Not A Bug: Antiques dealer: Strategy to "trick" the auction countdown

[Andi47]

I have just experienced a strategy to "trick" the auction countdown, I am not sure whether this is intended:

When somebody enters a bid, the countdown will be reset to 30 seconds.

But now, when THE SAME player enters another (higher) bid, the countdown will NOT be reset.

So the situation during the auction was:
1.) other player enters 20000
2.) I wanted to outbid him by entering 20001
3.) I got an error message "need to enter higher bid!", because the same player quickly entered numbers such as 20005, 20017, 20050, 20160, 20300, etc.
4.) while he was doing this, the countdown kept running down, while I was clicking away more error messages of "enter a higher bid!"
5.) I stopped the other players trick by entering 22222 while the countdown was at 11 seconds --> now the contdown was reset to 30 sec
6.) the auction continued, the other player tried his trick two or three more times; each time I stopped him tricking by entering a value ~2k higher by myself
7.) finally I gave up around 34k, because I did not want to spend that many trade coins.

Is this behaviour intended? I would expect that the timer resets every time when a bid is entered; even when the same player enters several bids in a row.

1.166.c670d65547d (14.11.2019 20:26)

 

[DeletedUser10057]

this behaviour was already reported here more than a month ago and inno didn´t do nothing

 

[Dudettas]

This is intended behaviour, the timer will not change if you outbid yourself.

 

[CrashBoom]

This is intended behaviour, the timer will not change if you outbid yourself.

why ?

 

[beelzebob666]

why ?

why not?

The 30 second addition is to allow outbid players to give a higher bid. As the highest bidder does not change when outbidding themselves, no time is needed to be added. All other players have had enough opportunities (roughly 2 hours worth) to make their bid. And if they want to outbid their opponent by only 1 in the last second (why not 30 second before the end???) it is their own fault for not giving a high enough bid...

This strategy works only against players that bid in the last second - especially if they increase the current bid by only 1.

 

[LastWarrior]

lol I just whack 10k in

 

[xivarmy]

While not a bug, I think the inappropriate behavior is being able to outbid by 1 in the first place. The biggest problem with 'you have 2 hours to enter your bid' is that even if you enter the rough maximum of what you'd pay, you'd certainly pay that number+1 as well so unless you value the item drastically more than your auction-group, early bids are meaningless. If there's was a minimum raise of the bid of say 10%, then you could at least feel confident that your 'fire and forget' bid accurately represents 'this is what it's worth to me and if someone outbids me, i didn't want to pay that much for it anyways'.

 

[beelzebob666]

Yeah - that's why I pleaded for a sealed bid 2nd prize auction... Much fairer and would probably even net higher prizes