Auction House

Sohl

A post in another topic made me think of an in-game auction house. It could be placed somewhere neutral, like Thera, and function similar to the artefact auctions.

• Bring your item to the auction house; when you start an auction, the item will be taken from your inventory and placed in a no-access, non-decay room.
• Can set options like starting bid, minimum bid, gold or credit bids, duration, public or private bids, and who can and cannot bid  - similar to shop options.
• Reneging on a bid will result in a ban from further use of the house and give the seller the option to restart.
• A relatively high fee for using it to discourage non-serious auctions. 50k or some such.
• Canceling an item you have up for bid will return the item to your inventory without a refund of the fee.

I'd use it.

Idelisa

I love this.  Only problem I see with it is that it would decrease actual shop sales, would probably have to be limited to certain types of items.

Sylvance

I just can't get past the WoW connotations

Trey

I dislike anything that removes the interaction from commerce, aside from obvious instances like a normal shop purchase.

Sohl

Fair point, @Trey, but then again there's not a whole lot of interaction that occurs as it is now except people spamming market.

Delphinus

This would largely trivialise player-owned shops. Auction houses exist where player shops do not.

Sohl

I pictured it more as a place to sell high-value items, unlike a shop. The associated fee would mean you don't see the common items sold in shops auctioned: curatives, clothes, enchantments, etc. But it would be a great way to sell a really nice rapier, for example.

Katzchen

50k is a very large fee... Is there even enough items of high enough value to make that worth it wanting to be sold or bought to make this viable?

I think 10-20k would limit it enough without being crazy.

I agree that shops do better in small trade, curatives, supplies, clothing. High value items don't sell that well, that stuff is usually on market, so it would just cause less spam there.

Beya

I'm very interested in this. Making a note for later.

Azor

You know, a player could already do this, assuming they had access to a non-decay room. No need to hardcode it. One of you that's interested, start it up! Might be more fun that way anyway.

Xith

There's also the market channel.

I'd say 5k fee max to add your auction though. I just don't know what else you'd use this for besides nice rapiers and things.

Katzchen

Event items, and other rarities. Nondecay items (without resetting)

Grandue

It would probably have to have something like a 30 month time limit or something. I can see those without access to a non-decay room using this as just a non-decay room, setting the minimum bid to like 99999999. 

Beya

Every year this comes up, and every year few months people overlook that there already exists something like this in Meropis. The reason it's not implemented closer is because there are shops on the main continent which would conflict with such a setup. Who knows what can happen, though.

EDIT: Not every year, every few months.

Sena

Yenien is a way to sell items at a set price without a shop, this suggestion is pretty different. Unless there's also an auction mechanic on Meropis that I haven't noticed.

Beya

Oh, hold on. Sell your artefacts for gold in a bidding war style?

This makes more sense to me.

That could be quite exciting as a theme.

Penwize

A lot of people seem to be missing the AUCTION part of the title of this thread.  There really isn't something like this already.  Shops do not perform this same function at all.  Players can already do it with market and such, yeah, but then they just spam market so it's really limited. 

I remember a while back, a few of the MUDs I tried had an auction method similar to Achaea's periodic high-price admin-run auctions, but that could be initiated by players for a hefty fee.  I'd love to see that sort of thing for rare and interesting items.  Achaea's not really a loot-driven game so there's less of a demand for that sort of high-priced thing, but it could be useful nonetheless.

Daslin

I love this idea. Honestly. Would make it a hell of a lot easier for the forgers to sell the high quality items. Not only that, it'd slow down the stupid posts on MARKET. Good lord, some people know how to advertise, some don't.

Long and short, Auction House, my name is Daslin, and I approve of this message.

Darklyre

Auction house does sound good as long as there's a minimum price, a significant fee, and a time limit.

Yen

I would like to see something like this for big-ticket items. Exceptional forged wares, for instance.

But also including, say: shops, and ships.  Clans, perhaps.  In my experience the things most commonly sold by auction are not things that you can just pick up and hand to a denizen.

Tirac

This is a fun idea but I'm not sure it would ever get used over traditional market auctions. One of the main things brought up in this thread is the sale of forged goods. Especially in the case of weapons, blacksmiths typically know who the big buyers are, and word gets out pretty well over market.

Would be cool to have and wouldn't hurt anything but I'm not sure if it would be used.