MERGED: "Auc-blocking" / Minimum price doesn't return

[Toolism]

Hey everyone. First of all i'd like to say i never played the original M.U.L.E. That aside here are my thoughts..

I really dislike the way that land is auctioned. It doesn't really work like a real auction. Here are my biggest problems:

1. There is no out-bidding. You can keep increasing the price no matter how long till you have the money. Real auctions dont work that way. If a player starts with 500. Then that same player cannot raise the bar to 600. First someone else has to outbid him. The way its currently made, enables for artificial price inflation and coupled with my number 2 grudge makes a very annoying tactic.
2. You can back out any time. This is also an incorrect aproach. In a real auction if a player bids 500 he cannot simply back , he must wait until he is outbid. In M.U.L.E. however you can back out at any time. This right now enables any person to inflate the price to 2000 and then at the last moment run back to the start line. Nothing happens to him, but the land is now off-limits to everyone else due to a very high price.

I eagerly await your thoughts on this subject.

[GabrielPope]

The goal has never been to emulate a traditional auction. It's more like an abstract form of negotiation, and it was a central part of the original game.

That said, while these features did exist in the original game, the pace of the auction phase was slower and the prices weren't quite so fluid. You couldn't drive up the price thousands of dollars on a whim, because time would simply run out before you got that high. Also, while you still had the option of backing down, the slower movement meant that it took a good chunk of time to get back down from a high bid, so if you cut it too close it was very easy to end up getting stuck with a high bid that you didn't intend to pay.

I'm not sure the added pressure you can exert on the price in this version is altogether a bad thing though, simply because land is so. damn. valuable. In the first third of the game, those price tags of a couple thousand dollars may very well be cheap compared to what the land is actually worth.

[d1000]

I don't think the auction is broken - it plays like the original M.U.L.E.

However, the price bars do zip up and down way too quickly. It takes too light of a touch...

[Tuahikaa]

Man, what was better than forcing the price up in the original game and then backing out at the last moment, forcing an overinflated purchase? Great fun! It's all part of the charm! The howls of horror when you land your friend with something as punishment for them forcing you to put the price up in the first place!

[Jaradakar]

Overall it's not just a land auction problem.

It's a problem with all of the auction phase.  It has to do with how fast you can move and how fast you can raise the price.

For example, a plot of land is for sale.  In the original game it would be very very hard to jack the price up to say over $1000 because of the time it takes to do so.  But in the current form you move so fast that you can hit the max caps far faster than you ever should be able to.

-Jara

[GabrielPope]

Overall it's not just a land auction problem.

It's a problem with all of the auction phase.  It has to do with how fast you can move and how fast you can raise the price.

For example, a plot of land is for sale.  In the original game it would be very very hard to jack the price up to say over $1000 because of the time it takes to do so.  But in the current form you move so fast that you can hit the max caps far faster than you ever should be able to.

-Jara

I wouldn't mind seeing the speed dropped a little bit, but overall I very much appreciate the faster speed. It always bugged me in the original that if I had $2000 I couldn't even try to outbid the guy who had $1200. It's also nice that you can actually pay $400 for that unit of food/energy you desperately need (or make other players pay $400 for it), where in the old version the price may not even go up to $200 before time runs out...

[Jaradakar]

Overall it's not just a land auction problem.

It's a problem with all of the auction phase.  It has to do with how fast you can move and how fast you can raise the price.

For example, a plot of land is for sale.  In the original game it would be very very hard to jack the price up to say over $1000 because of the time it takes to do so.  But in the current form you move so fast that you can hit the max caps far faster than you ever should be able to.

-Jara

I wouldn't mind seeing the speed dropped a little bit, but overall I very much appreciate the faster speed. It always bugged me in the original that if I had $2000 I couldn't even try to outbid the guy who had $1200. It's also nice that you can actually pay $400 for that unit of food/energy you desperately need (or make other players pay $400 for it), where in the old version the price may not even go up to $200 before time runs out...

You bring up some interesting points GabrielPope.  I think in many ways I might just be too used to the old one.  The slower speed kept prices down to be more reasonable.  Arguable that kept you from screwing yourself. 

On the flip side when I was low on food and need to purchase 4 units at very high prices... I ended up purchasing 5... so even the purchasing feels a little fast to me.

Here is my Auction phase wish list:

1) When purchasing goods from other players slow down the rate of transfer by a small amount.
2) Slow down movement/bidding speed at least some.

[lucid]

The speed wouldn't be a problem if the land price returned to its original asking when players run back down.
 
As it stands it's very easy to raise the price to the thousands and the base price will drop to a few hundred below what you went to when you quit buying.

[Jaradakar]

The speed wouldn't be a problem if the land price returned to its original asking when players run back down.
 
As it stands it's very easy to raise the price to the thousands and the base price will drop to a few hundred below what you went to when you quit buying.

Thank you Lucid!!!  After I posted and walked away this same thought hit me as well. 

In the current system while the upper end lets you drive the price up like crazy.  You are totally correct that it's impossible to decrease it.

Also it very easy for the person who drove the price up in the beginning to jump right back off the line and re-shoot the price back up.  It's all very much in favor of the grief-er -- which I dislike a ton.

[Stormdancer]

The speed wouldn't be a problem if the land price returned to its original asking when players run back down.
 
As it stands it's very easy to raise the price to the thousands and the base price will drop to a few hundred below what you went to when you quit buying.

Yes, this!  When the griefer drops back down, the price should drop as well.

[Big Head Zach]

There's a large part of me that wants the Land auction functionality to represent a real auction, so this type of griefing can't even happen. The land auction is an actual auction - the goods auction is more open trading.

My vote is to have the Land Auctions work in such a way that bids can't be retracted; that's not good business and gets you negative comments on E-Bay.

[Robbie]

One thing in auction functionality is annoying me... For example:

I own 15 food. And want to sell 11. For the best price i can get. Store buys at 15.
One other player need 4 food. He walk as buyer above, raises the price very high to 110.
Now i sell 4 items for a price of 110 to him.

I am not able to sell the rest of 7 items to the store.

Because if i walk down, the price never lowers to the price of 15 the store bought before. And i cannot sell the other items to the store anymore.
So i have to keep the 7 items and get a spoilage next turn.

I think if time is enough and after selling goods for high prices, a player should have the chance to sell the rest of the goods to the store at the buy price of the store.

[Lomgren]

This is how it worked originally - if the store was knocked off the buy screen, it would not be available for the rest of that particular auction.  This introduces many elements of strategy, including thinking about just how much you have vs. what you think you can get from the other players.  And if you think about it, what is better... 4 units for a grand total of 440 credits with some spoilage (and thus extra for you for next turn), or 11 units for only 165 credits without spoilage?

[BubbaBrown]

I have to second this.  The original may have done this, but it seems more of a logic limitation or oversight than a feature.  If the store has nothing, I should be able to sell to a price players want it and then move down.  It's not only the store that is affected, but other players who aren't willing to go up to the first grab price.  Once I sell off stuff to the high bidder, I'm limited in how I want to sell the remainder.  They may be another play willing to buy higher than what the store will, but with the price gauge moved so far up, they can't buy it.  This causes an artificial limitation of the market and just doesn't make any sense.  They're my goods, I should sell them how I will.  It also makes more sense to be able to sell them to the store rather than let them go to spoilage for the benefit of the colony and setting up an emergency stock.

I mean the AI doesn't even like this artificial limitation.

[tapir]

I think it's the most important bug of the game currently.
Every person I played with whines about this.

It can be exploited pretty easily too. You can pull the prices up as high as your balance permits and then go back to the BUY state so that no one can even attempt to buy it.

Please fix this

Thank you