Topic
Instant Auction Delivery
I'm a newish player.
1) Why is there an auction delay at all? (I'd have plus-oned an older thread, but they all closed.)
2) Why do I have to "enter world" before my auction delivery?
I can't always "enter world", so I satisfy my glitch craving by "playing capitalist" intermittently. (Yeah, I even do stupid things like sell all my food when I can't get inworld for a long enough period.) (Why even have player-markets if it's not invisible-handy?)
Replies
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re #1: The prevailing theory on why the auction delay was created is, I believe, that it helped guard against people who used third party tools to buy all items at/below a certain point and selling mass quantities of them at higher prices. This is allowed (the third party tools use the API) but I think mass quantities of it was a problem. Or something. Sorry, I'm not 100% sure, but this is what I've gathered from reading what others have talked about.
Currently I think a good reason to have auction delays is to differentiate that buying/selling mechanism from selling from SDBs in towers, where there is no delay.
2) I actually haven't heard anything talking about why you'd need to enter the world. I assume it is something programming/coding based, similar to how you can send mail on the site but can't add/receive attachments unless you're in the world. -
That's a good point. Monopolists would no doubt surface, using programmed tools to corner markets that I only want to casually "game". Slow-downs can help there.
Really, my main whine is point 2, the requirement to be in-world. I don't blame TS for my inability to log in more often, though! -
it helped guard against people who used third party tools to buy all items at/below a certain point and selling mass quantities of them at higher prices.
Urban myth. The auction delay (or lack of such) has no effect on people who are arbitraging market prices. They don't care if there is a delivery delay or not. All they care about is price.
Purchased items USED to go straight into your inventory, but that caused no end of trouble with people who were buying and selling large amounts of items, not because of prices, but because of inventory space. Consider what has to happen if your bags are full and you buy 100 - or 500 auctions of something. Thus, they switched to mailbox delivery.
Purchased items USED to arrive almost right away, 2 minute delay or so. Around the time towers were introduced, the 10 minute delay was also introduced. The move was widely seen as a way to put tower selling on a more even footing relative to auction selling. Stoot said that the game would be "more interesting" if you couldn't just necessarily get whatever you wanted delivered to you instantly. There's room for debate there. - WalruZ, the auction delay preceded towers by several months. For stoot's explanation of the delay, click here. It has absolutely nothing to do with towers.
- Ooh, thanks for the input from both of you! As I said I wasn't 100% sure of things, and I was basing them on random remembered things and not details or stootquotes and it's really nice to see that kind of thing - I find this a bit of an interesting topic!
- Official reasons aside, now the delay serves as a way to differentiate between Towers and Auctions, towers you have to go to them, auctions are delivered to you directly, yes theres a delay but you don't have to search as much, often with towers you DO have to go to multiple locations to get enough of the items you want, its rather a point of paying for convenience fee/time in a way. If you take the delay away theres very little incentive to even go to towers.
- I also assume I'm paying a marked up price for Auction purchases, because a Tower seller doesn't have to account for the 7% fee.