Auction griefing potential

I think a high profile auction like the Island sim auction has major potential for griefing, and there does not seem to be anything to protect against that, other than the potential threat of having to pay the amount bid at the end of the auction. If someone is serious about bidding, then more power to them and may the most determined person win. If someone is griefing just to drive up the price, that is bad for everyone and I hope they get stuck with the bill. It will be interesting to see if this occurs tonight in the last 5 minutes of the bidding.

Current Rate based off the Driving factor of the Island Auction is US$3.82 per Meter @ US$250 for one sim.

US$250/65536m2 = US$3.814697266 to-03 decimal point.

LOL and Linden labs only wanted US$195

Remember Virtue is Learned
Intelegence no one can help you with.
Greed only leads to the lessening of one or the other.
ShadowWeaver 01/07/04

Cris, I've been holding off bidding until the last minute so as not to prematurely drive up the price of the parcel(s) on which I intend to eventually bid. LL's really needs to add the feature whereby you can enter the top amount you are willing to bid and then your bid is increased incrementally whenever someone else bids. I forget what this is called... ?

Hi,

Just to let you know we have made a serious bid. We are commited to making SL work as a community. We have great plans for the island.

I also hope that the "griefers" don't ruin the last 5mins of the auction.

We want to open the island up as a community, therefore we are dveloping our ideas around 'inclusion'.

Its a serious financial commitment, so anyone bidding should read the small print of the contract.


Fiz

Fizik,

I wasn't referring to your bid actually, though I am glad that driving the price up $150 was not a fake bid. The real bidding will not occur until this evening, and I have a feeling it is going to go quite high. I just wish there was a way to protect against illegitimate bids.

My plans, while private at that time, follow the same lines yours do, and my bids are quite serious as well.

Cristiano

Folks,

If you bought the sim you STILL have to pay S195 per month to keep it ! Its not a 1 time fee folks. Remember that !

Consider the Auction simply the fee to AQUIRE the land .
You Still Have to Maintain it at $195 per month !


Added:
I forgot to mention Good Luck to all bidders your pockets are way deeper then mine !

Thanks for the support Cristiano,

My only worry about this 'auction' system is that, even at this stage, Linden can see that there is a demand for 'own' servers. Hopefully they will cater to the demand.

Also an incremental bidding system would be great. Or maybe a buy 'out right' button?


Would love to hear about your plans for the island



Fiz

How do you figure 'griefing' is possible under this system?

If someone places a bid, they're held to it. Regardless of the intent of their bid, their requirements are the same. They could get stuck 'holding the bag'.

It is true they could be stuck holding the bag, and that is the only risk they face. However, if you see people placing serious bids, it is possible to just keep bidding to drive up the price. It would be stupidity, and we all know that people don't do stupid things

Fizik,

It seems right now that the three serious bidders that I am aware of all have similar plans, so regardless of who ends up with the sim, we should explore ways to work together. Good luck

Cristiano

Proxy bidding. I also wish they would have done this, as it is much much simpler than trying to refresh and rebid all the time. (Assuming you stick to your guns about your maximum.)

Christiano,

I hear what you're saying, and in principal I agree. However, there's only so much protection against blatant stupidity. It would *not* surprise me one bit if the island was put back on the block as soon as the auction was done.

These are all just wrinkles to iron out. As for the proxy bidding, maybe LL should've run the auctions on Ebay with completion of the transaction via this site? Either way, adding the proxy feature can't be that difficult.

This is called Proxy Bidding. That is how ebay works

The "only" risk the face? Uh, if they win the auction by bidding, then they won the auction. I'm not following you at all.

There's no difference in bidding to 'drive up the price' than bidding to 'win at a higher price'. The bid is the same.

eh... think ya mis-understood the e-03 thre shadow....

gotta move that decimal point three places left... aka its actually $0.00381 per meter^2, aka somethin like 6 cents per 16m^2 block.... not too shabby really... yet

I think they're just trying to address the concerns seen plagued by other auction sites (Ebay being number 1 example).

There are those who will jack the top price up knowing they aren't going to get the bid. There are those who will jack the price up and not pay. Yes it can be put back up for auction but think of the wasted time and resources going through all that all over again.

The funnest thing that will be interesting to watch though: bid snipers.

To rule against this would be to rule against bidding in general though. At the open of an auction, you're almost ALWAYS bidding with the expectation that it will not be the winning bid. To say that it's wrong for someone to put a bid in which is low just because they 'know they won't get it' goes against the whole system of auctioning.

You bid what you can, if it goes beyond that, so be it, but you can't cut out people's ability to bid just because you've decided it's less than what you're willing to pay, so that you can pay less than that amount. That's ridiculous.

The way to eliminate bid sniping and bid greifing is to have a hidden auction.

You place a secret max bid, and thats it. No feedback at all.

At the end, whoever has the highest bid gets it for the cost of the second highest bidder plus a dollar.

It's not popular though, as it tends to reduce the end price, so sellers are lothe to use it. If the bidding sistem on SL is here for us and not as a way to make money for Linden Labs, then they should consider making it more bidder friendly instead of seller friendly.

I liked the Olive way better, myself... a raffle instead of an auction. I know teh idea behind auctions is that the people who want it most will get it, but what that means in reality is often whoever has the most money gets it.

I'm waiting for one of these Lotto winners to go to an online game like this and just buy EVERYTHING in sight. Maybe they keep it all, or give it away, or resell it or just release plots on a schedule to watch the riot of people trying to grab it up. Makes me wish I was rich so I could play with people lives... oh wait, maybe not...

Yeah, deciding you *really* want something can get expensive. Looks like I will be holding off buying other games for a while.

I like the hidden auction kind of thing, too. It looks like there were a couple of people who *really* wanted the part I wanted, so we might have ended up paying even more.

Edit: I kindly retract my post.

** deleted **

Hmm, I say go for the "no tolerance" policy. Make the consequences for winning an auction that you didn't want to win so bad that it's a deterrent.

Bids should be immediately binding, if you bid on something and win YOU PAY for it. No screwing around...this is real people's money we're dealing with. Bill the winner's credit card immediately after the auction ends. If it maxes the card out or the card is bad for some reason, GO AFTER them legally and MAKE them pay for it. I don't think that would be a problem if you make everyone that bids OK one of those lawyer-written agreements beforehand.

If they don't immediately resolve the problem (in case the bid was real, and there was an honest mistake which is easily resolved), charge them a %10 extra fee on top of what the final bid price was and MAKE them pay it. If there are still problems, totally kill all their SL accounts, BAN them from SL as best as possible (don't let anyone under the same name/address/IP rejoin the game, etc.), and redo the auction from scratch.

Dunno if it'd work, but at least it would give any "griefers" some of their own medicine.

Also:

Based on what's said in another thread, I don't know if LL would be able to legally enforce something like this...BUT--they can make them pay consequences within their own domain. They can delete your account and ban you from the game (refuse name/address/IP/credit card). And if they can make them pay for it or take legal action, good.

The only issue I can see cropping up here has to do with people quitting the game or new players who don't want to stay. I'm sure something could be worked out to fix that, though.

My question is what if the owner of the Island/sim decides they dont want to pay or cant afford the monthly land fee any longer? Can they split it up and sell it in lots or does it remain one parcel and if so do they have to resell it for RL$ or can it now be sold for LL$.

While the new land purchases seem to be a way to get more sims into the game I find that SL has just become a real estate venture. There is no creativity it seems any more. It just seems to be about land swapping.

I would like to see LL now focus on giving us more tools to be more creative with using less prims. Those that cant afford to buy up lots of land to get the added prims find there isnt a whole lot you can do with your 512m or 1024m plots.

I think they can do whatever they want Drift, there really was no fine print about that.

Also I kinda agree with you, while yes alot of SL seems to be about buying land right now, hopefully that will change once the land in the new sims gets open and also once people find a comfortable level with their land holdings. Alot of people were waiting for january 12th and now that thats been pushed back some are once again on the fence about what to do.

The whole real estate is also a step now in the creation of most builds, you now kinda have to plan how much land you need to make such and such build, so alot of people may be trying to figure out and get to a safe level of land to get back to being creative.

I also highly agree that LL needs to implement more prim saving features (incresing the max size of prims would be a pretty big help, and other things like prim cutting etc.), since everyone is now more concerned with how many prims everything takes up.