Buy Offers need Tweaking

[hypevosa]

I'll be frank - the current way that buy offers work is exhausting and painful. The fact that someone can literally offer .0001 more than what you are offering to kick you out of buying is insulting in some ways, and painful in others. I would like to suggest that making a new buy offer requires the offer be a minimum of 10% higher so long as the price is still below 10 coins (and bids already made are left standing for when the other buyer is no longer buying). This way people actually have to pay something to kick another person out of the market for an item.

I'm tired of having to check my buy offers after every, single convoy.

[Guest]

Sometimes it's a bit annoying, but the thing is, if someone offers a little bit more, that's still something that you weren't willing to pay... or if you were, then you should have offered that from the beginning. If you just offer what the item is really worth to you, then you're not losing anything if others buy it for more, because you would rather have that amount of gold than the item in question. And when the other guy who values the item a bit higher has it, his buy offer disappears, and yours becomes active, without you having to do anything.

[hypevosa]

But it's purposeless when anyone can go "yeah, I'd pay one thousandth of a coin more" when you're looking at at all similar price points. It's the same thing that happens in ebay auctions - for the last 2 minutes you see bids constantly rising by bare minimums. The difference there, is the auctions actually end - here it's essentially going on forever, and our bidding system actually has no minimum bid increase.

If someone wants to pay more for an item, it should be appreciable to the point it's actually a decision. No one notices one thousandth of a coin, but they do notice when their bid must increase by any reasonable percentage.

There are reasons that there are minimum bid increases in ebay - we should follow suit.

[Ood]

True, Mr. Nil, but...

Say I have an offer for something I want to pay 1 coin for, and 1 coin is a good price for this item. Someone can out bid you by .1 and up the price to 1.1, or they can outbid you and up the price to 1.000000001 (unless it's changed, fractions less than 0.0001 are okay, as long as the total is larger than 0.0001) Either way, the bid of 1 is no longer the high bid. But if the player choose to bid 1.000000001 instead... essentially 1 and 1.000000001 are the same price, but the liquidated item will go to the person bidding 1.000000001 until their offer is satisfied or beaten.

For the time being I think a decent soultion would be a twofold approach:
1) Limit buy offer's quantity to something like 5 or 10. This way, you can still purchase things while not logged in, but if you are an ass and only up the bid by an insignificant fraction, you will still get your items, but you will not be able to capture the market indefinitely.

2) Limit amendments to buy offers by type and level to once every 24 (or perhaps 48) hours. This lets more different people buy things, as offers will actually expire (due to condition 1), and not be resubmitted for a given amount of time. Offers themselves would not expire, you just wouldn't be able to change your price to 0.00001 higher than the current high bid all of the time.

These two would make so that people can't have buy offers for 100s of the same item out constantly, and would limit price jumpers to one change every so often.

[hypevosa]

I'm not really a fan of limiting how often someone can use an interface - this is also something that leads to frustration. Especially since it's the source of income for the game once we get to production, that doesn't sound like it would be wise since merchants, while an annoyance to some players, would ultimately end up helping to keep the game afloat.

[Guest]

Point is, the bidding war only continues for as long as people are willing to pay more. In the end, the person willing to bid higher wins. And that guy could have saved a bunch of time by putting up his fair offer for what he thought the item was worth from the beginning, instead of having a bidding war at lower prices. Ebay-like sites will usually save you the trouble by letting you set a max price, and automatically increasing offers by small amounts. That way, whoever is willing to bid the most wins, without the bullshit bidding wars at lower prices than any of the participants value the item. Without this system, the same thing happens, but it takes a bit more time. Eventually all items will have reasonable offers on them(not 0.0001, or 0.00011, or 0.00012001), and the game will have a real economy that isn't centered around being the sneakiest bid raising ninja.

[amitp]

In theory 0.0001 bid increments are good and efficient but in practice there are transaction costs to this, both cognitive and UI. What can end up happening is that it shifts from being a battle of prices to a battle of attrition, where bots will win because they are more efficient at handling those transaction costs. (I have a little bit of experience with this in WoW, where I was able to dominate the auction house for certain goods even though they had listing prices and minimum increments.) If the system automatically does bid increments ("second price auction"), then it can be safer to put in "what you were willing to pay" without losing out, and there will be less incentive to bot. But in a world with substitute goods, I think the Vickrey second-price approach may not be optimal either. Something for Rob to ponder in designing this market.

[hypevosa]

Aug 31, 2013 11:00:12 GMT -5:

Point is, the bidding war only continues for as long as people are willing to pay more. In the end, the person willing to bid higher wins. And that guy could have saved a bunch of time by putting up his fair offer for what he thought the item was worth from the beginning, instead of having a bidding war at lower prices. Ebay-like sites will usually save you the trouble by letting you set a max price, and automatically increasing offers by small amounts. That way, whoever is willing to bid the most wins, without the bullshit bidding wars at lower prices than any of the participants value the item. Without this system, the same thing happens, but it takes a bit more time. Eventually all items will have reasonable offers on them(not 0.0001, or 0.00011, or 0.00012001), and the game will have a real economy that isn't centered around being the sneakiest bid raising ninja.

No no no, you mean the bidding war only continues for as long as people keep signing in to update their bids by one thousandth or ten thousandth of a coin... It does not ever stop because, naturally, people want to get things at the best price they can. You don't walk up to a person in a flea market and, while they're throwing item X in the garbage tell them and then loudly announce the item is worth [insert your highest offer] to you (because, remember, the idea is that these people are essentially throwing half these items away otherwise, it's also the delete button). You offer them anything because they're literally halfway to putting it in the garbage already - and here they can't throw it in the garbage to spite you either.

Let's put it this way, a minimum bid increase would save everyone time since items would eventually reach their highest price point SOONER rather than later. The game makes more money (when coins are eventually bought), sellers get more for items, and buyers spend less time entering ones and zeros and more time playing. Everyone wins. It also decreases the likelihood of people using bots on the market since there's less need for micromanagement.

[Guest]

Aug 31, 2013 12:20:59 GMT -5 hypevosa said:

Aug 31, 2013 11:00:12 GMT -5:

Point is, the bidding war only continues for as long as people are willing to pay more. In the end, the person willing to bid higher wins. And that guy could have saved a bunch of time by putting up his fair offer for what he thought the item was worth from the beginning, instead of having a bidding war at lower prices. Ebay-like sites will usually save you the trouble by letting you set a max price, and automatically increasing offers by small amounts. That way, whoever is willing to bid the most wins, without the bullshit bidding wars at lower prices than any of the participants value the item. Without this system, the same thing happens, but it takes a bit more time. Eventually all items will have reasonable offers on them(not 0.0001, or 0.00011, or 0.00012001), and the game will have a real economy that isn't centered around being the sneakiest bid raising ninja.

No no no, you mean the bidding war only continues for as long as people keep signing in to update their bids by one thousandth or ten thousandth of a coin... It does not ever stop because, naturally, people want to get things at the best price they can. You don't walk up to a person in a flea market and, while they're throwing item X in the garbage tell them and then loudly announce the item is worth [insert your highest offer] to you (because, remember, the idea is that these people are essentially throwing half these items away otherwise, it's also the delete button). You offer them anything because they're literally halfway to putting it in the garbage already - and here they can't throw it in the garbage to spite you either.

Let's put it this way, a minimum bid increase would save everyone time since items would eventually reach their highest price point SOONER rather than later. The game makes more money (when coins are eventually bought), sellers get more for items, and buyers spend less time entering ones and zeros and more time playing. Everyone wins. It also decreases the likelihood of people using bots on the market since there's less need for micromanagement.

No, it ends where one person is willing to bid more, and the other is not. The increments do not matter, because any item at any time has a precise personal value; Maybe you think 0.0001 is nothing, but there is a point where you're willing to bid 0.0001 higher than the last person, and there's another point where you are not, and the only thing affected by the size of the price increments to get there is the time that is being wasted feeling like an idiot. 1000 price increases of 0.0001 each is the same as 0.1 in one step. When you decide how much you are raising the offer by, you are weighing your extreme greed(the chance of saving money if someone acts on your offer, by raising by 0.0001 instead of 0.1) against time you will have to spend feeling like an idiot, raising by minuscule amounts over and over. The chance that your offer will activate is minimal though, because a minute later it won't be there anymore, and you will be putting up a new shitty offer.

If you really want to speed the process up, there are manybetter ways, such as the Ebay-type function I mentioned earlier.

By the way, the reason why minimum raises of significant size should not exist in a game or the real world. If I am willing to pay a certain amount for an item, and someone else pays less, but they still get the item, then something is seriously wrong. If that isn't immediately obvious to you, let's think about it this way. One person is happy because they got an item for what might be less than its actual value, one person is sad because he had more money to offer, but the system didn't accept it for bullshit reasons, and another person is sad because he could have had gotten more money for his item if the system simply sold to the highest bidder.

[hypevosa]

Aug 31, 2013 20:55:45 GMT -5:

By the way, the reason why minimum raises of significant size should not exist in a game or the real world. If I am willing to pay a certain amount for an item, and someone else pays less, but they still get the item, then something is seriously wrong. If that isn't immediately obvious to you, let's think about it this way. One person is happy because they got an item for what might be less than its actual value, one person is sad because he had more money to offer, but the system didn't accept it for bullshit reasons, and another person is sad because he could have had gotten more money for his item if the system simply sold to the highest bidder.

So you can think of any item where you say it's worth X and then if someone upped it by 1/10,000 of a coin for it, you would go "Nope too rich for my blood" and walk away? Sorry, I call bullshit except for where you are paying everything you own for an item and literally are not allowed to bid that ten thousandth of a coin. Therein lies the rub - you bothered to put your high bid out there, essentially establishing the new acceptable price for an item, and now someone goes, "but I want it" and nudges your effort aside for a mere pittance price differential. YOU established a new price for the item, YOU are the person not lowballing the marketplace, and now you don't get jack shit because someone had the .0001 coins to buy you out. The person who sold their item owes to you the fact that they got that number of coins, and you're left with nothing for actually bothering to pay more than the other people were originally trying to buy for.

And therein lies the biggest problem I see - you've stagnated the buying pool, because you now have so few people who are even in the buying market due to the ridiculous behavior, that you're essentially artificially lowering the prices of all items. While joe-blow may honestly believe your item is worth 10 coins, he's just going to stick to trying to find it on his own since he's not willing to play the "who isn't on anymore" game with whoever already has the buy offer on the marketplace (a game he's already lost a few times, or has grown tired of).

I'm getting tired of the game, I'd rather we piss or get off the pot with pricing - and I may leave the buying market at this point if it continues.

[Guest]

Aug 31, 2013 21:45:57 GMT -5 hypevosa said:

Aug 31, 2013 20:55:45 GMT -5:

By the way, the reason why minimum raises of significant size should not exist in a game or the real world. If I am willing to pay a certain amount for an item, and someone else pays less, but they still get the item, then something is seriously wrong. If that isn't immediately obvious to you, let's think about it this way. One person is happy because they got an item for what might be less than its actual value, one person is sad because he had more money to offer, but the system didn't accept it for bullshit reasons, and another person is sad because he could have had gotten more money for his item if the system simply sold to the highest bidder.

So you can think of any item where you say it's worth X and then if someone upped it by 1/10,000 of a coin for it, you would go "Nope too rich for my blood" and walk away? Sorry, I call bullshit except for where you are paying everything you own for an item and literally are not allowed to bid that ten thousandth of a coin. Therein lies the rub - you bothered to put your high bid out there, essentially establishing the new acceptable price for an item, and now someone goes, "but I want it" and nudges your effort aside for a mere pittance price differential. YOU established a new price for the item, YOU are the person not lowballing the marketplace, and now you don't get jack shit because someone had the .0001 coins to buy you out. The person who sold their item owes to you the fact that they got that number of coins, and you're left with nothing for actually bothering to pay more than the other people were originally trying to buy for.

And therein lies the biggest problem I see - you've stagnated the buying pool, because you now have so few people who are even in the buying market due to the ridiculous behavior, that you're essentially artificially lowering the prices of all items. While joe-blow may honestly believe your item is worth 10 coins, he's just going to stick to trying to find it on his own since he's not willing to play the "who isn't on anymore" game with whoever already has the buy offer on the marketplace (a game he's already lost a few times, or has grown tired of).

I'm getting tired of the game, I'd rather we piss or get off the pot with pricing - and I may leave the buying market at this point if it continues.

Yeah, I sure can. That would be every item in the game. Again take a look at Ebay, where people will raise by small amounts repeatedly, but eventually all but one decide it's not worth it to them. I think you're completely missing the point of what I said.

Your argument only really applies to a market where items are priced below their actual value, which means if that guy made his 10 coin offer, the guy who wanted it for for 0.0112 coins isn't going bid higher. He'll just wait until the trade is done and the 10 coin offer disappears, and everyone is happy.

You do bring up a good point. If someone offers 30 coins for an item, and I have 30.8, why shouldn't I be allowed to make an offer to buy it for 30.8? Placing these artificial limits on an economy just isn't good.

I didn't realize it at first, but I think the system of automatically raising up to a max prize would actually work well. Just think about it, really consider what effecs it would have. Essentially it removes the advantage that bots and mindless zombies have by giving it to everyone. youtu.be/A8I9pYCl9AQ?t=8s

[hypevosa]

Yeah, I'd love a system that automatically raises to a max price (like ebay, ironically enough), but I'd rather it still have a bid increment higher than a ten thousandth of a coin after a point. Going through and seeing every item's price be 35.0023 or some other thing would be a real eye sore. Once you're dealing with items that aren't below one a tenth of a coin in value, I just don't feel that allowing bidding in the thousand and ten thousandth of coins column is appropriate, ya know? It would be like if we still bothered using mills in everything other than gasoline (honestly, stupid practice there too). Imagine the chaos at an auction house if you allowed people to only bet one mill at a time.... ugh. I guess we don't have the time investment here though, so it's not as much of a problem.

I originally proposed the idea of having a dollar buy you a thousand coins, because there would be items no one would want to pay more than a thousandth of a coin for because it was a noobish item, and I didn't want players locked out of the economy from the getgo. I find all the 0s and decimals make the use of the market more tedious than it need be.

[Guest]

Hmm. Personally I prefer prices ranging from 0.0001 to 1000 over prices ranging from 1 to 10,000,000, but maybe that's just me?

[hypevosa]

It's a matter of key economy and normal typing habits. Your average person will go "I want to pay 215 coins" and hit 215 immediately. Most are unaccustomed to the practice of using a decimal and 0s to deviate how much they want to pay for something (and I wouldn't be surprised if half the population takes 5 seconds to find the period key since they almost never use them). I'm fairly certain once the game goes public you'll see alot of issues where users will accidentally miss a 0 or misplace a decimal and end up giving far too low or far too high an offer. I myself have almost missed a zero on a few occasions, I'm just paranoid and keep double checking my entries.

Basically for all new players who try to use the economy and actually buy things, they'll be losing alot of time hitting a bunch of 0s to their price offers, since they'll have to hit one to three 0s before every time they use the interface. While this is small per individual transaction, and only translates to another second or two, ultimately it means many hours of game time lost for newer players over the course of a week when our population booms. I feel it would be better to place the key stroke burden on those buying higher priced items since those will happen far less often.

[Guest]

Isn't it just as easy to type 100000 instead of 10000 though?