If you are constantly driving the price up, it is not easy to back out in a market auction either. It's only easy in a land auction.

[so nobody can stop the price increase]

It is not clear to me that the design is broken, and the intent behind the mechanism of not being able to get back to the original price is not documented anywhere.  It is only speculated.  Therefore, it is only your  personal opinion, not a fact, that this is not working as intended.

Fair enough, so let me state it in another way. Just because something isn't documented isn't an excuse to ignore logic and reason, so we should give it a whirl:

1-Clearly one restriction with the way auctions are presented is there is limited screen estate where the range of the maximum and minimum bid price is presented. Since you can shift the maximum price by moving up, then the minimum has to shift also. At the most basic level this is why the store price disappears.

2-This is is no problem with store auctions because of what I explained above: it fits within the gameplay dynamic. The seller can go down ANYTIME to stop the price increase. So it's the seller's choice/greed to let the buyer max out the price.

3-It is a problem with land auctions, because there is no seller so nobody can stop the price increase

4-The opportunity cost for letting the land go doesn't exist: the land is clearly not worth purchasing as no other player, even with almost as much cash, is interested in buying at the inflated price. You can't talk of an opportunity cost where there is no choice - for the exploiter, buying was never an option to begin with. All you have here is a mechanism for the richest player to remove the land auction from the play, as if it was never offered in the first place.

5-Again this problem did not exist in the original game to any appreciable extent, because the movement speeds are much slower.

But you guys are ignoring the fact that the original game was played around a TV screen, while this game is played over the Internet. In the original, you couldn't really record unless others were cool with it (it really didn't happen) and the memory was an important element. With PM, it's easy to record (although tedious).

So I agree with the OP. It'd be best to either remove the tedium, or make the information unavailable. Currently not recording is a handicap unless you have exceptional memory. It also makes it harder on newbies that don't realize this, increasing the learning curive.

Overall it's not a big deal, but it'd be a nice improvement.

Most of the suggestions in the first post are great, I would also like to have round 12 auction skipped - it's completely pointless and just makes you sit there waiting for the scores to come up.

What I would definitely agree with is that the price moves up and down too fast compared to the original game, making the price go too high too fast.  IMO that should be addressed.  But the original mechanics should remain the same.

Regarding the Land Auctions, this is clearly broken if you consider the intent behind the mechanism of not being able to get back to the original price. As you mentioned, since the speeds are a lot slower with the original game, this broken design was a non-issue. Here's why it's broken: as explained by others, the intent behind not being able to get back to the original price is that the seller, by not coming down, is sacrificing the possibility to sell to the store. This is a very good gameplay mechanism, but it DOES NOT apply to the land auctions, because there is no store! Now couple the high speed bidding, and the broken mechanism and you clearly have a problem.

You claim this is not abuse and it's rewarding player who has lots of cash. How does it possibly fit with a game design that (correctly) tries to prevent the player who is ahead from getting too far ahead and the player that's behind from falling too far behind? The only reason it wasn't fixed in the original game is because it wasn't easy to abuse with the original speeds and who knows, they probably didn't have enough memory left to implement an exception.