Give us the option to bid anonymously, or make all bidders anonymous, when we're not the host. Then replace the outbid message to reflect that. I see a lot of hostility, passive-aggression and spite coming from being able to see each other's names.

This means the one hosting the auction still sees all the names, but that the ones who make the bid don't see the names of other bidders.

@Manah

This is a popular (and understandable) suggestion, and I've personally seen the animosity between players that you're talking about. At the moment I'm on the fence about anonymous bidding though, because someone brought up a great point that I agree with, which is that I'd like to be able to know if I'm bidding against new players, so I can give them a fair chance at winning auctions.

At the same time I get where you're coming from, and I don't think that anyone is taking the game too seriously if they're frustrated by auctions. Pixpet has a small community, so you're often bidding against the same users, day after day, unlike eBay (which has anonymous bidding, incidentally). You get to know their bidding behaviors. They become like roommates. Also, it can be argued that the competitive aspect of auctions is only fun if you're rich. I'm open to hearing different opinions about that, though.

TL;DR I think a good compromise would be to have anonymous bidding as an option that you can toggle on or off in your user settings.

Thank you for the suggestion!

@Manah

I think what Yubelchen meant was that if a player contacted you directly to intimidate or threaten you out of bidding on a particular auction, that would be worthy of a report. And that's correct. If someone told you that this was allowed, they're very wrong (and if it was a staff member who told you this, I'd love to know who).

And it's true, unfortunately there are endgame players who don't care who they bid against. A while ago I had suggested dividing up the markets by game progress, so that new players would only be able to bid against other new players, and so on. However this probably wouldn't be good for the economy because of how small the community is; we'd end up seeing even emptier markets than we already have. Plus if you found a newly-released item as a new player, you wouldn't be able to peddle it off to rich players with this type of system, and that wouldn't be any fun.

I'm thinking maybe rather than dividing up the markets by game progress, we could have something sort of similar to that, like an AI feature that waits until there are a certain number of bidders on an auction, then reads the wallets of all bidders and averages them together to determine a "cap" that will auto-block players who have more money than the cap. If that makes sense. I realize it's not a perfect idea either and there'd be ways to exploit it. I'll have to think about it more.

Either way, the auctions favoring endgame players has been a hotly debated subject for a while, and I agree that something needs to be done about it at some point. You might already know that the development of Pixpet Adventure is a priority right now, so if this gets addressed it'll most likely happen sometime after official launch and when Adventure is more stable and bug-free.

I'm really sorry that the auctions have been unfun for you. If you ever need help getting something and haven't had any luck in auctions or usershops, please let me know and I'll see what I can do. Of course, I can't always give players everything they ask for, but if you're at the end of your rope and really need something, don't be afraid to ask!

I support anonymous purchases in general, both in auctions as well as usershop.

Moreover, I think we should not only be able to get more usershop slots, but also usershop should take tax like auctions do.

On flight rising, all auction house purchases are anonymous except for dragon purchases which unfortunately can not be made truly anonymous, and it does cause harassment occasionally; meanwhile, being able to buy other things anonymously has not posed any issues at all

If there is concern about not knowing whether the person you're bidding against is a new or old player, maybe their join date could be visible? Not the exact day but rather month/year? That's a possibility.

And well other than that, an auction system is what it is, and any sort of sales system will ultimately and inevitably be in favour of richer players. Usershop daily purchase limit helps a little bit but you can still buy 3/5 of someone's usersales in just one day, and come back for the rest on the next, which is why I think more slots would help

Anyway I'm kinda rambling now but these are my thoughts!

@BK47
Sadly these were throwaway accounts, had gibberish numbers and letters as usernames. These throwaways weren't on Pixpet discord, but someone must have seen me from there? Whoever it is, they covered up their trail really well. I'm sorry I don't have more info to give, I fear they could hack my Discord and it's really prized to me...

Oh I meant more of a megaphone feature. The forums and Discord tend to be very quiet. But I will try out the forum to ask for items I want to buy.

Perhaps something to kiiiinda prevent older players from ruining the bidding would be forbidding to add 1000+ coins at once? Give the bidding a limit, just like there is a minimum of how low you can go. I know it probably won't do much because they'll still be able to add over time... But it's still not outright?

@BK47
Unfortunately I don't have any screenshots, but if it happens again I will see what I can do!
Also part of the reason I'm scared is because several of my friend's discord accounts were compromised lately, my livelihood is on it and that's why I'm mostly just praying it passes over

@Klaora
Hey if you're not doing it to flex, then it is not directed at you personally! I never seen you outbid me either, not as consistently as some did. But some have been a bad sport about it, I won't say names though. It's just not a 100% assurance that it is always done as good intention. Granted, I should have added the keyword "some" to the quoted area, as I definitely don't think ALL players do it.

I am glad others didn't have to see the mean messages, and I don't want to go into that problem too much, but these things can and do happen is all. The only reason I mentioned it here in the first place was that it was a consequence of lack of anonymity in bidding.

Back to the topic, I think we can agree that there needs to be some improvements in the auction system?

I believe some of them may be doing it to fully secure said egg? Whenever I join a game I tend to grind for tons of money fast and then look at my inventory, go "Hmmm, I am missing X or Y or Z" and then secure bid in auctions. Something this even works as a method in real life related auctions, so I can see how a bunch of new users could use the same tactic. It can make them appear at first glance to be someone you may not want to bid against as they could easily outbid you. Then you get to check their page and see that they probably bid their entire household for that one auction lol

Also to add on the first topic, I am in favour of anonymous bidding as a toggle option as I am sure some of us would like to keep it visible.

@BK47
Thank you for keeping an eye out and I hope no one else has to encounter it.

I really like the two toggles, I think it will ease a lot of anxiety players may have