land auction

[ltbeeb]

when buying land i outbid someone ,  he had the line then i got it and went above him and he got the land .  this happened twice, has this been reported?

[Mega Byte]

That's most likely a result of lag.  It happens all the time, not just in land auctions, but also commodities.
If the ping rate was over 200, this is probably what happened.
-S

[cyounghusband]

But to be fair, this can be considered a bug.  It is annoying to be staring at the screen and then seen that someone who was bidding less than you won the auction.  It doesn't poll the final bid of players properly.  If I see $800 as my final bid, it should not be won by someone who bid $780 just because they have less lag.  This seems fixable to me (compared to other ping-advantaged actions like plot selection which are probably harder to fix).

[C64 nostalgia]

But to be fair, this can be considered a bug.

I agree.

[Mega Byte]

The only cure for lag is to eradicate it.  That's the point... you can't POLL when the gap of time in between is too great.  There's no way to resolve it, aside from removing time as a component of the auction.  Playstation network players have been suffering it for years.  If there was a software fix to this, it would have been in place a long time ago.  The reality is, only hardware, and removal of latency can actually fix this.  The good news is, it applies as a problem to everyone.
-S

[poobslag]

Well, you can at least eliminate the "host advantage" with dedicated servers. Obviously that's asking a lot for a free game.

[data2008]

With starting to experiment for a possible follow-up, we are giving the dedicated server variant a serious thought. To early to tell though now.

[Peter]

We know of this and it's planend to be fixed. We are also considering changing the land auction so that players can't raise the price exteremly high and then back out. THose changes will probably come around in the same update after we've decided on how it should work.

[Mega Byte]

Dedicated servers won't solve the issue... someone who is closer to the host origin will have lower ping than someone further away (like me, in Tokyo... and I doubt you're going to host one here, or on every continent even.)  The only way really around this is to install Arista sub 1ms low-latency switches at a cost of around half a million dollars... hmmm, I suspect that's not in the budget.
-S

[cyounghusband]

The only cure for lag is to eradicate it.  That's the point... you can't POLL when the gap of time in between is too great.  There's no way to resolve it, aside from removing time as a component of the auction.  Playstation network players have been suffering it for years.  If there was a software fix to this, it would have been in place a long time ago.  The reality is, only hardware, and removal of latency can actually fix this.  The good news is, it applies as a problem to everyone.
-S

I strongly disagree with this.  The problem is that the host computer is taking the last update that IT got when IT's time ran out, and then awarding the bid to the immediately to this last update. 

What it should be doing is getting a final bid price from each client before determining a winner.  Yes, in theory this could allow for easier client cheating if people hacked software, but that is not the problem.

To be clear, we can't fix the problem of not being up to date on someone else's bid where you think you are ahead but are not.  But if you finish the auction with a bid of $800, your client should submit this final bid, the server should wait until all final bids are received, and then select the winner.   It is silly to see the land awarded to the player who bid $760 when you are staring at your screen with an $800 bid.  This is just an implementation issue.  Put another way, the total time of the auction should be the same for all clients, instead of (host time - ping time).