's necessary to have, but 10 min just seems too much. Something like 3 minutes seems extreme but then people would have to be actively engaging each other and bid wars would resolve faster.

Anyway, sorry for long post, these are just my thoughts after some very long bid wars I don't think either side enjoyed