Flea Market Suggestion -- Price Batching

[MrSmellybeard]

tl;dr: Single stack purchases can be very difficult to obtain for some people, leaving them to pay 20% more in many cases. Items in stack quantities greater than one seem to have a higher success rate. Perhaps, as an interim solution to give the devs time to perfect the current market implementation, listings could be grouped together into price brackets (chosen by calculated values) to allow everyone a greater opportunity of getting an item out of that stack.

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Hello,

So I've done some digging around and it seems like it's pretty common that the market is kind of hard to use right now. There's talk of macros and bots, but even with that aside there's a lot of people trying to buy stuff on the market, which seems to have rather iffy synchronization that makes it extremely difficult to actually purchase the thing you set out to. Quite often I see my countdown either stall out for a second or two, only to (sometimes) later jump down a couple seconds. I watched a video suggesting that this is tied to your system clock, and that manipulating your system clock can yield better results. This feels a bit like an exploit and, while I'm sure lots of others are doing it, I'm personally wary of following suit.

I have noticed something though... on a single stack purchase I have maybe a ~10% success ratio of there is any kind of competition for purchases. However, if there is even one more item in the stack, my success rate jumps up to ~80% success rate. This is interesting to me, and suggests that perhaps there might be only a small number of people buying up auctions constantly and relisting. Unfortunately, the current setup caters to them, as if this person has a better connection to the server, or are using any of the previously mentioned exploits, it is very easy for them to pick off each listing as it comes up, one at a time.

This leads me to wonder if there was some way to batch listings into price groupings so, instead of listing items as single stacks, they will pool together allowing people a greater window of time in which to make a purchase. Obviously there would be a trade-off for such a system, which would be price flexibility. Currently you can suggest any price you want, undercutting by a single unit if you wish. In order to facilitate grouping, listings might have to have price options instead of numerical entry. Perhaps certain percentages of the average sale price, rounded to some reasonable amount.

As an example, consider an item currently selling for 100k RUB. If I want to list that item, perhaps I'm presented with the following options: {60k, 85k, 95k, 100k, 105k, 115k, 150k}. When I list, instead of being held for 1 minute, my listing is instead held for up to 10 minutes to allow time for other listings to join the group. After the 10 minutes, or when the group reaches some number (ie, 10 listings), it becomes available for purchase. Note that all these values here that I've used are merely a suggestion

Now I get it, this is definitely a more restrictive pricing system than we're used to. I don't think this is perfect; however, such a system might be an effective compromise to give the devs time to iron out the kinks in the current market style, which seems like a very difficult problem to solve.

[MrSmellybeard]

So,  you know how I know Google trolls your browser activity? Within a day after posting this threat, a video pops up on my youtube feed from 10 days ago making a similar suggestion!

</conspiracy>

Anyway, the suggestion (at roughly 17 mins) is similar to mine but takes it a step further in that it keeps the individual price intact, but only presents as price groups. When you purchase, you get the lowest price available in that batch. I think this is better than my own suggestion as it keeps price flexibility intact, but ultimately it's the same to the buyer who has a stack of items to choose from.

It was a good video to watch, I'll link it here if anybody is interested. It's quite long though, so heads up.