A few days ago, I was reading the thread "why does the auction system exist?", and there are quite a lot of passionate voices in that thread. As staff, we understand that the reason players raise concerns is because they care about the game and want to see it succeed, not because they're out to cause drama. However, also as staff, it can sometimes be hard to determine whether players are misunderstanding a game mechanic, criticizing something based on personal preference, or raising a valid concern. After all, we can't see from each other's gameplay perspectives. One thing that's clear, though, is that disillusionment with the auction system has become common, and we want players to know that they're being heard. So I've compiled this list as a way to make it easier for Komodo to see the community's suggestions about the auction system. That way, he can decide for himself if the auction system should be improved.

Please keep in mind that Komodo is currently working on Pixpet Adventure, so if/when he considers whether or not to improve auctions, it will most likely be after that's released and has undergone significant debugging. Additionally, we don't know how Pixpet Adventure will affect other aspects of the site once it's released, so some of these suggestions may become unneeded or require modifying.

These suggestions are open to discussion, and I'm more than willing to edit them or add more suggestions. Please remember to be constructive.

I'm thinking that houses would fall into designated groups, such as New Player House, which would range from the Starter Hut to the Woodland Bungalow. Midgame House, which would range from European Lakeside to Designer Two Story. And Endgame House, which is the rest of the houses.

As for the issue of people switching between houses to see different markets, that's a good point. I'd say it's quite a hassle to move out of one's current house just to see a different market, so I'm confident that most players wouldn't bother...but of course, there's always that one person. ^^; Perhaps there could be a strict house cap, like two houses per player, to discourage that behavior. Or, the house groups could be programmed so that once you advance to the next group, you can't see a "lower" market even if you switch houses.

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

I understand that the auction system was intended to be a pretty big gameplay mechanic, so here are my two cents on the issue with that in mind.

As an end-game player, I definitely have a lot more money than time at this point. I gladly overpay for things so that I don't have to sit there and babysit an auction.
But I'm not really a fan of the class system at all, especially since anyone can find big-ticket items and should be paid for those fairly.

But if you're wanting to encourage users to use the auction house over the user shops, I think limiting the types or rarity of items in there might help, as well as a limit on maximum price.
In my personal experience in early and mid-game, finding ingredients to make Evo-bars for my pets took potentially *days* for something I ended up paying like 10PC for at the auctions. (I just needed some darn blueberries!)
But if we could actually search and use user shops for smaller purchases like that, I think it would go a long way. By limiting items under a certain rarity and by type, you still encourage users to use the auction house.
Because if I needed some blueberries now, I'd just pop 150PC on that and call it a day.

Being able to host more auctions may help this, too. Because I only have 5 slots, I have to prioritize what auction I'll host and for how long. It's also just not worth my time anymore to host an auction for like 10PC, so I'm not contributing any items into the economy. I'd literally rather sell everything in my inventory for 1PC each just to avoid the hassle.

I think there should be a tax on user shop sales as well. Whether you want that higher, lower, or equal is up for debate.

That said, I'm a fan of most everything else proposed! That's just been my experience and I hope it helps to put things into perspective. :)

I'm not sure if anyone else has said anything about this but... I really don't like the grouping auctions by housing. Some of us endgame players (like myself) prefer sticking in the Riverside Mansion, for a multitude of reasons. So limiting our auctions by the two houses higher than us, I just really don't like that. That's all I have to say on this piece, I've said more in the previous thread

Added everyone's suggestions (I think) to the first post regardless of whether I personally liked them or not. After all, the list is for Komodo, not me!

And after hearing feedback, I've removed the entire section that says "New players shouldn't have access to endgame items in the auction market" since two users raised a good point that rare items can be found by anyone (and auctioned by anyone), not just endgame players. This section included my "house groups" suggestion, which was very vaguely explained and seemed to be confusing some people.

However it's still important to me that we try to come up with solutions that can help prevent auction domination by veteran players. While PC sinks will help, those can only go so far because when we get down to brass tacks, there will always be players at different stages in the game, and thus anyone who isn't an endgame player is at a large disadvantage in the auction market. In order for auctions to be fair, either everyone would have to be at the same stage in the game, or auctions would have to be divided into two or more separate markets that can only be accessed based on each player's progress. Maybe I'm just not thinking outside the box, but I don't see another way to achieve auction equality.

@Shyads
Oh, I didn't think that you were criticizing Komodo or anyone else, so no worries there. And thank you for sticking around this long, as well as contributing your thoughts to help improve the game

a very minor suggestion but i think it'd be good if the price that pops up when you go to put an item on the market was the sellback price instead of 0, partially because i tend to put items up for that amount and also because i see people getting less than sellback price, especially on the pixpet market. O__O

Just bumping up this suggestion because I just had this happen and can't help but think I might as well be selling via usershop instead of the market because this is just pathetic honestly.

Bumping this as a +1 for setting the minimum bid on a pixpet egg to be the sellback value, and adding in that ALL items should have a minimum bid as their sellback value

A. There is no purpose to selling items under the sellback value. There is a private trading system so you can gift eggs to your friends or sell them directly to new users for cheap if that's the desire. There are a ton of items that sell back for 1pc so those would be unaffected, but there are many others that sell back for over 1pc and go through the system under that value for someone else to sell to the server for profit.

B. While I love the minimum bid increase update, it's entirely killed the incentive to bid war with people on pixpet eggs. The game is now merely first-come-first-serve, and I wouldn't be surprised if the most prolific auctioneers that do this have scripts in place to snap up valuable auctions immediately. It's pretty much impossible to detect, too. All it does is contribute to the inflation of PC, it's not a feature of the game.

No, I like the minimum bid increase and it should stay

It's the auction warring over underpriced eggs and items that needs to go. If people are super vocal about (for whatever reason) being able to set a price below the server sellback price then I suppose I'm in the minority. It would be nice if it was indeed a charitable contribution but.. it's just giving free money to a few people, pretty much. Adding eggs to usershops and gifting would be good, I'm not sure why this isn't already a thing!

But no, unfortunately you can't really detect a script plugging a bid in. It's not a complex process, it would be pretty hard to distinguish a bidding script from a person that just refreshes the game all the time and manually adds bids. And even if you were diligent enough to figure it out, people using scripts are likely going to run them off of a proxy server that doesn't come from their account or IP, so there really isn't much way to stop it. It's not a malicious script, you can inspect a lot of the game elements yourself in Chrome with F12 and choosing Sources.

PC inflation is going to happen in any game that generates currency out of nothing. The point isn't to have a real economy, the point is to have fun. But the idea behind a buy/resell mechanic is for people to buy up items at a price and sell them to -other players- for a higher price. It's pretty silly if players can just buy up items at a price and sell them back to the game for a higher price. I'm all for the sell to server mechanic, it just doesn't make sense to let players offer items below the server sellback price. Even new players can afford 18 PC pixpet eggs. Only the rarest eggs go for hundreds or thousands of PC, but you can buy pretty much every other egg for under 50 PC. A few low level hoards earn you that no problem.