Proxy and Max Bid Auctions

How does max bid work? I know that you can enter your max bid and it will automatically bid for you just enough to be higest, but, follow me with this example...

Say 512m is up for bid in L$. A person bidding knows that about L$5000 is the most it will take to win a bid. So, they really want this land and are pretty confindent it wont go over L$5000 but decide to bid L$250,000 on it. Sure enough, the others give out at L$5010 and the L$250,000 bidder wins at L$5020.

Does it work like that?

Yup.

Yup.

Except that for L$ auctions, it won't let you bid more than you have at the time of placing the max bid.

Unless of course you have L$250,000

I'd say if you really want a piece of land that badly, bid your current bank balance. Nothing worse than missing out on an auction by L$10 because you uploaded one texture too many last night, of course

Just because you see an auction won by L$10 more than you would have bid doesn't mean you almost won. The winner's max bid was likely higher than the winning bid.

A max bid should be a one time only entry in an auction. You bid the max amount you are prepaired to pay, not less then increase it later if you're out-bid.

People come in and bid way over your latest bid at literally the last second and surprise the heck out of you. You can't be complacent and put in a large bid and go offline because you see there's been no activity at all on your auction, and you figure everyone else has given up. They are just lying in wait for you. I've had this happen to me several times, and it literally is a question of how fast our Internet connections are and how fast the page will load for competing bidders at the last second. It seems to me you have to really want a piece of land and be willing to go $250 or $500 over the mark for it because somebody might be lying in wait willing to lull you into complacency and zap you.

I have also had the experience of people who were competing against me in a bid being decent, and assuming I must really, really want that piece, so they withdraw. Like they'll fly out and see our property and a project there and they'll see we were trying to get a piece of adjacent land to keep contiguous with a build, and they withdraw. Players like Ursa Falcone have done that in my experience and they are to be admired for their decency.

The very first time I bid on a parcel, I was made suspicious by the fact that when it came down to those crucial last minutes, and it was clear I had to be ready to put in a new bid of $50 or more because there was a flurry of bids at the end, all of a sudden my page jammed. It was all white, and it simply wouldn't "take" my bid. I had never had that experience in the whole process, or even just doing some curiosity bidding with low amounts on some parcels to see if they had already been essentially locked and loaded by barons.

I do not believe it was a computer malfuction, because I logged in with my alt, took him into the auction, and had him bid low to see if the system was working -- it was. I couldn't then use the alt to try to win the bid because he'd set a high bid and then be forced to eat it, just as I might be winning with my old bid -- you just have no way of knowing as you stare at the screen those last few minutes whether the others have put in amounts way over what they last bid to ensure a win or what's happening. In that sense, it's unlike a visible auction house where you can see what's happening, and very insidious. I complained to customer service about the page refusing to take bids, and they said they would look into it, but it just seemed to be some temporary glitch. I wonder if anyone else has had this experience.

I began to contemplate this whole system and became more suspicious as I saw what else could be happening -- insiders could be artificially jacking up bids to make sure the highest prices would be paid. Why would they want to do that? Well, they could have money to burn on this process. This could either be done by various land barons acting in a cartel, putting in false bids just to keep the whole process inflated, especially if it would help their land parcels have more value in a given sim. And God forbid, there could also be Linden insiders in the procesr, deliberately by the company or without the company's knowledge, and they could be either ensuring their own wins or their friends' wins, or jacking up the price on a particular piece of land to keep the whole thing rich.

We have absolutely no checks or balances against these possible flaws and exploits as far as I can see.

The only possible check would be a public record that could be tracked to see if Land Baron A had a habit of always bidding up a piece really high and withdrawing in favor of Land Baron B or something. But the record only goes back 5 days, which is really a terrible defect, IMHO. Sure, it's a lot of paperwork but it helps to understand how land is valued and what happens to it.

If you're willing to bid $500 over your maximum bid, you should have made that your maximum in the first place.

This is the whole point of a max bid... If you were prepared to go back and bid a further $50 at the end of the auction then you should have put that amount in as your max bid in the first place... If you win an auction you DO NOT pay your max bid amount... only the winning amount, which will be one increment higher than the previous bid.