Staff's Long-term Intentions/Expectations: With the ability to auction in smaller quantities, forum auctions are easier to participate in from the start. Ease of access will introduce players to the auctions that may have never tried to host one as well as resolve issues with clarifications and contradictory items, such as padded armor, etc introduces in Update SU2. After hosting a small auction, a new auctioneer is either going to decide they don't like auctions overall or enjoy them and become more actively involved with them. This will noticeably increase the forum auction participation over the course of a few months, and continue to do so. With the average completion time of auctions being 48-72 hours since last valid bid, players will be trained/instructed to look in the Auction house if they are looking for auctions to participate in. Items that players want to bid on will be bumped in the recent active threads list as they bid. New posts, as well as bids will still show up in the recent activity list, showing the thread as active and the auction actively progressing. In the past, after a initial spur of bids, an auction would stall. With a completion time of 48 hours and auction bumps allowed every 3 hours, this resulted in players bumping up to 15-16 times with no valid bid progression of the item. It had reached its market high and no bidders wanted to raise the bid. Players have made comments that these bumps were crowding out the community interaction on threads. After watching for a few months, and debating the changing of auction item guidelines after SU2, Staff agreed and decided to stop bumps for auction threads and the timeline would coincide with auction item restriction changes. Bumps also occurred in-game with market chat being sent for auction advertisements. 1/5 players is not on the forums. Some don't want to be, some aren't allowed, and some can't because their computer craps out on them if they try top be in-game and on the forums at the same time. That's their prerogative. When an auction thread link is posted to the market chat, to these players, it's spam. Not all of them are bothered, but I've heard my fair share complain in-game as soon as an advertiser logs off. It's a forum auction and players are required to go to the forums to participate. Why should a player that isn't on the forums be forced to hear it. Options were to split Market into two channels, or to disallow auction thread adverts. With the change of bumps instilled, player reaction dictates that it would result in an increased amount of players turning to in-game advertisements and increased spam in an already known issue area. So to stop this, we decided to not allow it fully. We discussed the 24 hour change that some of you have suggested. We discussed removing the auctions from the recent active threads section entirely. We discussed the feasibility of a separate recently active auctions list. We looked at it from every angle. However, in order to fully instill the mindset for players to go to the auction house instead of relying on the recent threads section, we fully believe it is in the best interest of the community in the long run that bumps and adverts are removed completely for auction threads. In the future, we may be able to turn the auctions into something more than just threads, thanks to some plugins we are looking into. Nothing fancy but there would be a set format and result in less confusing of an auction with a community interaction thread. That's a ways off though and changes were necessary to lead us there. We've been sitting and watching the behavior of the auctions for months. We knew that the immediate reaction would be auction spam of extreme proportions. We also know that supply and demand will stabilize those auctions. This was not a spur of the moment change. We know that it's a big adjustment, but we also know that the expected reward in the terms of boosting player interaction for auctions is worth a little initial turmoil. So to summarize, the intention is to remove archaic auction rules that made no sense with the complexity of items involved now and boost overall forum auction participation in a way that changes player mindset and steers away from reliance on the recent threads section so that auctions can later be modified to adapt for any plug-in capabilities that we may implement, hopefully making auctions something better than threads with post spam.
In all honesty, I've thought about combing through auction and selling history, and calculating how much staff members are overpaid for items given their value at the time, but it was just too much work and I decided not to stir up drama. I still have that Google spreadsheet sitting on my computer as we speak!
So why am I not allowed to advertise my auction on my own profile? It's a part of the forums too. Only people on the forums can see it.
Well I'm glad the all knowing staff, know what's best for us. I appreciate all the handwork you put into this private decision but I have yet to see numerous people support these rule changes. I thought you wanted to make EMC more fun. I've never in my life on EMC seen someone complain irrationally. Put it to a vote....
Respectfully I ask you to stop. If you have nothing to say and are only here to troll, go away. We don't care for your kind around here.
The reason why you did not have a poll and refused to put this to a vote is because no-one likes this rule change. Are you trying to kill EMC's community? You are not always right you know and that's what I got out of that whole explanation. That you know what's best for us no matter what.
