Auction House: Delete bids from players no longer playing

[Vorlonagent]

Right now SCORE's big problem is how to handle the crush of players coming in.  Later, as people leave again and you contemplate what, if anything, to do with inactive accounts, you may want to look at this.

 

If a player is inactive for, say, longer than 90 days, their Auction House bids should be cancelled and inf refunded.  There's a subtle quality of life reason for this.

 

An auction house bid by an inactive player functions as a price support two different ways.  1) It keeps the price of an item from swinging downward by winning low-end bids.  2) It takes individual items out of circulation.

 

This isn't likely to be a problem for this iteration of CoX for at least a year and your player population is small enough it may never be.  But it was on the NCSoft Version of the game.  Salvage like Alchemical Silver was expensive and stayed that way.  We'll see this happen again as Level 50s become more dominant in the player population.  As A Silver rose in price, it left behind a string of unfilled bids at lower prices.  Players still playing the game would cancel and re-bid but players who leave the game would leave their auction house bids where they were.  Those bids would trigger when prices started to drop damping out drops in price without affecting rises, driving up the price active players were paying.

 

We'll only see this with stuff where demand permanently outstrips supply.  Orange salvage, in-demand recipes and enhancements, mid-grade white salvage once the population is primarily 50s, and maybe luck charms.  By contrast, high-end white salvage prices will bottom-out eventually.  We're already seeing the price of yellow salvage drop at all grades.

[Vanden]

The salvage issue has already been solved, since the market has been seeded with millions of salvage at fairly reasonable prices.

[Dr. Gemini]

Given that all recipes/enhancements of the same set are pooled, there's really not enough bids on anything to be much of an issue, even if the population does drop. Taking items out of circulation would only be an issue for the less used recipes/enhancements, but these are also the lowest priced ones and rarely have many, if any, bids waiting on them.

[Vorlonagent]

The salvage issue has already been solved, since the market has been seeded with millions of salvage at fairly reasonable prices.

 

Those amounts are genuine?  I almost reported them as a bug.  :)

 

It will be interesting to see how fast the players burn into the really high-demand stuff.

 

Given that all recipes/enhancements of the same set are pooled, there's really not enough bids on anything to be much of an issue, even if the population does drop. Taking items out of circulation would only be an issue for the less used recipes/enhancements, but these are also the lowest priced ones and rarely have many, if any, bids waiting on them.

 

You might be surprised (I might be also).  A smaller game population means it takes less zombie bids to effectively damp out a downward price trend.  The nice thing is that there is a ceiling for how high prices can go.  I'm more concerned about midgrade white salvage once the game population becomes topheavy. 

 

In NC-Soft's CoX, I had no trouble paying going rate for orange salvage, recipes and enhancements.  They were rare items where paying a market-driven premium made sense to me.  OTOH I think the players have a right to reasonably priced white salvage.  I'm glad to see an upper limit put on the price of it

[Gigajoule]

I think having all unfulfilled bids auto-cancel after 90 days would be reasonable.