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Announce post #3198: 2021 Auction
Autoposter
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7/20/2021 at 0:47
Tiur, the Gnosis
Everyone
2021 Auction
Auction time!
As per usual: The auction will go on for 12ish days. And I promise next month is NOT a credit sale.
Some general auction rules:
* Any artifacts bought through auction (including the gold items) cannot be traded in, nor can their power be transferred to any other item.
* Iron Coin and Credit auctions allow you to bid whatever value you want on them, even if you don't have the currency on hand. Gold items require you to have the gold.
* When IC/CR auctions end, you will have a week to get together the amount you won the bid for, or we shrub you until you can pay up. We take this seriously.
* We don't do takebacks on bids, even if you messed up and added an extra zero. Be absolutely careful with your bidding commands.
* Read both HELP AUCTIONS and HELP AUCTIONHOUSE if you are unfamiliar with the Auctioning system in Aetolia.
* Yes, bound credits/bloody iron coins can be used to pay for the auctions!
Credits
-------
A beastmaster's whip
Syntax: CRACK WHIP
Summon to 5 of your minipets and mounts to stampede through the room dealing periodic AoE damage. More minipets/mounts lead to longer effect duration.
*NEW* Rune of Reaching
This weapon rune allows you to throw the attached weapon from one room further away. It does stack with other sources of range extension.
*NEW* Hunter's Quintessence
An orb for the hunt_quintessence power. It acts as a level three hunting artifact for all classes at once.
A bottomless vial
Ethereal Link
A caravan construction kit
Level 4 Crit Pendant
A portable leyspike
An Eelskin Cloak
Iron Coins
----------
*NEW* A minipet
Name the minipet and you'll recieve it in a cage.
*NEW* A recursive dollhouse
This dollhouse will sit in your castle and be a creepy replica of your home. SHAKE it and it will violently expel any visitors in your castle. TOUCHing anyone in the house will teleport you to them. Attempting to interact with the small dollhouse within the dollhouse may collapse the universe.
*NEW* A castle expansion permit
Gives 10 room credits.
Gold
----
*NEW* A Village Shop Token
This token is good for a player run shop in a village somewhere, subject to RP and Admin oversight. We'll set up your taxes to the village there, and should you lose it due to normal reasons, it'll lock down and show up in these auctions again.
*NEW* A Minipet Spawning Box
Design a minipet, and when sufficient gold is put in the box, it will make a cage of that pet. Own a personal special pet! Sell your own! Refuse to use it and deny everyone the possibilities. Give it away just because. The possibilities are pretty much those four! Subject to Admin Approval. Note that minipets are exempt from a number of crafting "do nots", such as elementals.
An emblem of martyrdom
a Celestine rune of empowerment (l3)
-T
PS The ones with no description are either in the Artifact shop already, or in HELP SPECIAL ARTIFACTS.
PPS I reserve the right to add more things if I feel like it.
Penned by my hand on Kinsday, the 10th of Lleian, in the year 496 MA.
Tiur, the Gnosis
Everyone
2021 Auction
Auction time!
As per usual: The auction will go on for 12ish days. And I promise next month is NOT a credit sale.
Some general auction rules:
* Any artifacts bought through auction (including the gold items) cannot be traded in, nor can their power be transferred to any other item.
* Iron Coin and Credit auctions allow you to bid whatever value you want on them, even if you don't have the currency on hand. Gold items require you to have the gold.
* When IC/CR auctions end, you will have a week to get together the amount you won the bid for, or we shrub you until you can pay up. We take this seriously.
* We don't do takebacks on bids, even if you messed up and added an extra zero. Be absolutely careful with your bidding commands.
* Read both HELP AUCTIONS and HELP AUCTIONHOUSE if you are unfamiliar with the Auctioning system in Aetolia.
* Yes, bound credits/bloody iron coins can be used to pay for the auctions!
Credits
-------
A beastmaster's whip
Syntax: CRACK WHIP
Summon to 5 of your minipets and mounts to stampede through the room dealing periodic AoE damage. More minipets/mounts lead to longer effect duration.
*NEW* Rune of Reaching
This weapon rune allows you to throw the attached weapon from one room further away. It does stack with other sources of range extension.
*NEW* Hunter's Quintessence
An orb for the hunt_quintessence power. It acts as a level three hunting artifact for all classes at once.
A bottomless vial
Ethereal Link
A caravan construction kit
Level 4 Crit Pendant
A portable leyspike
An Eelskin Cloak
Iron Coins
----------
*NEW* A minipet
Name the minipet and you'll recieve it in a cage.
*NEW* A recursive dollhouse
This dollhouse will sit in your castle and be a creepy replica of your home. SHAKE it and it will violently expel any visitors in your castle. TOUCHing anyone in the house will teleport you to them. Attempting to interact with the small dollhouse within the dollhouse may collapse the universe.
*NEW* A castle expansion permit
Gives 10 room credits.
Gold
----
*NEW* A Village Shop Token
This token is good for a player run shop in a village somewhere, subject to RP and Admin oversight. We'll set up your taxes to the village there, and should you lose it due to normal reasons, it'll lock down and show up in these auctions again.
*NEW* A Minipet Spawning Box
Design a minipet, and when sufficient gold is put in the box, it will make a cage of that pet. Own a personal special pet! Sell your own! Refuse to use it and deny everyone the possibilities. Give it away just because. The possibilities are pretty much those four! Subject to Admin Approval. Note that minipets are exempt from a number of crafting "do nots", such as elementals.
An emblem of martyrdom
a Celestine rune of empowerment (l3)
-T
PS The ones with no description are either in the Artifact shop already, or in HELP SPECIAL ARTIFACTS.
PPS I reserve the right to add more things if I feel like it.
Penned by my hand on Kinsday, the 10th of Lleian, in the year 496 MA.
1
Comments
*NEW* Hunter's Quintessence
An orb for the hunt_quintessence power. It acts as a level three hunting artifact for all classes at once.
did I miss it?? or is that the orb of power?
Nothing is going to get better. It's not.”
― Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
auction probe 22235
You take a closer look at an orb of power:
Power swirls within this small orb, glowing with a soft light.
It is an Ankyrean artifact, enchanted with the following powers:
hunt_quintessence
It can be worn.
It is strangely weightless.
Credit wares are underwhelming and missing all sorts of cool stuff that seemed like no brainers. Ironcoin options don't seem all that appealing to me - ultimately, minipets mean very little, house credits are purchasable by platinum keystones, and the dollhouse was portrayed as a last minute idea. One of the best options on the entire list is for gold.
There were much more exciting items to put on these lists. There's barely anything new and some of the new stuff was put together last minute.
Good luck, those you that are bidding!
Sure, not everyone likes the items on the list. That's cool. If you don't like the items on the list then they aren't for you. Not everyone will be able to get it. I'd love an endless vial as it would really stop me from ever needing to refill health ever again, but I'm not spending 850+ credits on it.
Just because they don't look appealing to you, doesn't mean they aren't appealing to anyone else. Especially if the current bids are anything to go by.
I'm not as riled as Iesid is but I'm pretty sympathetic to his frustrations; it was a long time to wait for a thing that hasn't been done in a long, long time and the offerings are fairly underwhelming to some folk. Just because some people have credits to burn doesn't make those assessments invalid.
As for your second line: scarcity is not a replacement for balance. However, all of these items in HELP AUCTION ARTIFACTS already exist. Someone already has them. The milk is already spilled. We should have increased the supply on at least some of that list.
I'll be real frank: the feedback I see from Tiur on the Official Discord indicates to me that he's not quite sure what actual players want. We had to literally spell it out for him in a forum thread a month in advance to get something a lot of players want. At least we got salvage.
You can throw any number of strawmen in front of me and wring your hands about how 'some people' like this auction - but the truth is, I think people are just desperate for anything exclusive to spend their currency on. We'll never know how much better any of the items I mention would perform in an auction vs. what Tiur inevitably gave us, because they aren't on the list. It's almost pointless to speculate.
I'm waiting to see if the Emblem of Martyrdom ends up killing group PK or doing basically nothing.
An entire orrery left uncontested, about 6 or so twins, a couple majors, and some umpteen lessers with absolutely 0 contention. Sure, there has been SOME contention, but not enough to really make it seem otherwise, but that's not a conversation for this thread.
But you're right Legyn, all artifact auctions are much better to be set to high utility, niche QoL, or things that are like 'huh, thats kinda cool' type items, but nothing that will break the game.
The Martyrdom emblem is going to go one of two ways: You're either going to be primary target or last target. You'll either burn it quickly or never burn it at all. It's going to become just as much of a niche artifact as everything else.
Aetolia is in the minority here - and this auction is even less of a thrill when you compare it to the previous auctions even within our own game.
I did clearly misread some items, though. I used previous auctions and such as a jumping off point, forgetting that players who showed up in the time between haven't seen those items. I'll have a second round go up shortly with the things I thought were a bit tired. Custom wings, relic pieces, etc. My mistake!
If you choose to play the other games and prefer those auctions better, good on you. But that's not really an apt discussion to have when it's not the game we're playing.
But ok. :thumbsup:
It's valuable information about the same market you are trying to tap.
Ultimately, Aetolians are players of Iron Realms games. If a wildly more successful Iron Realms game does something differently, it might pay off for Tiur to pay attention to those practices instead of listening to someone who only wants to come into a thread to make bad faith arguments.
EDIT: what I'm saying is that it is a chore to deal with you and the bland way you think about gameplay, game design, or products. I'm glad I don't need to make my case to you and that the person I do need to make it to has already taken my feedback into account.
Also interested in your question though, even though it doesn't apply to me.
Meanwhile the rest of us are either going to be "disappointed" because nothing seems worth it, or pissed off because Tina or Jhin were able to outspend them on something marginally special. Some of these items probably, imo, should be released to the public in the regular artifact wares; some are so unbalanced that they'd probably break the game if they were widely available (does that make them good? or horrible?). Would the bottomless vial being widely availble destroy curative sales, or would it just put a minor dent in it? No idea.
So to a degree I'm sympathetic to all sides of this equation, but I will admit that, after going through HELP SPECIAL ARTIFACTS or whatever the file is, I was a little disappointed that some of the really cool items that are listed in that file that didn't show up in the auction. I also think the Admin not knowing what players want is a real observation; I think it's a perfectly normal thing to experience when you're in that position. The auction probably shoulda been preceded by a survey or form or something that was like "what do you want to see and why" to at least act as a litmus test for what people have their eyes on if nothing else. "Hey, we're gonna do an auction that'll take a few weeks to put up, what do you want" probably would've saved some decision paralysis upstairs, as well as some headaches. But overall I think an auction is always gonna be kinda meh one way or the other however you slice it, and it might be just because of the model itself; expecting people to spend absurd amounts of credits for something that's essentially an unknown quantity or for something that's exclusive that'll tip the actual mechanical balance one way or the other is just...always gonna be bad imo.
That said, I really am wary of the "look at the bids" argument when it comes to gauging interest. At least yesterday, Tiur said that nobody has yet bought credits for the auction, and I think a large reason for this is because folk have been banking currencies for the past 20 days in preparation; once you take platinum keystones into account, the high bid prices do seem a lot less sensational.
On the other hand, on the player disappointment side of things, I think that it would feel less 'bad' that its weak, if the auctions were ran more often than once every 2 years. To be quite frank, I have no idea, with all the currency this will drain out of the game and money that it will make, why these wouldn't be done more often, in place of say, promos that a lot of us are burnt out on. ESPECIALLY if they're going to be toned down, or at least feel toned down.
Auctions are supposed to be a yearly thing! I just haven't kept them up like I should. They should be a nice pressure valve release on stored up stuff. Perhaps I should just automate them to a degree and escape my scatterbrain.
As I said in a previous post: The milk's already spilled. A Producer long, long ago already screwed that pooch for Tiur. There's no winning play - either we don't have auctions and those people keep their unique toys forever or we hold auctions and put more of these 'no win' items into the game.
Since it is apparently not relevant to bring up other IRE Game Auctions (why, I have no idea), why don't we take a look back at the last two artifact auctions in Aetolia? Both of which were run by Tiur, mind you!
I think we've seen an overall decline in quality of goods in each artifact auction. I would hesitate to say that either of these auctions were any good when you compare them to other IRE games - but since we're not doing that, we'll just compare these two and our current one. Overall, I'd rather have any other auction list in Aetolia's past. There were more risks and things that might make the game interesting or present new problems for team PKers or solo PKers alike to solve, provide some fun utility or new people some flavored toys, etc. I shouldn't need to say this, but I will: 'hoping that the bad items retire' indicates to me that people are reluctant to address balancing items. I don't believe auction items are exempt from the disclaimer about credit value, artifact value, etc all being subject to change at a moment's notice. Here it is, for your viewing pleasure, where it does not list auction artifacts as an exemption: Is it crappy to deal with entitled customers who feel their price tag should exempt them from balance concerns? Yes. A thousand times yes.
Is it still part of the job of someone responsible for game balance or product scarcity? Yes. It absolutely is.
I still do the crappy parts of my job. You probably do as well. They suck to do, but at the end of day, you gotta do 'em. Speaking personally: I did not overhype myself. I expected an auction in line with other auctions in Aetolia (above) or other IRE games. If having expectations based on previous precedent is 'overhype', I think I need to reassess who I'm having a discussion with; this strikes me as the language of an apologist. It's OK to not be pleased with the state of the game, a promotion, etc. If the auction remains as it is currently stands, I would not spend any currency to acquire any items from it.
If you are expressing that you think that we should hold these more frequently, I would say that the frequency will not change the amount of currency I put into them. You aren't going to alleviate my disappointment with that sort of approach - you're just going to make more opportunities for me to be disappointed. Offering a bad menu item more often is not the way to improve your menu.
I also can agree with a survey. A month prior to the auction being scheduled (as I assume promotions are determined quarterly or at least bi-monthly) would give an easy assessment of what to consider including - taking out things that are highly imbalanced or with infinite value (logbook, venom rag).
That said, I do have to agree with @Rhyot that comparing auctions in other IREs to Aetolia is apples to oranges. Previous auctions in Aetolia? Certainly, but even then, items that were distinctly imbalanced for the sake of high spending or giving someone something special should be discounted or considered very very carefully.
Achaea has a different playerbase, different desires, different standards for balance, group and single combat, etcetera - to go "well they offered these items" is not comparing two games that are the same, it is comparing two games in a similar genre and ignoring the differences inherent in their design and design philosophy (FFXIV vs WoW).
I will agree I was underwhelmed when the auction came out, but mostly it was the variety of what was already on special artifacts and what was actually on offer. I understand wanting to balance offering with currency available. You offer too much, the pool is too low and things that are valued at x are going to underperform significantly and, while you drain currency, you also run into a grumble at "saturation". A staggered release of the auction (as Tiur initially mentioned in his first post regarding the election) does allow for a fluid step into addressing saturation.
Should more been released first? I think so, but so long as more come out, I think we'll get an opportunity to bid on more items. That does not stop anyone's right to feel disappointment at what is currently on offer, but given that the number on offer has already been said it will be addressed (both in this thread and in the initial post), I think it is also worth to acknowledge time for the lack of variety to be addressed.
I, for one, am quite glad there is nothing game breaking. Game breaking auction artifacts create resentment and end up having to be balanced later. Since "other IREs" have been mentioned, should we talk about the beckon tank in Achaea that could be set off and beckon en masse from adjacent even if the targets were off-balance? Or choke gauntlets (not an auction, but still). To say things have declined is... true to a point, but so has the concern for ensuring balance is kept rather than encouraging people to spend to have a toy that only they (or their allies) really enjoy. Just because you feel you should be able to buy something or afford to buy something doesn't mean you should be able to buy something. My list of things I would like to see:
Custom wings
Full relic tokens
ring of elemental mastery
boots of divine celerity
relic tokens (for gold/ic)
shield of absorption
golden translocator (through the token or on its own or both)
class slots
TL;DR: Staggered auction release not the end of the world. More could have been released and more information gathered prior, but things can be done better next time. Comparing other IREs to Aetolia is bad - different design and different design philosophy. Feel free to be disappointed, deliver criticism and feedback constructively for future iterations.
"I shouldn't need to say this, but I will: 'hoping that the bad items retire' indicates to me that people are reluctant to address balancing items."
People throw a -riot- every time anything they paid money for is touched, even if it's to tune something completely out of line. Every single time an artifact has been nerfed, players throw a unicornsing fit.
Of course they're going to be reluctant to nerf things players paid money for. We're a bunch of unicorns-heads every time they do, even if it needs to happen.
Speaking of, re: Saidenn, delete golden translocator or make the relic that blocks magical movement trivially common.
Edit: Piety also blocks pylon recall, voltda/duanathar is blocked by lower health/mana, monolith blocks many things, indoors blocks leap/fly - the list goes on.