Automated Land Bidding...this is allowed?

I was looking for land, and starting throwing out some bids. There is obviously a bot running somewhere that is outbidding me by 10 L$ every single time I submit my bid. It raises me by 10$ immediately, every single time, no matter what my increment is.

Yeah I'm new to this, I never really had to buy land and don't know much about it. How the hell do you outbid a bot that just auto raises you 10 bucks infinitely? Is this what land exchange is boiling down to in SL these days?

It has always been like this, and it is not a "bot" run by ebil land barons.

It is just the normal functioning of the Lindens' auction board, and the Lindens themselves built this function in.

If you read the description of the auction, you will find it has automatic incremental bidding. I believe some other auction sites on the Internet have this too. It is a very fair system, especially given that the auctions happen on US time zones prime time, yet many auction bidders are not in the US. Should they have to stay up all night just to get a piece of land in SL?

The way it works is you look at the land, you figure out the maximum you will pay for that land, and you figure your bid. The system asks not just for your bid of that moment, but initially asks you to type in your maximum bid. Type in the highest you are willing to go for this land. Then watch it. It might go up, it might not, depending on what other people typed in, which you cannot know, because both their identity and their max bid are kept hidding in this blind system, which is an accepted system internationally.

Your calculation of a maximum bid should keep in mind that what you pay for it is not all...you will have the tier fee to cover too. And if you want to resell it, you have to load in the calculation of what you paid in GOM fees, perhaps, if you had to buy in Lindens, or in PayPal fees, if your purpose is to sell and cash out back to US dollars. And market prices, and PG and M and all the other factors. I'm told land barons have complicated mathematical formulas for figuring max builds and margins. That may be bunkem. Gut it out and see what you are willing to pay, first of all by looking at your RL budget and pocket book.

So, with all this in mind, put in your maximum highest bid. Then, you can walk away and the board will automatically go up 10 each time someone else comes in with a price. If they have put in a maximum bid above your maximum bid, it will go up another 10 and so on over your bid, and inform you that you are no longer the highest bidder. That's what is making it appear as if there are "bots". It's just the incremental bid.

So when you see that happening, re-do your maximum bid price and press it through the pages. That is, if you want to change your maximum bid price.

But it is good not to be sucked into changing it just because someone is fighting you on the auctions. Think about whether you really want the land, think about the tier, think about its resale value, especially when you are now paying a lot more for it than you were willing. Let it go if it gets too expensive, the Lindens will have more tomorrow and the day after that, often looking exactly what you see there.

Jeezus christ just forget the whole thing, I totally don't get it. If buying land at an auction is that complex, not for nothing but it ain't for me. Let the Linden Land Bot have it.

Now more than ever I know that I'll never sell my current parcels omg.

Have you ever bought anything off ebay? The Linden auction page works the same way as regards to max bids.

If you decide a plot of land is worth L$5000 then put in a bid of L$5000. it is that simple. If the new price shows L$5010 it simply means someone else values the land higher than you and has already put in a higher maximum bid.

It sounds like it works like ebay. It automatically bids up to your maximum.

Yes, exactly like ebay, except that the bidders names are hidden untill the auction ends.

calm down Tcoz it doesnt really take 20 paragraphs to explain it......

when you bid on the autcions you see a place where you can type in a max bid amt....
enter what you want there and the auction will up your bid by 10$ each times your outbid up to the max you typed in

Aww go calm yourself.

No I've never bought anything on Ebay.

Like I said, nevermind, it ain't for me. I got my answer, I guess this is just how it works, something to do with something auto bidding against you and you putting in what you think the land is worth and just getting instabeat. Or whatever. I've been to auctions and you bid against people who say, right then and there, "I bid this". Period and that's all. I'm just not inclined to this global auction stuff.

Varney and Natoma forever.

This type of bidding can actually save you money, as the auctioneer (LL in this case) is acting as your agent and doing your bidding for you. This way you don't have to make a guess and bid "X" amount and then keep going back to look at compepetitive bids; you just make an honest assessment of what the land is worth to you. If you get it for less than that amount it is great, and if you don't, well, at least you didn't get caught up in the craziness of a bidding war and pay way more than you intended to.

In one of my econ classes we had a little thing where the professor auctioned off a one dollar bill... but whatever you bid you would have to pay whether you won or not. I think it ended up going for about $2.75 and about $10 was collected. It was a little experiment thing to show that people take sunk costs into consideration when deciding future expenditures... "hey i'll have to pay $.75 no matter what at this point... so if I win I can at least cut my losses a bit."

What's the relevance? None really, that comment about bidding wars just reminded me of it. And I wanted to gloat about how much better my econ classes were than yours

I assumed the whole fun of auctioning was in fact watching the bids climb and competing. All this automated stuff just makes it sort of procedural and joyless...you never really know what is happening. All you know is that you got beat. It is SO annoying to just see your bid beat by 10 bucks by the autobot (or agent, whatever you call it) again....and again....and again....

Hey I'm sure you high end econ class taking types have played enough sophisticated games with one dollar bills and quarters to make this seem fun somehow. Sounds like a productive 5.3 years.

The one good thing about all this is that I can definitely rule out pursuing a career as an EBay buyer. I'm sure it's all very well thought out in an insurance application kind of way but if this is what it's all about it just ain't my cup of tea.

We need a new land program, "Land for the Ancient that Never Cared About Money or Buying Land and Now Can't Get Any Breaks". Reminds me of going to college and applying for student loans...are you...JewishAfricanAmericanPartofAnyMinorityAmericanIndianHandicappedChristianOrphan....?

"No".

"Hmm...well, you had a donut outside I saw you take it. Thanks for coming!"

Oh and as I understand it there's a 2 minute slider on the last bid.

Over and out.

What's fun is bidding and watching the price climb. What's not fun is watching someone else walk away with the land because they got in a bid in the last second before the auction closed, not because they were willing to pay more.

Let me get this straight. You want to have to stay online for two days, tit for tat bidding against others dollar by dollar?

Or maybe if bidding is at $100, you want to have to pay $500 just to make sure you get it? (Even though nobody else is willing to pay more than, say $217 for it)?

Here's what you do:

Decide what you think a plot of land is worth TO YOU, and then set that much as your maximum bid. Period. Either you get the land for equal to or less than what you think its worth, or you don't get the land.

The purpose of auctions is to sell land to whomever is willing to pay the most for it. It isn't a game.

Buster

I'd love to be able to auction off my land....

I've considered putting it up on ebay, but hate having to deal with insertion fee, final value fees, paypal fees. Though I was considering doing that and allowing someone to pay in $L and state the exchange rate in the auction, or something like that.

Why not hold an event? Gather all interested parties and hold a real life auction with the attendees shouting out their bids.... then sell to the winner.. why is this a problem?

Yes, I know the events list isn't policed very well, but there is always someone waiting in the wings just watching for a reason to report it... especially if it even remotely appears to interfere with their business. And if I were to do it, it would be something I'd be interested in doing on a regular bases.

I would say an in-game land auction, maybe with a little raffle or something, a dj who knows, is not just "visit my land for sale".

If I want to have 10 people on my land to bid for the price of it, I can't imagine LL would have a problem with that. Why would they? I could see if you just put up an event that was nothing more than coords to an empty plot of land, yeah that would be out of line. Linden has a problem with that as an event, you throw another event, hand out cards at it that you are doing the auction, details at this other website here tell your friends.

And yes, I would rather check in on my bids for two days. You may think that's stupid, or whatever. I do not. Also, sorry to assume SL and all things in it are supposed to be fun and interesting, I often forget that a lot of people just don't see it that way.

That public land web page is a joke. I watched it for over a week and never saw a listing.

I think now I'm starting to understand why Pete puts out his land scanners. I may eat my words and follow suit since it's more interesting and at least allows you to compete instead of all this invisible guessing and 10 dollar bot bidding, and after all, LL says it's ok. If my bid gets beat, tell me by how much so I can decide if I want to cap that. Otherwise I'll just script a web page that submits 10 bucks over and over up to a threshhold until I can no longer scrape the words "outbid by proxy" from the html. I'm sure people out there are doing something like that now anyway.

... and you will have re-invented from scratch the very system you are complaining about. Because that's *exactly* what the Lindens' proxy-bidding "bot" does now.

And then someone can come along and complain in the forums about having to bid against *your* bot...

Yeah Tinker, how about that. Funny how one thing leads to another.

Isn't it.

I applaud your defused attempt at sarcasm. * buzz * aww ladies and gentleman...well, we're sorry. But we'll be back next week!

Actually, you CAN check your bids and up them if topped. In fact, LL send you an email TELLING you somebody topped your bid.

My perception of what land is worth changes sometimes based on other bids and what the most recent next-door plot goes for. So I do that, I go in there and up my maximum bid. But believe me, as someone who used ebay before ebay introduced the bots, you *WANT* the bots. Even YOU, believe me.

Otherwise the barons wait until the very last second, and whoever has the fastest internet connection and hits the ENTER button at exactly the right moment wins. (That's never YOU. That's always somebody with a $20,000 co-location server and the automated program that calculates ping times to the millisecond.) The only way to win in that situation is to bid MORE THAN THE ITEM IS WORTH.

That means that if YOU want to buy something, YOU always have to PAY TOO MUCH.

So you'd be happy to pay a lot more for land if the bidding was more fun?

Anyway, I lecture people all the time about imposing their idea of what's fun or not on other people. I hate it when people tell other people how they ought to think. So if you want to have fun bidding in an auction, then that's great! But be careful what you wish for.

Buster