Marketplace Auctions

[Lord_Ryizine]

Honestly they take way too long. Once one has been bid on it should only last a few hours.

[cornwallis]

People that add auctions want to get the maximum money out of it. And the longer the auction is, the more bidders it will be. Besides, everyone is not on the marketplace every hour.

You could reduce the time of the auction once it reaches like 3-5 bidders.

[Torost]

The auctionsystem has its problems, people might be shy about placing orders early and high, since the gold is deducted and kept in escrow.
And there is really no reason ever to not wait until the last minute before placing your bid. Makes sniping the wise way to play, not showing your hand before its to late.

I suggest adding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction

Where the seller sets the minimum reserveprice ,startprice, and timeframe.
Buyers can preplace bids at the price they are willing to pay.
And once the price goes down to either a valid bid or reservationprice, the auction is settled.
How many are bidding should not be public knowledge.
Put inplace a feesystem that encurages sane pricing intervals(setting reservationrprice too high or startingprice to high has a nonrefundable cost)

Pros:
No canceled auctions
No tieing up gold in 1 auction, place bids on several with the same gold.
only takes 1 bid to finish.(better chance for seller to get a good price).
Excitment!!!

Cons:
None.

[seddrik]

Questions on auctions.  Tried it out to see how they work.  And its... eh. 

I placed a bid one an item that had 1g asking.  It then immediately told me someone has bid higher.  Ok... i bid one gold high, and this happened like 10 times.  So I'm thinking this is a system thing not an actual bidder?  Why doesn't it update the bid to what someone has actually placed on it?   I'm not gonna guess 50 million times to finally find whatever the top bid was.

[[ptx]]

That is the same way auctions work on ebay, it doesn't show you the maximum bid, it just shows the current bid. Which will always be one gold higher than the 2nd highest bid.

[seddrik]

That is the same way auctions work on ebay, it doesn't show you the maximum bid, it just shows the current bid. Which will always be one gold higher than the 2nd highest bid.

This does not make sense.  Because the displayed bid isn't accurate.  If I bid 10g and the guy above me bid 500g.  I only see "Someone has bid higher than you" and the display shows 11g (a blatant inaccuracy).  I don't care if ebay does it, blind bidding is just a way to trick people into over bidding.  Just set a minimum bid for an auction and be done with it.  Then let people compete honestly and visibly.

[CrazyCracka420]

Yeah I'm not a big fan of the ebay style set maximum bid auctions.  I'd rather it was just a normal auction, if someone bids 10 gold, and I bid 15 gold, then I'm the current winning bid. 

The reason they do set maximum bids is so that you can still bid if someone outbids you, up to what you are comfortable with.

Pro's and Con's of both systems (or the dutch system, which the big con for that, is that you HAVE to be constantly watching the auction so you're going to reach a lot less people who may be interested in your item, but weren't aware it was being auctioned).