Automatic Buy Orders? Or a bidding system?

[kevindrosario]

This is probably a longshot seeing as how it might be difficult to implement, but I figured I'd give it a try anyway. Would there be any way to have a feature on the auction hall where you could input

1. What good you want
2. The most you're willing to pay per unit
3. How much gold you're willing to spend purchasing that good

And then whenever a good is placed on the AH that meets those requirements, you automatically purchase it? That would be great so I wouldn't have to constantly watch the AH to get the stuff I need. On the other hand, the major problem would be how to deal with multiple people that have the same buy order. I'm not really sure how that might be sorted out, which is why I think this idea is a longshot. Maybe someone else can think of a good way to deal with that.

Any thoughts about this?

Edit: I edited my title because I thought my second idea was actually much better and I wanted to make sure it was noticed. I posted about it in the fifth post.

[Dax]

i like this idea alot because im a massive seller on the auction hall and i would love to just put up a sale and it just complete like that so i can get on with what i want the money for. good, PROPER GOOD!

[WSC_CrushTheEvil]

very easy to implement, but worst for CPU and RAM on server. and priority problem.

[freiwulf]

And then whenever a good is placed on the AH that meets those requirements, you automatically purchase it? That would be great so I wouldn't have to constantly watch the AH to get the stuff I need. On the other hand, the major problem would be how to deal with multiple people that have the same buy order. I'm not really sure how that might be sorted out, which is why I think this idea is a longshot. Maybe someone else can think of a good way to deal with that

if more than one person has the same order it could go into an private auction between the people so theres a chance the seller could get more than he would originally put it up for with updates to both parties as to how the bidding is going

[kevindrosario]

Or if the automatic buy order thing doesn't work, what if there was a bidding system instead of purely buyout? You could set the starting bid which would be the reserve value, and the item would be returned to you if no bids were made. Maybe you could also set a buyout price so if you need the money immediately, you could set a low buyout.

So if you don't set a buyout price, the advantage would be that you would more likely get more money, but you'd have to wait until the auction ended to get the money. If you set a low buyout price, the advantage would be that you get the money immediately, but you probably wouldn't get as much as if you waited for the bidding.

The problem I have with the current Auction House system is that anything that is a decent price gets bought within 20 seconds. So often I refresh my page, try to buy an item, and get the message that the item is no longer available. This means that the best way to make money is to just camp the AH 24/7 and immediately take the good deals. This is bad for the uninformed sellers who don't realize what their item is worth. It's also bad for the rest of the buyers. If a bidding system were implemented, it would cause prices to be much more stable. Right now they're all over the place. It would also greatly help newer players make money early on. A lot of times I see valuable goods selling for 10% of their value because the person is new and has no idea how much they're worth. With a bidding system, the buyers can decide how much things are worth and that way nobody gets ripped off. This will allow newer players to get a faster start earning money, and to be honest, would probably increase the retention rate of newer players since they'd be upgrading to better gear faster.