[X] My Assistant

Say, Super, do you know why some avatars in the bid times page are registering as Forbidden?

Say, Super, do you know why some avatars in the bid times page are registering as Forbidden?

Oh no, I didn't even notice. I always use RefControl on FF and Referer Control on Chrome, so when my browser goes to the bidtimes page and tries to access the image sub-resource on E-H, my referrers are spoofed so that E-H thinks I'm actually on an E-H page rather than an external (reasoningtheory) page.

But everyone else who uses the standard referrer will never see the images load. I guess I'll have to download the avatar images onto reasoningtheory myself in order to display them properly. I'll fix it soon done.

Thanks for pointing it out, I wouldn't have noticed it otherwise.

This post has been edited by Superlatanium: Nov 2 2017, 03:26

Will you keep auction start time at around Wed 14:00?
17:00 is little bit too late in my time zone. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/wacko.gif)

I hate those who intended raising prices(and don't want them or at least don't want them at that price) more than I hate those who took over the item at last 30 minutes.
And I think this new system will encourage this kind of things.
Also if someone want something they should care about it,what you said good faith people to me is more like want something at a cheap price(like price in the first day of auction) and don't really care about that thing and keep annoy after they lost it.
It's like harm those who really want something(by encourage raising prices and need more time to focus on the auction) for those who not really want that thing but like disturb.
Again,if who really want something they won't be influenced by other people bid at last time.(but please take a way to punish those who bid at last 30 seconds every 15 minutes,that's annoying)

This post has been edited by issary: Nov 2 2017, 10:34

@super,
I think you should also mention EProf % in staffs like done in Kedama's auction

I wonder what does -time means (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif) (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif) (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)

It looks like the anti-sniping measures have been working pretty well. This is a combined graph of all bidtimes before auction #~80:



As you can see yourselves on the individual bidtimes pages, the recent graphs after the policy change have generally been significantly less curved towards the end. There are still a small handful of rude bidders, unfortunately, but there are many fewer of them than there used to be.

I am changing the percentile calculator from the static percentile ranges to the live percentile ranges, described in detail in the script forum section. Ranges might look slightly different now, but they'll be up-to-date with the database the wiki uses.

@super,
I think you should also mention EProf % in staffs like done in Kedama's auction

You can see them in the preview post now.

I hate those who intended raising prices(and don't want them or at least don't want them at that price) more than I hate those who took over the item at last 30 minutes.
And I think this new system will encourage this kind of things.

I don't know how one would distinguish between users who actually want an item and users who don't, but are bidding anyway. If someone doesn't want an item but they bid on it anyway and win, they are on the hook for paying for it.

Also if someone want something they should care about it,what you said good faith people to me is more like want something at a cheap price(like price in the first day of auction) and don't really care about that thing and keep annoy after they lost it.

Until the auction ends, it's generally not possible to tell whether someone's actually "lost it". How would you tell the difference between someone who's just trying to be annoying and someone who legitimately wants the item? I'd always assume the latter. If anyone thinks there really is someone who's just being annoying or something and not bidding honestly, feel free to PM me, I guess, but unless there's conclusive evidence there's not much that can be done.

Again,if who really want something they won't be influenced by other people bid at last time.

They might, if they happen to not be able to be online at the end.

I wonder what does -time means

It was a result of mis-labeled dates for automatic proxy re-bids, should be fixed.

(but please take a way to punish those who bid at last 30 seconds every 15 minutes,that's annoying)

I've been thinking recently that a 15-minute extension is a bit too long. I could change it to 10 minutes instead. I guess people could still bid at the last second every 10 minutes, so the root problem could still exist, but how would one distinguish between someone who's trying to cause trouble and someone who isn't very attentive?

There are still a small handful of rude bidders, unfortunately, but there are many fewer of them than there used to be.

I've been thinking recently that a 15-minute extension is a bit too long. I could change it to 10 minutes instead.

I do not understand those graphs but I agree with that conclusion. In my opinion you could still consider increasing the reward for early bidding, or the penalty for sniping. But you'll never be able to get rid of all sniping, so maybe it's fine where it is. It's hard to say what the balancing point is.

Increasing the bid increments, possibly only during extensions, could be alternative way to deal with trouble makers at the end. Or perhaps implement a mandatory final simultaneous proxy bid after a maximum number of extensions. I don't know, as I have not been involved in a late bid war before, much less a bad faith one.

I do not understand those graphs

Take the meta graphs from all bidtimes pages (before auction #~80) and put them on top of each other.

Increasing the bid increments, possibly only during extensions, could be alternative way to deal with trouble makers at the end.

It could be complicated to code and communicate how much the minimum increment actually is for X user at Y point in time - seems like too much.

The problem is too rare to require a coding solution, I think, and there's still the issue of how one would objectively determine whether someone's actually trying causing trouble or is just inattentive or oblivious.

Or perhaps implement a mandatory final simultaneous proxy bid after a maximum number of extensions.

Very complicated, and given the time pressure at that sort of point, and given that said users hadn't submitted true proxy bids before, it won't work.

One of the issues is that in a real live auction, everyone shows up and participates during the auction together, and has to actually be present then and there. This isn't "sniping" this is just how auctions work. Courtesy is defined as being present when the bidding takes place, and not wasting peoples' time dragging things out. It should only take a few minutes tops to determine if everyone is fine with the winning bid.

Auction courtesy is not defined by how early in the auction you bid. It is defined by how much time other people have to wait on you to place your bid after they've placed theirs. The current format lets people bid days after you. So get rid of the duration.

Making the auction last several days seems like it is an attempt to be convenient for people of different timezones and schedules. This would be true if day one of the auction was as valid as the last 10 minutes. But this isn't the case, because none of the bids matter until the auction is actually about to close and lock in a winner. So the later minutes are always more relevant than the prior days. Bid on the last day, and the auction rewards you with your item soon after. Bid early, and you're rewarded with having to wait for days, only for someone to "snipe" you.

I think what you ought to do is treat the first 4 days of the auction as a preview. No one is allowed to actually post bids. They can set up proxies if they wish, but nothing actually posts. Then, on day 5, for one hour, open up the forum-post bidding, and let the proxy bids go live. If you can't participate during the hour, that is what proxy bidding is for. To be there for that hour you can't be.

All this effort to encourage people to kind of sort of bid early, but without actually making the real auction happen early, is missing the point. Auctions work best when everyone interested in an item participates at the same time. If Saturday is the most convenient for the most people, then the auction is Saturday. If Wednesday is more convenient for the most people, then it should happen Wednesday. Trying to cobble together something where some people participate on Wednesday, then some other people have an auction on the same item Saturday is just plain bizarre. No one is benefitted by the Wednesday auction when it is the Saturday auction that actually counts.

I also think the bid increments should be smaller for low-end. I feel like they've been selected to discourage/exclude lower-end items a bit too harshly. That said, I think that if everyone's bids are hidden until Saturday on the last hour, low-end items might reward people for selecting higher "blind" starting bids. We can expect piyin to bid his 50k starting bid on things he thinks no one else wants. Anyone else also bidding 50k will get nothing due to timestamp priority. But if someone decided the item is really worth 60k to them, they can bid that and win it, instead of being forced to decide if it is worth 80k or 110k.

[snip]

Maybe read the entire discussion?
This has been debated over and over and suggesting a complete overhaul is pretty much pointless.

Also good luck having a live auction in a forum with people from everywhere in the world knowing that some will never use proxy bidding (because they don't trust the system/don't understand how to register/whatever reason).

One of the main points of auctions is price discovery: with commodities or near-commodities, users figure out how much to value an item partly based on how much others desire the same thing. If there's not enough time for bidders to reliably interact with each other, this mechanism fails: there's less competition, and sellers end up with notably less revenue (not because the users value items less, but because they don't all have the time to see what's going on, think clearly, and come to a conclusion on their upper limit). If people barely have time to think, the final price for an item is much farther away from its true market value. I want to ensure that items sell for as close to the fairest price possible, within reason.

This would be true if day one of the auction was as valid as the last 10 minutes. But this isn't the case, because none of the bids matter until the auction is actually about to close and lock in a winner. So the later minutes are always more relevant than the prior days. Bid on the last day, and the auction rewards you with your item soon after. Bid early, and you're rewarded with having to wait for days

I don't follow - early bids are just as valid as late bids. The amount of time you have to wait between when you bid and when you get the item doesn't affect anything, as long as the time isn't that long (which it isn't) and as long as you're modestly patient. People who absolutely cannot wait at all to get their hands on something should find a WTS shop whose seller is online instead.

Auctions work best when everyone interested in an item participates at the same time.

This is plain impossible here, unfortunately. I don't want to exclude players from the process simply because they're unlucky enough to be in an unfortunate time zone (or have a job, etc) at the critical moment.

No one is benefitted by the Wednesday auction when it is the Saturday auction that actually counts.

The people who are asleep or at work on 14:00 Saturday benefit from having the ability to bid, and from having the ability to consider counter-bids in the earlier days.

They can set up proxies if they wish, but nothing actually posts. Then, on day 5, for one hour, open up the forum-post bidding, and let the proxy bids go live. If you can't participate during the hour, that is what proxy bidding is for.

Many users still do not proxy bid, even though it would make things a lot more convenient for them. If they were unable to be online at the end time, they would likely just stop participating entirely, or get someone else to do it for them, which is a hassle.

If there was a worldwide hour of free time every week at <insert time here> dedicated for people to log on to E-H, a more standard auction would be both viable and fair - but since such a window doesn't exist, trying to force it into one anyway would make it neither.

I also think the bid increments should be smaller for low-end.

I'm not all that happy with enabling even more fighting over near-trivial amounts, but it's not hard to implement or anything. I wanted simple minimum bid increment rules more than I wanted to design for competition over junk-tier items, but if more people think it's worth doing, we can try it.


---

maybe you can discourage snipers by sending each one of them a personal letter of indignation

Working on it.

This post has been edited by Superlatanium: Jan 3 2018, 14:22

Why are there auctions at all when you're barred from gettings things you can actually use and the "real" auctions have a million cino soul tax... and you still get barred for being an evil bidder? Just call it what it is: a sour grapes management system. (Including mine.)

Two seconds of thinking would tell you an auction is the worst way of figuring out the """true""" price of an item anyway when you have to add competitive value and the value of beating someone else to whatever it comes up as. If only that pesky human nature didn't exist! Even ignoring the fact that bidding at the last second is the major method of paying as little as possible for something, what if a bidder just doesn't know how valuable something is until after the price flies up? Auction activity itself draws people to participate. Tax does nothing to stop people with money (the real "issue" with auctions) from getting the items anyway. Now they'll just bow out on purpose and pay the winner a price higher than he payed but lower than the tax. Open-increasing-bid is nowhere near the only style of auction either, so let's just be real here and acknowledge that the goal is to get the seller and auctioneer the highest price possible and sniper crying is a distraction; otherwise you'd have been using a different sales system already. IRL, most auction proceeds go to charities or the government, which is why you never hear about snipers there (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

If you want to increase bidder equity without losing profit, start using blinds and fees, or set a super-high BIN price during a preview period before any bidding starts (that pesky human nature), or do it [en.wikipedia.org] Japanese style. Setting a high initial price also sweetens sour grapes. There's no reason for a multi-million piece to start at less than one million. However you want to do it, you can't fix the inherent fairness of auctions going to the highest bidder. Maybe you want lotteries or lowest-unique-bids instead.

Why are there auctions at all when you're barred from gettings things you can actually use

This doesn't make sense. If there's something you can use, bid on it, and if you end up being the one being willing to pay the most, you win it and get to use it. If there's something you can't use, don't bid on it.

and the "real" auctions have a million cino soul tax... and you still get barred for being an evil bidder? Just call it what it is: a sour grapes management system. (Including mine.)

I don't understand what this statement is trying to say either...

Two seconds of thinking would tell you an auction is the worst way of figuring out the """true""" price of an item anyway when you have to add competitive value and the value of beating someone else to whatever it comes up as.

Those who participate just in order to get better gears for themselves - which is probably the vast majority of participants - would be wise not to value those things at all. If my Phase Shoes of whatever are subpar and I want to upgrade, I want to pay the least amount I can for a decent improvement. If the bidding gets to be too high for my liking, I don't so much care who wins it instead - I just care (unhappily) that the price for continuing is more than I should afford. The solution to that is to wait for something else to come along and hope it'll be easier to get now that one competitor is (probably) out of the picture - the solution is not to keep bidding even though I value it less than the current price, that's just dumb.

If you know someone is bidding purely out of spite or something like that, what I said before remains true:

If anyone thinks there really is someone who's just being annoying or something and not bidding honestly, feel free to PM me

Auctions in general are widely understood across the world for being a pretty good method to determine the true and fair market value of a given item. If you disagree, well, that's your opinion; you don't have to participate.

what if a bidder just doesn't know how valuable something is until after the price flies up?

Read the prior discussion: this has been brought up before. It's fine if you don't know exactly how much you'll want to end up paying; that doesn't prevent you from showing your intent to win the item early. Then when someone outbids you, if you realize you actually value the item more, that's your chance to re-bid.

Yeah, it sucks if you're in that situation but it's too late for you to be around to respond to the bid increase, but that's exactly why I'm trying to reward early bidders more.

Tax does nothing to stop people with money (the real "issue" with auctions) from getting the items anyway. Now they'll just bow out on purpose and pay the winner a price higher than he payed but lower than the tax.

You're assuming that the winner would be willing to sell the item they just made an effort to win for just (end bid price + 4%). That sounds like it would be incredibly rare, certainly not something anyone could count on before the actual deal is agreed to.

This whole thing seems to be stemming from a complaint that only those with sufficient funds can win items in auctions, which is a bit silly.

let's just be real here and acknowledge that the goal is to get the seller and auctioneer the highest price possible and sniper crying is a distraction; otherwise you'd have been using a different sales system already. IRL, most auction proceeds go to charities or the government, which is why you never hear about snipers there (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

You're accusing me of selfishly deceiving everyone in bad faith, even though I'm losing money off of this new policy, even though I've tried to make the process and discussions about it as transparent as possible, even though I've bought a domain and server with my own money and put hundreds of tech-hours into making all the features and pretty data for everyone to use and view?

The reason IRL auctions don't have sniping issues is because all the participants are there together at once. Here, the issue is coordinating users from time zones all over the world into bidding and counter-bidding in time for the other users to respond. Real internet auctions do have sniping problems: [www.google.com] example. (the difference is that I'm willing to try to de-incentivize it while not leaving standard bidders out to dry)

No, I'm not going to turn the auction into a lottery. I think you're just arguing for the sake of it. I would appreciate it if you took that to a different thread, please.

man, you were able to upset latanium. it's... quite of an accomplishment, i guess. but reading this last page, it seems to me he was an example of patience.

you know, due to our respective roles here in the forum we know each other a bit, and he never gave me a single occasion to think he is acting in such an ill way. more in general, afaik all the current auctioneers are worth our trust and should be thanked for the work they do. both what we know they do, and what we *don't* know they do, which is possibly more than what we think.

both what we know they do, and what we *don't* know they do, which is possibly more than what we think.

I second this. What if we make a bit of money out of our activity? That's the fair reward for the countless hours spent managing all the auctioned goods, improving our system, monitoring the users and cooperating with the moderators for various things.

(IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/rolleyes.gif) sta05 is from K's auction just several weeks ago

link

This post has been edited by exxxooo: Jan 10 2018, 14:37

Maybe he got another one in the meanwhile Σ(-᷅_-᷄๑) ...
Maybe he calculated the price of reimudall phase set and decided to play something else ...
Maybe he put an IW 10 on it and hope to sell for higher...
Maybe he dropped a Peerless Tempestous Willow of Destruction and decided the godnesses of loot and harvest destined him for something else for now...
Maybe he thinks he got into one of those lucky ٩(◕‿◕｡)۶ weeks when you see very good equipment go for cheap and think he can profit...

Lots of situations ┐(︶▽︶)┌ might have happened and not all of them are "bad/evil/unethical" reasons.

This post has been edited by reality_marble: Jan 10 2018, 15:35

(IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/rolleyes.gif) sta05 is from K's auction just several weeks ago

link

This resale is not for profit,he got it nearly 10m then perfectly IWed(+3~6m)
I think 5m start bid is very reasonable.

furthermore, you have to consider that auctions end at saturday for a reason: there's a fair chance people don't work at saturday and they have more time to surf the forum.
i can understand you want to incentivize early bids (your auction, your rules) but at the same time i invite you to reconsider the penalty at later time thing in some way.

Only just found out there was a late bid penalty because I mainly surf on the Saturday. I think I am at work when the auction starts but for items I want I'll have to throw down hard to try to capture as many penalty hours to create an AT field against other bidders?

This is like reverse sniping lol. If you don't get in straight away on a huge ticket item then you are fucked. you could have a 10% delta on a 200m item so a late bid might require 236m in bank.

Is there an item notification system if certain items are going to be auctioned?


I wonder if I can lend people credits at 4% interest so they can avoid 8% tax and get 2% discount o.O

This post has been edited by EsotericSatire: Jan 14 2018, 02:17