Wentworth's bidding system bugged?
By
Chaos Creator,
Posted on: 2010-09-15 16:59 in The Market and Inventions
When all bids are the same it is random.
Precisely. The system does NOT fill identical value bids in the order received. This is working as intended. I'm not saying whether it's a 'good' or 'bad' idea, just that it was designed this way on purpose.
Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project
Thanks for the info, was not aware of the way the bidding system works, thx
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A couple of years ago someone did some testing to determine the order in which identical bids were filled. They thought they detected a pattern, but I don't recall what it was based on. I have no idea what you'd search on, but the topic was a good three years old at least.|
Originally Posted by Chaos Creator
When all bids are the same it is random.
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I don't think that the current ordering is exactly what the devs "intended." It's most likely what just happened to pop out from the implementation. If pressed they would probably say that the order in which bids are filled is undefined -- not guaranteed to be anything.
My guess is that it has something to do with the order in which identical database results are returned, which likely has something to do with the internal representation of the database. Unfortunately, that means it's not something that we, as users, can control.
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The someone was peterpeter and he enlisted a number of people from TheMarket global channel (myself included). I do not believe the original post is still around, but someone asked about this in July and peterpeter posted a summary of our conclusions in this thread.
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Originally Posted by Rodion
A couple of years ago someone did some testing to determine the order in which identical bids were filled.
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Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project
I assumed (and rightly so) that identical bids would be queued in chronological order, first come first served, to me that seems to be fair. The present implementation is completley based on chance so i might in theory never get the item i bid on unless i saturate the bidding to give myself a better chance. That would be very hard in the case of bidding for a +3 gladiator.
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If it was kept in chronological bid order there would be those who would complain that evil marketeer types would scoop up the stuff first by getting their bids in first.|
Originally Posted by mammalian
I assumed (and rightly so) that identical bids would be queued in chronological order, first come first served, to me that seems to be fair. The present implementation is completley based on chance so i might in theory never get the item i bid on unless i saturate the bidding to give myself a better chance. That would be very hard in the case of bidding for a +3 gladiator.
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There is an argument to be made that the random method is also fair because it does not favor any bidder over another.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
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I don't know if they expected the system to have capped bids in place. Regardless, I'm not sure you can say that an unbiased random system can BE unfair. |
Originally Posted by mammalian
I assumed (and rightly so) that identical bids would be queued in chronological order, first come first served, to me that seems to be fair. The present implementation is completley based on chance so i might in theory never get the item i bid on unless i saturate the bidding to give myself a better chance. That would be very hard in the case of bidding for a +3 gladiator.
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The traditional way of outbidding people with 2b bids up is to find one of the many "Want to buy +3% gladiator" threads and post in it, or start your own. Basically go off-market. I'm not in that business, I don't know what people are currently paying.
EDIT: It's a repeatable pseudorandom system, but it is very very hard to game anyway.
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So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
I suppose the 'unfaireness' i am referring to is that you could put a bid in for several months then someone puts a bid in for one day and walks away with loot. I perfer a more structured solution, an ordered queue, knowing your time will come eventually, with the current implementation , your time might never come
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It's highly probable that the devs considered putting a secondary sort key on bids so that older identical bids would be filled first. They likely discarded that idea because they knew that players could easily defeat that sort order by bidding higher (which is is why I always bid just a little bit over the nice round numbers so many people tend to use).|
Originally Posted by mammalian
I suppose the 'unfaireness' i am referring to is that you could put a bid in for several months then someone puts a bid in for one day and walks away with loot. I perfer a more structured solution, an ordered queue, knowing your time will come eventually, with the current implementation , your time might never come
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That is, you can always jump ahead in line by simply bidding a little more than everyone else. This ability to line-jump makes having a secondary sort key pointless.
Except, of course, for bids at the maximum influence value. The devs probably never thought that someone would be bidding so much for items, or it would be so rare that they were simply wasting time and effort coding for something that would never happen.
And indeed, for the first couple of years nothing ever sold for that much. Not even when purples were introduced did things get that out of control. But then PvP recipes were introduced. And characters started to rake in huge amounts of influence from various exploits. And now anyone can make billions just by selling a few purples or a PvP recipe.
And at this point there's really no reason to spend the effort to provide an orderly resolution to identical bids at the maximum inf value: people can get much more than that off-market through direct sales. It's therefore a feature that almost no one would ever use, and dev resources are better spent elsewhere.
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just curious how the off market transfer of more than 2 billion would work. isn't 2 billion the cap of what you can hold, as well as the bid cap in WW? |
Originally Posted by Fulmens
I don't know if they expected the system to have capped bids in place. Regardless, I'm not sure you can say that an unbiased random system can BE unfair.
The traditional way of outbidding people with 2b bids up is to find one of the many "Want to buy +3% gladiator" threads and post in it, or start your own. Basically go off-market. I'm not in that business, I don't know what people are currently paying. EDIT: It's a repeatable pseudorandom system, but it is very very hard to game anyway. |
not that I expect to ever sell or buy one of these pvp recipes but just wondering
You have to do 2 billion, then people have to go to the market and grab the other X billion/ bid on a level 53, then you do the rest of the trade. As far as I know it's a trust thing.
As I said, never done it myself.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
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thanks Fulmens, pretty much what I guessed would have to happen. |
Originally Posted by Fulmens
You have to do 2 billion, then people have to go to the market and grab the other X billion/ bid on a level 53, then you do the rest of the trade. As far as I know it's a trust thing.
As I said, never done it myself. |
make sure the character selling the recipe has 0 cash on hand; trade the recipe for 2 billion influence; place a bid on something like a level 53 and then have the buyer hand you the rest of the cash. worse case, they stiff you for the amount over 2 billion and you put them on ignore but you still got 200 million more than you would have from WW with their cut
There also seems to be a bid lag for bids that aren't the highest bid. It seems to me that I purchase the item real fast if I bid really hi, but if I creep bid, it takes a while, esp for salvage. For example, if there's 4000 for sale and 2000 bidding with the highest bid in history at 50000, I make bids for 100, 333, 555, 1111 and 11111. The bids don't turn into purchases right away. I go to the uni to craft, and after I craft 1 item, I get the notice that I purchased them all, even the bid for 100. Based on this, I'm guessing that it's fastest for the bidding algorithm to match against the highest bid and lowest sell price cuz it's just 1 compare. However, to match bids in the middle takes time.
I don't think so. I'm pretty sure it's just that it takes a while for the lower bids to become the highest bid at a time when something's listed for less.
If I'm bidding 1500x10, it sells gradually like that, even while in between my buys people are buying something for 100k.
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Originally Posted by seebs
I don't think so. I'm pretty sure it's just that it takes a while for the lower bids to become the highest bid at a time when something's listed for less.
If I'm bidding 1500x10, it sells gradually like that, even while in between my buys people are buying something for 100k. |
I think a lot more salvage moves through the system than people realize.
It used to be 500 Luck Charms a day on a weekday.
LC's were low supply at the time, though (pre-AE ticket rolls, pre-council-dropping-magic, they stop dropping at 25 and slow way down at 20.)
I'd guess 3-4,000 salvage a day for something like Iron. More on weekends.
Mini-guides: Force Field Defenders, Blasters, Market Self-Defense, Frankenslotting.
So you think you're a hero, huh.
@Boltcutter in game.
When the markets merged I decided to put in a bid for Gladiator's Armor +3 def, i was the 7th bidder and bid 2 billion the cap, however there have been 9 sold since then, so what happened to my bid? Surely this is a bug or am i not understanding the bidding system? Can anyone shed any light on this.