[X] My Assistant

-- Insert random blaberring about how I great it is to have those auctions --
Welcome Hell.

When i first started hosting auctions back in 2017, which was a damn while ago, I didn't expect those to meet such success. It was a great help for newbies to have all the actual great pieces of equipment gathered is one place. It lasted for a few years until 2021, after a total of 160 held auctions, when I decided to stop all my activities because of exhaustion and because it seemed that I wasn't that much needed anymore.

Now we are March 2024, and the current state of the game shifted again. Low level equipments have been disappearing from the landscape (and my WTS) little by little, Superlatanium has a level activity and care that I consider being unsatisfactory and unadequate (no offense dude). Long story short: I feel like it's time for me to get back into activity. But this time I'm going to do things a bit differently.

Long story short: the Evil is back in business baby. And this time he's going to hold auctions that are not focused on low level equips exclusively, but on just everything that is worthwhile auctioning, low level or Lvl500.

(IMG:[i.imgur.com] http://i.imgur.com/CR6HlSE.png)

A few guidelines about my auctions

1. My goal is to be someone who provides actual advice, support and fairness for sellers and buyers alike. Not to be your slave or a fallback for Superlatanium.
2. I don't intend to make everything automated. I am a human (or debatably youkai), I am very busy and I have other things to do than spending days working on scripts to automate everything. Unless you are a good samaritan who gives me everything I need to achieve that. I am a helper, not a slave and I expect people to respect my service at the level of what I offer.
3. Understand to it that I'm expecting you to be civilized and responsible as much as I try to be myself.
4. With those auctions, I may charge substantial fees, but do understand that in no case it's actually profitable for me. If I really want to make money, I just go grind the Grindfest or charge people for IW service..
5. Contrarily to the previous series of auctions, I will not spend time to entertain you with borderline edgy banners or haikus. Well at least those won't feel uncanny anymore for some people I guess. At best I'll give a quick word in every week's thread if I've got some info to provide in particular.
6. If you start treating my auctions like a dump for your garbage, we won't be friends.
7. I am open to criticism, but not to whiny bullshit. So be reasonable and don't be too demanding, thanks.
8. You are free to discuss pretty much everything in this thread.

This post has been edited by KitsuneAbby: Mar 4 2024, 17:07

more touhou cleavages or nothing.

Just send two Unassigned Epipments to you.

Legendary Ruby Leather Gauntlets of Protection
Magnificent Agile Shade Breastplate of the Arcanist

Because of my current Level and because I already gave away/donated/sold with a very low Price fast all my usable Unassigned Epipments to the low Level Players after 0.82, I can't help much now.

If you can accpet those two Equipments and they're sold, please don't send anything back and take it as the Donation for your Projekt. Ah, they're not good Gears now but someone may like to use them, I hope. And Thank you for your Effort to help new Players like many other good Players in this Forum.

more touhou cleavages or nothing.

Deal. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/tongue.gif)

(IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/gmIaNVC.png)

I thought that the equips are too expensive, level is too high, don't worth to buy at first.

But I found the LEG katana. Level 198! 3 Attributes! LEG!
Looks powerful and I like it, that why I bid it. Didn't think much about price.

Was anxious at the last few minutes, and found out that actually no one is going to bid anything...
Everybody just looking.

--

Just talk about what may a low level player think.

For the low level players who do not really know how to earn credits (or pouring credits into drop rate training like me...), I think they may just stick to the equip dropped from re and arena. Nintendo will do. Or they just found your wts shop...

For the players who can tell an equip is good or not, they may just simply save the credits for the higher level auctions.

The stuffs in this auction are good, but quality is not as high as high level auctions.

Chance of getting good equips from shrining trophies is too low. It makes everyone's trying to sell trophies for easy credits instead of shrining them. For the ones who don't sell trophies, they just shrine the one they have, without the hath perk, there's no reason spending credit on buying them and gamble. The output may just all end up in bazaar.

That's why there is not much really high quality stuffs. The drop rate needs a little bit change for low-level players, or the players just sell the trophies.

I didn't sell any trophies, and keep shrining them everyday, but get nearly all crap.
Finally got a superior, but found out that it is a 1-attribute-crap, and this attribute value is lower than average, basic value just similar to the one I got from arena, but with 2 or 3 attributes.
Also, I have never got a shade from shrining. I have already shrine 50+ trophies, I think I will be okay even if it gives me an average shade for now.

I don't know if I am going to sell them all one day when I finally feel despaired with the shrining system.

--

I may bid for something left from last week if no one's go for it this week.
I will try to bid something as long as you open auctions and I am 350-. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

--

P.S. The Phase shoe in the second auction has gone crazy... (And I start thinking of selling trophies every time I look at it. LEG! Phase! Fenrir!)

That charged phase shoe tho..., I don't know how I should feel.

I thought that the equips are too expensive, level is too high, don't worth to buy at first.

Agreed.

There are a lot of equipments that, if they were leveled 300, 400, or 500, would be instant bazaar fodder, but they are in fact acceptable for a lower level.

Now, I don't think every one of them should be priced bazaar-like, but I see a lot of stuff with 50k starting price and 150k autobuy that is just too much.
A low level needing 5 or 6 pieces of similar equipment to muddle through the under-300s, sees those prices and gives up. That's too much for a person that has not the right equipment to farm credits whatsoever.

I know it's not hard to make 50-100k/day of thropies even at lower levels, but you have to survive those arenas first, and if you can survive them, for sure you already have better stuff.

Fear not, I understand very well this kind of reaction and misunderstanding. There do are reasons why I've set things as they are, and I'll detail them here right now.

tl;dr
Just give me a bit of time to adjust the prices if needed. And don't forget that the auctions have to satisfy the sellers as well as the buyers.

1) These auctions display the top-quality equipments for low-mid level players
As much as people fight over phase pants or peerless in super's and kedama's auctions, the equipments displayed here have pretty much a comparable status. This auction is in no way some kind of "auction for peasants" that is somehow inferior to the others: I am wanting it to represent the finest items for low-mid levels, save for the materials (their presence is motivated by other reasons). A Lvl200 Exq Power of Protection is pretty much similar to a 50% ADB Lvl400 Legendary Power of Slaughter in terms of rarity.

2) They obey to the law of offer/demand
I am not setting the start prices off the top of my head. I am basing myself on my experience in the price of all the stuff that I've bought and sold so far. Yes it's hard to believe that an Exquisite can be worth more than the average low-quality Lvl400 Legendary or that a Mag can be sold for several hundreds, but it's the truth.

3) They do take into account the income of low-mid level players
It is more or less an consequence of 2), but I think it's better to write it clearly. Add to this the fact that the "big expense" (which may not be as big as you may think, trust me) is often a good investment if you consider using the equip for a while before finding better and selling it once you're done with it. That is, the equips are likely to be an investment to be able to play a higher difficulty decently, which increases your income.
So really, see these prices as an investment that pays back more or less quickly.

4) Contrarily to other auctions, these equips will be very likely to be sold back
I have been doing everything in my power to bend the mindset of low-mid level players into considering their equipment as something that is valuable and can be sold once its obsolete for their needs, instead of making them go to waste due to a soulfusing. So far it's starting to bear its fruits, as I see more and more equips that make their way back to my shop, with a 25% fee mind you. So it's quite easy to imagine an aware player using that kind of thought process to bid and win an item in these auctions, knowing that he'll sell it back later anyway, with only a small 10% off the sale price.
Needless to say, I am intending to use my growing reputation to encourage a wider portion of the playerbase in following that kind of thought process that will help in keeping (or maybe increasing) a good amount of high quality items in the low level market, which will probably make these auctions more consistent/pertinent in return.

5) The equipments carry over between weeks if they remain unsold and I may modify the associated price
Of course, despite my experience in low level equips, I'm still susceptible to misjudge an equip's value a bit, especially for equips that are out of the norm like the ones displayed in these auctions. I am perfectly aware of this, and I will adjust some prices. That doesn't mean that an equip's will necessarily lower if they remain unsold, though.
So for now I'm watching how things go and I intend to fine-tune everything to get the best out of the auctions, for everyone. And honestly, last week I was thinking about giving uip altogether, and this week I'm considering to lower many quick bid prices, as their high value seems to be defeating the intended purpose: encouraging bid wars, bidding early and straight to your max acceptable value, bidding straight at that value to give yourself a chance to win the equip before the end of the auctions, giving two competitors as much time as they need to fight over the item they want (I may add extra rules regarding this later, when it comes to bids that end up extending the default auction time instead of shortening it), and so on and so forth.

6) The seller will soon be able to decide the start/quick bid price
As stated in the auction thread, I am the only one to decide these prices for now, because I really need to get the system to work better before giving more freedom to the sellers. I really need the entire system to be stabilized, to proceed to some finetuning and to get a bit more experience regarding the auctioning of these items before giving this freedom. All this is needed so that I do can give some advice to the seller and tell him what is OK, what isn't, for him, for the buyers, and for me.

7) Have faith in the Evil (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
This is a Moriya Shrine conspiracy to get me and the sellers super duper rich
I am really doing my best to get all of this giving the best we can expect out of it, for the sellers, for the buyers, for the low-mid level market as a whole. It means that the prices for which the equips get sold need to be worth auctioning for the sellers, worth bidding for for the bidders. I have imagined the system in its entirety to fit the current market+meta as well as possible and I will take any measure necessary to meet that objective the best way possible.

This is why I've opened this thread, and why I value the comments posted in it. (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

(IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/PUyjwxb.jpg)

The auction #1 was indeed pretty sad but the later ones have been doing surprisingly well so I'll refrain from making further suggestions until we see how it develops.

Can I suggest to have all equips in the auction to be at 100% condition/fully repaired? Or before other players send in an item for auction, the weapons/armors should be repaired first.

This post has been edited by Setton-san: Dec 8 2017, 01:14

If they're below 50% condition, just ask me to repair before buying and I'll charge the seller for the repairs. Otherwise, no. Do people complain when they have to sink 29 scraps + 10 energy cells to repair a Legendary rare at 60% condition they just bought? They don't.

When you acquire a Mag+, you gotta deal with it when it comes to repair your stuff. They're great, but they're also stuff that isn't cheap to maintain.

Why are there so many different seller zeros in this week's auction? I'm guessing that was just your mistake in organization and typing, otherwise...

No, there is no mistake. He really sent me dozens of equips. 33 to be exact.

You might have misunderstood what I was pointing out. Check the names you typed carefully.

You might have misunderstood what I was pointing out. Check the names you typed carefully.

lol, excel's doing. it saw that as a number, so it raised it by 1 for every cell.

No, there is no mistake. He really sent me dozens of equips. 33 to be exact.

Check [Clo14, Clo15, Clo16, ...] that have as seller [zero1018101, zero1018102, zero1018103, ...], i'm pretty sure that's wrong (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)

PS: Personal question, what happened to this week evaluation of equipments? I was waiting on it to send stuff to your auction (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

Sorry I got really tied up gian. I barely had time to post the auctions at 8pm. Yours will be in #7.

And yes, damn Excel messed up with me, it increases by default. Gonna change the column to "Text" so it doesn't happen anymore. I fine tune this tool little by little: this week's featuring formatting depending on the equip's quality, and I hope I'll be able to do the same for prefix/suffix next week.

Sorry I got really tied up gian. I barely had time to post the auctions at 8pm. Yours will be in #7.

No problem, just wanted to know (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

And yes, damn Excel messed up with me, it increases by default. Gonna change the column to "Text" so it doesn't happen anymore. I fine tune this tool little by little: this week's featuring formatting depending on the equip's quality, and I hope I'll be able to do the same for prefix/suffix next week.

I actually have a similiar thing, something quick written in c++ to format txt, it's how i order my shop (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)

Hello.

Today something has been brought to my knowledge. It appears that me auctioning that item:
[Clo25] Legendary Radiant Phase Pants of Heimdall (Level 323, EDB 49%, Int 66%, Wis 46%, Agi 38%, Evd 49%, Pmit 62%) (seller: reroda) | Start price: 2000k Credits | Quick bid price: 3000k Credits => a23199763 (4000k Credits), Bids end on 03/01/2017 21:00

... raised the question of it being unaccessible to players beyond Lvl350 who would probably bid for more than 10M on it. I knew it beforehand, but I've started being pressured to exceptionally open the bids on it.

For now, I'm asking the seller if he'll allow such a thing. But I'll also be asking this:

Should I allow some of the really exceptional equips open to Lvl350+ in all of my future auctions?

My opinion regarding this: yes, but I'll always leave the choice to the seller.

This post has been edited by decondelite: Jan 2 2018, 21:08

your auction, your rules. if sellers are fine, it's fine for me too.