Rules Updates: August 11, 2018

Discussion in 'Empire News' started by Krysyy, Aug 12, 2018.

  1. "No automatic clicking faster than the set limit of 3 clicks per second"

    Out of curiosity... can I know the reasoning behind this? Seems like a big drop compared to the old 10 clicks/second.
    FunWart, Slvr and FadedMartian like this.
  2. Would be great if we leave auctions available to advertise in market chat once or twice a day!
  3. The macro settings were voted on by the community a while back so this one's more or less determined by the community on what they think is balanced
    Impulsive_Egg likes this.
  4. Hi, 23 pages a lot to read.... but my 2 cents:
    I have got an ongoing auction. During the running auction the rules where changed and i got such an PM for bumping. Ok fine.... but know my auction is at the second page, over 24h to go, with all kinds of silly renamed items auctions taking place. Seriously?! a dirt block called Kryysy etc etc..

    I'm seriously thinking about bumping and risk a ban on the auction forum.. I mean, auctioning for me is over now anyway. I will not return there to sell something . I feel that something that was not broken is fixed... and you now what they say: If it ain't broken... don't try to fix it. (btw i do not need replies telling me it was broken..)

    But as always, thanks for everything and keep up the good job! :)
  5. There are so many fumes in this thread that if someone lit a match we'd all explode.

    Anyway, I don't want to reignite that, I just wanted to add some actual constructive feedback on what my first opinions of these are since I've avoided commenting on it since it would just get lost in the chaotic turmoil that ensued. I don't have access to in-game right now so obviously I don't know exactly how it's impacting so far; this is just what I think.

    #1: No bumping auctions on the forums seems fine to me. It's not that hard to click Forums, scroll down, and click Auction House. Not to mention it isn't like no auction ever will be on the sidebar anymore. When they are first posted and when they are bid on, they will be naturally bumped again to the sidebar. So... You can still see plenty of auctions just by looking at the sidebar. But again, it isn't that much effort to just scroll to the Auction House. Also, on Windows at least, I know you can do ctrl + f and then enter a word to search a webpage for it. Voila! Better searching than the EMC forums themselves provide. Type in what you're looking for and if you don't see it, go to the next page, etc etc. Who knows, you might even see something that catches your eye that you didn't notice before. There's a way to do this on other platforms as well, I'm just not sure how.

    #2: No bumping auctions in-game, now this, this I'm not so sure about. I've spoken to a lot of players who aren't allowed onto the forums or don't care enough to make an account, etc. I have not once heard them complain about forum threads being advertised in-game. And if we're going to get critical of them looking like 'spam' because they're forum links, well... I guess those links in the EMC broadcasts need to go, too. And staff can't use event threads in their broadcasts anymore. Oh, and people can't advertise any kind of thread anymore, because that link looks like spam to someone who can't get on the forums, too.

    The forums are a part of EMC, whether some parents like it or not. If they don't want to trust us, that's fine. But not all of us should be restricted because Billy's mom in Alabama is afraid he might see a stray damn or the lord's name in vain. And even then, it isn't like forum auctions are advertised nonstop in-game. I counted when I played maybe 2 or 3 times a week whenever I was really active. 3 times a week, when I was active for 4+ hours a day, more on weekends, and almost every day. Of course with the new forum bump rules the time may have to be extended to prevent spam from starting to occur - once every 24 hours or something like that - but I still think in-game advertising should be allowed.

    #3: 3 clicks per second? Why? We went from 10 clicks per second to 3? I am more puzzled by this one than anything else. Even someone on a horrible, $5 mouse from Walmart could click faster than 3 clicks per second... If this is meant to encourage players to not use autoclickers, I am not sure I understand that either since our self-proclaimed reasoning for allowing automated mods in the first place was to decrease pain from repeated clicking, and so on.... And I don't mean macros, just in general autoclicking, like to quickly trade all of your pumpkins to a villager or buying from a shop sign. And again, I don't mean faster than the rules state, I mean at just a normal human 8-10 clicks per second. 8 is usually what I had my old autoclicker set to. I just want to know why.

    #4: Are there going to be reliable methods in place to prevent us using alts normally from being misconstrued as active accounts while 'away'? What I mean by this is sometimes in the past, I'd be active on my main, have a second alt chilling in a minecart at a Sushi Drop farm, and have my third near a gold farm. Every now and then I'd go still on Slvr, open up my alt's tab, do somethign on them, rinse and repeat. No two accounts were ever ACTIVELY moving, clicking, etc at the exact same time but they could be doing so within seconds of one another and appear to be both active at once even if they aren't. I would really hate to be wrongfully punished for that if it's not what I was doing at all.

    EDIT:
    #5: Auctions need minimum item requirements. These 1 item auctions are ridiculous and as long as we have new players, there will be new auctions like these. It really should be a minimum of, I don't know.. a stack, or 9 depending on what the item/s are. I feel like letting someone auction something as small as 1 is ... a tad ridiculous.
  6. They believe that silly 1 item auctions like that will die down over time, because right now it's just the new cool thing you can do. If it does die down, more serious auctions will start to take over again, but if it doesn't the rule's probably going to get amended
    ASliceOfRhyBread likes this.
  7. Here’s my experience with the “no bumping rule.”

    One fellow of mine auctioned a DC quantity of mending books. Because he didn’t bump it again, I ended up winning the auction for 1k, which is way below market price.

    I’m not objecting the new rules I’m just stating a fact that appears as of right now. Most players are going to lose money on DC quantities, so with the new “any quantity” rule, I feel the auctions will now be flooded because it won’t taken as long to get the DC or SC of materials to host an auction.

    Don’t exactly know what direction this post went, but #yolo :p
  8. With the less quantity auctions, the people who were hosting auctions at 1dc per auction are losing huge amounts of money now. But the solution would be to auction in a smaller quantity and with a quicker auction end times. but even then the auction can fall to the third page. they just need to amend all of this its crazy. it was never broken
    Impulsive_Egg and FunWart like this.
  9. (not directed against you Weezer, this is just a general comment)

    "Somewhere else" I commented on how staff is inconsistent with applying their rules and to be honest this is a perfect example of that. Weezer started their auction before the rule change and now gets warned about bumping their auction? How on earth can anyone consider this fair play?

    Changing the rules during the run of a game has always been heavily frowned upon throughout history, and rightfully so. It is plain out unfair to those who play the game, because of their expectations when they started it.

    If this is what EMC staff considers fair play then... I don't see a sunny future ahead.

    At the very least staff should have allowed running ("active") auctions to finish by following the previous rules. This is just highly unfair towards players such as Weezer. On a side note: I can't help but wonder if this also isn't partly responsible for the massive backlash. I honestly expected much better than this.

    Anyway... I've shared my opinion, one too many times for my own liking, so I'm going to keep my criticism about these recent changes to myself from here on and concentrate on Minecraft again ;)
    Patr1cV, SkeleTin007, kaptrix and 3 others like this.
  10. Regarding this, and any other auctions posted prior to the rule change:

    You may report your auction to close with no winner, if you so choose. We will allow you to exit the auction and retain your item(s).
    If you elect to not stop the auction, it will continue and conclude under the new rules.

    Allowing continuation of bumps on old auction threads will delay the results we and the community are looking to receive so we can adapt to the situation. Therefore, we offer these options as an alternative.
  11. you mean you will allow
    🙄


  12. Were the only reasons for "fixing" the auction system because of spam? I remember Kyrsyy (not tryna call you out buddy you've already been taking a lot of bullets for the rest of the staff by defending the changes) saying that changes were necessary but I don't fully understand why because I've never heard anyone complain about auctions being spammed in the first place. There wasn't much spam until they took out the minimum quantity limit.
    And in regards to people saying that it's not hard to go into the auctions thread and find what you need, was it harder to go into other threads in other categories to find what you needed? was that the problem?
    Also, not everyone has a fast system. To someone with about 16GBs of RAM they can click two things and they'll be where they need to be in seconds, but not everyone has that luxury. That's why a lot of people rely on auction bumps in the recently active threads box so that they can use it as a shortcut. Not everyone is going to be at their computer all day to catch every new auction bid either, so this only shortens the window of opportunity people have to catch auctions that may interest them.
    My last point is that the auctions were fun. They were fun to bid on, and they're fun to pull together. I've been trying to gather multiple DCs of various things because it's fun to work for and grind stuff and I haven't even been able to start any of them off yet. Now that the minimum limit is one block, all my effort feels completely pointless.
    After seeing everyone's reactions, in the long run I feel like these changes are just going to break the auction economy and no one will be motivated to do the auctions again and then the auctions just die entirely.

    EDIT: one more question, what is the hypothesis of these changes? what results are we expecting? That was never clear to me
  13. This is an extremely excellent point I didn’t think of. If the rule change was because the auctions “spammed” the recent thread section and made people have to go search for other threads enough to complain, how is the complaint not valid that the auctioneers/buyers now have to go search for threads?
  14. To be fair though, that is 1 auction. I've had ones like that before WITH bumping. It all depends on the items being auctioned. Certainly 1 example is not enough as proof, wouldn't you agree? There are already a few auctions from yesterday that got new bids today and they were not on the recent thread list. (Regardless if they were joke auctions or not :p) Someone had to look for them and they found them. :)
    SkeleTin007 and JParsonsX like this.
  15. I haven't read all 13 pages since last night.

    But its simple:

    The auction system was functioning just fine, why was it changed? And where was the poll/question/discussion to change the rules or not? (As with previous rule changes, there were always some discussions to inform what we (the players that play (and pay) on EMC)))?

    Furthermore auctions are all about getting the highest possible bid within the timeframe that you set for your auction. If you're not allowed to bump then you'll most likely be stuck with a low bid which will in turn discourage people from auctioning stuff or even spending time on gathering items as a whole.

    It is clear that this rule change has backfired and/or needs to be reviewed/changed. Players are upset and every post that is written to try and explain to staff why this will negatively impact the EMC economy is treated by staff like a crying kid 'just hand them icecream and itll go away'.

    Can someone from staff please open a Poll where the question is asked plain and simple: Does the auction system and its new rules need a revision: Yes or No. Pin it to the frontpage and after a week or so let the players decide.

    Lets not keep on shouting 'you're wrong yada yada' over and over. lets fix this togheter. as a community.
  16. Sorry for the long post. As explained before, the issues were multi-part.

    Primary goal at first was to change auction requirements. They've been a constant issue in defining what is and wasn't auctionable and in what quantities. When the list was created for auctionable items, it was pretty simple. However, over time and with the addition of multiple items, it grew and grew, becoming more and more complex as each restriction was added. You can see the list still on reverse auctionable items because we really don't know yet what to do with those. It's complex and WAY too much confusion was occurring. So that was step one.

    Which brought in step 2. By loosening auction restrictions, we knew there would be a ton of auctions created, especially at first. It's how historically players have responded to rule changes. So we started looking into the forums use. After doing so, we analyzed the content of auctions. After an auction has reached a stall point and becomes a constant series of bumps, it becomes equivalent to begging spam on the recent active threads and pushes out active player threads, event threads, etc which are all active communication points that help to build the community. When looking at auction items, we rebooted an old discussion about what we want for the forum section long-term. Our auctions are not great. They are threads with posts on them. If you look at other sites, you'd see that this system is illogical and messy. Ideally we want to eventually have a real auction system in place. However, when we get to this point, the auctions won't appear on a recent active list. You will have to load a page on the forums to access the auction house. Bumps won't be allowed in an automatic system. So these rules are the middle ground. They are intended, and have already shown, that we can get players to start going to a set location instead of relying on the recent threads list. Even some players who don't like the rule changes have proven this ability unwittingly because auctions have bids after being off the recent threads list for some time. Which means that these players are going into that forum section actively, which is the intended goal. Active threads are shown amidst the auctions and community development can continue to evolve.
  17. I've stated, though it may have been missed, that we need to allow the changes to make an effect first. Then we are going to make a poll to ask what the community thinks about the experience and use that data to make adjustments where needed. The goal is to retrain a mindset. That doesn't happen overnight so we have to have time to see if it works before we go about changing anything again.
  18. Then why didnt you slowly ween the bumping function from say 3 to 6, and so on until you delete it
  19. As someone who doesn't have this luxury, I hard agree with this point. I know what it's like to be in this spot. I think bumping is pretty much a necessity with auctions. I really hope this gets amended.
    roblikescake and Impulsive_Egg like this.
  20. Its not the effects and 'letting the dust settle first' things that im talking about.

    Its about the system that we, the players, didnt find broken nor openly complained about (if so, could someone show me proof?).

    And the fact that these changes have just been made without the community consultation first.

    One of EMC's strongest points (that has always been present in my 7 years of EMC) was that changes were always discussed first before being made. Where did that aspect of rule changing go?