Permanent Auctions (in General)

Right now, you have to list an expiration date for your auction. Running an auction that doens't expire is a lot like having a consignment store. What fee would you be willing to pay to have that happen? Understand that there will have to be some kind of check in place such that people won't use the auctioneer as some kind of extended inventory.

How about a Continuous Overall Listing Fee?

You List "X" Amount of Items, the overall price is "X" to continue to list them. Kind of like now but much easier.

You mean, like, get a CM saying click here to autorenew for $X ?

Or when you make the auction, check a box to automatically deduct the listing fee everytime it expires?

One to support the other I would think.

Dear merchant your Rentals Items Listing will expire in 72 Hours. To renew your listing please visit the Rentals Section.

When visiting the rentals section simply click one button for an overall deduction (Per Char?)

Well I would think this for Auctions and Rentals.........lol

Well it would be really nice to get the fees of the auctioneer to apply when the item is sold. Probably wouldn't work for this case, but the normal auctions it would be really nice.

As for not using the auctioneer as some kind of extended inventory, just set it up the same way as in rentals. Even while it is being rented, it has a ghost item in your inventory.

The fees have to be taken when you list it, as otherwise a person could game the system. A partial fee could be returned, though, on expiration. Start the bidding at 50%?

Game the System how?

Start at full listing price and 75% renewal?

I am with Zenai on this one. I fail to see how it would game the system. It still counts as an inventory slot when you put an auction up so it wouldn't help in that regard.

If the fee was taken at the sale of the auction, then you could create a junk party, list the auction, transfer all the cash off the junk party, then wait for the sale to complete. It'd be very hard to stop that. Much better to take the money upfront, then return it if the auction doesn't sell.

But then wouldn't the cash that is deducted just come from the sale of the items?

Well how about make it to where you can't Xfer out the amount for the Original Listing. I know that you cannot send the last 100 cbd on your char so why not this as well?

Z - that's a lot harder to do for very little gain. I mean, I already agreed to return the fee.....

EOD - not if the sale price is under the fee. That does address some of the problem... but even then, I was offering to return partial fee, so there's still the problem for when the item doesn't sell.

Yeah I can see how returning partial of the fee would be easier to implement. However, if the fee is higher than the item being sold, then I think there is a problem with the fee ;).

Eh take the fee from the get go to make it simple. Don't have the cash you don't get to list it. If it doesn't sale they get 75% back. Want to extend the listing it's 75% of the original cost, IF you do it before the end of the listing time.

How would this work from the bidding end? Or would it be more of a "buy it for x amount, with no actual bidding? Would my money be kept until I got out bid or would it say/ something like "you didn't reach the minimum bid and no money was deducted..." ?

The items would probably be "BUY IT NOW" only.

I figured an auction would only be automatically relisted if there have been no bids. Users are free to do buy it now, however.

So what if people would use it as an extended inventory feature ?
In fact, why do we even have any inventory limits to begin with ?
Just remove all limits on inventories then there would be nothing to game.

Also, we have a problem with too few auctions and too few rentals, not too many. If anything, we should remove (or at least drastically reduce) all LISTING fees on auctions, and also do something similar to transfer fees.
To compensate, feel free to institute a sales tax, taking out a FLAT PERCENTAGE out of the actual sales value. Even up to 3% of MAX(actual sales value, system computed fair value) would not be excessive.

As for auctions, you could have a reserve price (which could be public or hidden, or user-selectable) and a separate (higher) "buy it now" price.
Any bids on an item should increase the leftover "regular" timer by a small amount of time (5-30 mins) to prevent "sniping".
If the highest bid does not reach the asked reserve price by the end of the regular auction period, the auction timer gets "stuck" at 5-30 mins (same number as in the anti-sniper rule), and CAN BE MANUALLY CANCELED by the one that listed it even if there are bids smaller than the reserve price on it already.
If it's not manually canceled it just sits there indefinitely (or until somebody offers at least the reserve price).

The "sniper timer" could be user-selectable, and could be even higher than 30 min or lower than 5 min.

Optionally, we could also have a separate limit per "expired open auctions" by type of item, where only the lowest 2-5 reserve price listings "expired" auctions that have been "expired" for at least 3-7 days are maintained at cache flush, and rest get auto-canceled.
This would keep some items available on the open market, while preventing excessive clutter.

Side-note, would it kill us to get an "edit" button to the forum ?

I have quite a few items I am not exactly willing to use right now, and I'm not even near my overall inventory limit (free char slot, not all minions recruited on all holder chars, etc).
I would sell at least half of them, if I knew I could do it with a minimum of fuss, at a halfway decent price, and if I was also confident I could repurchase (even at a noticeably higher price) items of that type back if I was ever to need them.
The current cumbersome and needlessly taxing system is making me HOARD the items, and that can't be a good thing.

I guess not then...