peterpeter

Turns out I still have my old market columns in text files on my pc. Here's the one on resolving ties.

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Which Bid Wins?

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to tackle a question which has been puzzling marketeers for countless generations. When there are multiple bids for the same item at the same price, which bid is resolved first when an item is listed? If the bids are for different amounts, then the highest bid should always get the item, but when the bids are for the exact same amount, no one really knows what happens.

There are two dominant theories. The first is the FIFO theory: First In, First Out. According to this theory, the first person to place a bid will get an item before the second person who places a bid. The last person to place a bid will be the last person to win an item.

The other theory is that the bids are resolved in random order. According to this theory, there is no way to know which person is going to receive the item when the bid amounts are the same. Some random roll of the dice on the server makes that determination.

In order to put these two theories to the test, I gathered up a few stacks of unpopular recipes: Level 11 and 14 Fear/Range recipes in the Horror set. I asked for volunteers from the Market section of the forums and the global channel TheMarket. I asked each of the volunteers to place a bid for exactly 89 influence on the level 14 recipe. Nine people offered to help. I carefully recorded the order in which they placed their bids. 0th Power placed a bid first, then Miuramir, Macskull, Anti-Gravity Man, Lili, AC Bolt, Blazing Stone, Ironblade1, and finally Grandpa Squeak. Once all nine bids were in place, all for the same item, all for the same amount, I listed one recipe for sale at 1 influence.

The recipe sold instantly to... (drumroll please) ... 0th Power. I listed another recipe. It sold to Miuramir. So far, it was looking like the FIFO theory might be correct. I listed the third recipe and leaned forward into the monitor, waiting to see who had bought it. Would it be Macskull? No! It was AC Bolt! The sixth person to place a bid was the third person to get an item. The next recipe went to Grandpa Squeak, the last person who had placed a bid! FIFO was out the window! The remaining recipes went to Ironblade1, Lili, Macskull, Anti-Gravity Man, and Blazing Stone. First in was definitely not first out.

We could have stopped there, and just assumed that the random theory must be the correct one. After all, the results looked pretty random after the first couple of names. That wasn't good enough! We decided to run the exact same experiment over again: the same people placing the same bids in the same order on the same recipe. If the purchase order was determined randomly, then we would see a new and different mix-up of names. That's not what happened.

I listed the first recipe, and once again it went to 0th Power. I listed the second recipe, and once again it went to Miuramir. Who would get the third recipe? Would it be AC Bolt again? Yes! Yes it was. The exact same people received the recipes in the exact same order. The random theory was sporting a black eye!

Now we were eager to learn more. We tried the same experiment with level 11 recipes instead of level 14. It didn't make the slightest difference. The buy order seemed to be fixed in stone. What magical power gave 0th Power a lock on first place? What dark curse kept Blazing Stone stuck in last place?

It didn't look alphabetical by global name or character name. We tried comparing the levels of the characters, and the number of vet badges. Nothing made any sense. What about other badges? Market only badges? Influence on hand? Server? Age of the character? Time zone? People were throwing out information and data points as fast as they could type, and I was trying to compare everything. Suddenly, I noticed one point of correlation: origin. The first two characters to get buys were both Natural origin. Next was the one Magical character, then all three Science characters, followed by the lone Mutant. Did the market favor Natural characters and punish Mutants?

I double checked my notes, and realized that one origin was missing. For the correlation to be perfect, Grandpa Squeak needed to be either Science or Magic. I typed out the question, and waited for a response. Grandpa Squeak's character was... a Mutant. The series was broken. Humans are very good at spotting patterns. Our brains are wired for it. Sometimes we're so good that we spot patterns which aren't even there. I decided the partial correlation could be chalked up to coincidence. We still didn't know what factor determined the buy order, and we had an endless stream of possibilities.

Luckily, our next experiment pointed us in the right direction and away from the vast swamp of character details. We ran the same experiment as the first time, except we reversed the order in which people placed their bids. Would 0th Power still come out on top, even when he was the last person to put in a bid? Would Blazing Stone still come in last, even when he put in the third bid?

Nope. Grandpa Squeak put in the first bid, and Grandpa Squeak got the first item. Ironblade1 put in the second bid, and got the second item. Blazing Stone put in the third bid, and the third item went to... Anti-Gravity Man, who had put in the sixth bid. Even though we had changed the people around, the bids were still resolving in the same order relative to when they were placed. The last person to put in a bid became the fourth person to receive an item, just like last time. Which person actually placed each bid didn't matter!

Once more unto the breeches! For the next round, I assigned a random order, starting with Grandpa Squeak and ending with Miuramir. It made no difference who placed which bid. The first two bids always received the first two items. The third bidder was always the seventh buyer. The last bidder was always the fourth buyer.

Obviously there were many potential variables which we did not test. What if each person placed two bids? What if they all bid something other than the 89 influence we had used over and over? What if a few bids were placed, then a couple of them were canceled, then a few more placed, then two items were sold, and then another bid came in? Sadly, we only had time for one more test. What if there were only eight bids instead of nine?

Quat and Hecktender stepped in to replenish the dwindling ranks of volunteers as we ran our last experiment. Once again, the first bidder got the first sale. Once again, the second bidder got the second sale. The first surprise came when the fourth item sold went to the eighth bidder instead of the ninth. Of course, we only had eight bidders, so it wasn't that big of a surprise. There was a ripple effect, though: the fifth item went to the fifth bidder instead of the eighth, the sixth item went to the third bidder instead of the fifth, the seventh item went to the fourth bidder instead of the third, and the eighth and final item went to the seventh bidder instead of the fourth.

The numbers were different, but clearly the same pattern was still present. The conversation quickly dissolved into a complicated analysis of random number generator seeds and number sequences patterns. In the end, we could only resolve to come back and puzzle away at it again on some future date. We certainly accomplished what we set out to do: to thoroughly test the two main theories regarding bid resolution order. The system is clearly not FIFO. The system is also not truly random. The bidders may have been jumbled up a bit, but they were jumbled up in the exact same way every time. There may have been a random sequence generated at some time, but during our testing window we were clearly dealing with a fixed sequence.

I will leave you with a few rows of numbers to think about. The first row is the ID of the bidder, from bidder #1 to bidder #9. The second row shows the order in which each bidder received an item. Bidder 1 received item 1, bidder 2 received item 2, bidder 3 received item 7, and so on. The final row shows the order in which the bidders received items during the final experiment, when there were only eight bidders and eight items instead of nine.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
1 2 7 8 6 3 9 5 4
1 2 6 7 5 3 8 4

I think that, every once in a while, a bunch of level 1 Hellions should run in and yell "This is a stickup! Everybody put your hands... oh crap."

You know, maybe I should have been more worried about this issue back when I17 went live. Is it just my imagination or did those non-existent Market teleport inspirations vanish when the new UI arrived?

I was just cleaning up my thread subscriptions and I stumbled across this. Ahhh, three months ago. How the world has changed.

Happy birthday!

What do you want to be able to do? If you are going to solo, a tank is the safest but slowest of the three. If you want to draw aggro away from your teammates and survive it, a tank is your best bet. Both scrappers and brutes can solo well, but personally I think scrappers solo better. Brutes can get more benefit from teammates' buffs, though. Really, it's hard to go wrong.

I suppose one fundamental difference is the inherent. Brutes get fury, which increases their damage output as long as they're fighting. Scrappers get criticals, which allow them to do bonus damage at random times, especially against bosses. Tanks have gauntlet, a taunt effect which helps them keep aggro.

Arachnos inserts them when they are babies, and then waits until they are fully grown before sending in the rest of the team. You have to plan ahead when you're a supervillain like Lord Recluse.

This isn't a reappearance of the old mouse-over bug is it, where moving the mouse over the post button while clicking and dragging triggers the button-down event?

I haven't really been logging in much lately, especially not to the market, so apologies if that's a totally dumb idea.

Personally, I think of this forum as being all about creating arcs, and the other forum is about playing arcs, but of course that's not the official distinction.

I'm excited to see some of those old stickies unstuck! Thanks Ocho!

It looks like Mod 08 is open to the idea of cleaning up stickies, so I sent him a PM pointing him to this thread. Are there any important changes to the stickies in this forum section since the OP? The guide to fitting an arc into 100k is about to get a lot less useful.

The Gamester. Right now he's really nothing more than an excuse for the devs to put Christmas presents appear all over town. I imagine him as an all powerful being from another dimension, but it's a dimension without a sense of humor. He's just a child, and he stumbled across our dimension while playing. He thinks humor is an interesting idea and he tries to do it, but really can't get the hang of it. When his parents find him messing around with our dimension, they drag him off. I'm sure I've seen characters like that before in the Twilight Zone, and Star Trek, and possibly comics.

A few thoughts...

Swellguy's OP: Sliding market fees make things more complicated, which I don't personally like, but the devs don't seem to have a problem with. It might very well encourage people to list items low in order to get a quick sale, but the result would be that the supply of items for sale at any given moment would drop. We'd see more empty shelves. Empty shelves tend to cause jagged price jumps. I don't think this would overall be a fix.

dave_p's idea: I don't think it's a bad idea, but I also don't think it addresses the problems that I imagine the devs are looking to solve. If nobody wants to buy stuff, then nobody really cares what happens to it. It's the high price, low volume stuff that gets the player base worked up. It's hard to tell what gets the devs worked up.

So, as Mandur12 points out, the first part of the game is to figure out what it is that the devs see as a problem. I'm going to guess it's something like:

1. Prices are high enough to scare off new players and anger some others.
2. Reduced supply of sub-50 recipes.
3. Some hero/villain disparity

Given those problems, I would speculate these solutions:
1. Reduce the vendor price on high level common IO recipes
2. Increase the crafting price set recipes, especially high value ones
3. Tie the level of recipe drops to the character, not the mob (I suspect this is a much harder change than it sounds like).
4. Lower merit costs for lower level recipes.
5. Increase merit rewards for all strike forces
6. Add new strike forces

Personally, I think #3 there deserves some consideration. I don't know about everyone else, but it seems to me that SSK has increased the number of low level characters playing on high level teams. People can exemp down, but that seems less popular. As a result, a lot of low level drops have been replaced with high level drops. That makes for more influence and higher prices overall, while at the same time lowering the availability of mid and low level recipes.

Unfortunately, it's the kind of change that would really hit at the heart of the loot drop code, so the devs might be reluctant to tinker with it. If they did, though, what would the result be?

If they were to add a few more villain strike forces and set the merits/hour on them to something favorable, that should bring down prices, at least on some high end things. I wouldn't call it a fix, but at least it's something. Isn't there a level range hole with no redside SF's at all? If I were a dev, I'd find that a bit embarrassing this many years after release.

I think the paid time is the number of months you paid for directly, and the veteran reward time is the paid time plus any time you paid for indirectly plus any free time that you got. By "indirectly" I mean the retail boxes. Those always come with one month. It's not a "free" month because you had to pay for the box, but you weren't billed for the month itself. So if you bought CoH and CoV and one other box, maybe the Mac edition? Then you will have 3 months of time added to the months that you paid for directly. I think you can also get free months from having your friends subscribe.

I hope that makes sense. It seemed clear before I started typing. Anyhow, that is why you see two different numbers. But yes, there is also a common bug about having the vet rewards actually be rewarded. It happened to me, but a petition cleared it up quickly.