Suggestion: Auction Logic ?

[~ Cirrus ~]

I have never understood how the auctions are sorted when there are the same items at the same buyout price, with relation to how much time it's been in the auction.

I mean why this one is below that one in the list..?

for example, if I filter all the same items in ascending order of buyout, for many of them we will have several of a same items at exact same BO price.
But the first one, at the top of the list, may be an item that was auctioned only a few minutes ago, while the same item at the exact same price is still at the bottom of the list since 5 days...

There is no logic in this. (if there is, then please explain, I didn't get it yet )

Players tend to always take the first item on the list, once they have sorted by price.

It would be nice if once sorted by price (buyout), items with the same BO would also be sorted by time spent at the auction.

So that everyone has the same chance to sell those items when they are at the same price as the others.


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While I'm at it;

When you click on the buyout tab to filter, you get a descending order, i.e. from most expensive to least expensive.
But I'm pretty sure that 99% of the time users do it to see the cheapest items... and not the most expensive.
So you have to click twice each time.

Why not make that the first click sorts the prices in ascending order ?

 

[endermigne]

There is only one criterion you can order by, the rest looks random, but it most likely isn't. There are various techniques out there to fill structures (list, map, trees, ...) and one of them is used here.

I mean we don't even know the root of the actual ordering. It most likely comes from a database. And then it may be something like an Oracle-database or a NoSQL-database, stuff coming from one storage or joined as they are collected from various instances/indices/shards/buckets/(other terms here).

I don't know if you have noticed, but the ordering changes every time an auction item received a new bid or a new one was added.

To the extreme:

1. Clear the filter for the item name
2. Make sure the item tree on the left is collapsed
3. Add an auction item and let it start at 100%/+0 PED
4. Order by markup ascending
5. Take your time while you flip through the pages
6. For the fun of it: go to the first page and click the Reload-button then repeat step 5

You may notice that you'll see your auction item more than once and sometimes not even once at all.

I mean one could assume that they at least would sort the lines by what we click on and then an internal id or its time of creation, just to be consistent. Nope.

 

[~ Cirrus ~]

Here I add an image which will perhaps be more telling than me with my bad English.

Here I have simply sorted the items by buyout in ascending order (whith 2 clicks, as they must first be sorted in descending order... 2 requests to the server is always better than one, apparently... )
As you can see all items are the same, set at same SB/BO, same price, same 7 days auction, etc..

Now like many after having done this I will take the 1st one on top of the list without wasting time.


But there are items at the same price that have been at auction for almost 3 days and that appear further down the list.
I find this illogical.

Many of these items will never be sold and will go back to the seller, since each day new items will be put back on the auction and will go back to the front of the list each time.

Also, I sometimes have the impression that it's always the same few people who end up at the top of the list.
I'm not saying that this is the case, but if someone tell me today that there is a "trick" to get to the top of the list, I wouldn't be surprised.

Anyway I think it would be nice if a sorting according to the time spent by the item in the auction would be set up, and be automatically displayed after the sorting requested by the buyer (buyout for example)


I specify, if it's necessary, that I do not sell any item of this kind for now, therefore I do not make this request for me.
But in the perspective of a greater fairness for all.

 

[endermigne]

I understood what you meant and I answered to that. You just can't order by two columns at the same time, it's not supported, and MindArk doesn't have an additional criterion to handle "equal" values in the column you sorted. You mentioned that you suspect a certain preference of players, well, I have no clue, but it would be super bad if there was such a thing.

So it looks random, but it still isn't. Just as you can add elements to a B-tree and then run through the branches and collect the elements to build a list of them. There is a logic to it, but it isn't obvious.

In my proof and steps to reproduce that I tried to make it obvious that the order may change with any action done in the list of auction bids you have filtered (by item name and/or selection in the tree of item groups on the left). In your example, in case a new mining amp gets added or sold the order of the listed auctions is likely to change. And I'm not talking about "all are moving up or down one row", no, completely rearranged.

Is all of this bad? Yes, it is. I'm on your side, this should be changed.

 

[~ Cirrus ~]

I understood what you meant and I answered to that. You just can't order by two columns at the same time, it's not supported, and MindArk doesn't have an additional criterion to handle "equal" values in the column you sorted. You mentioned that you suspect a certain preference of players, well, I have no clue, but it would be super bad if there was such a thing.

So it looks random, but it still isn't. Just as you can add elements to a B-tree and then run through the branches and collect the elements to build a list of them. There is a logic to it, but it isn't obvious.

In my proof and steps to reproduce that I tried to make it obvious that the order may change with any action done in the list of auction bids you have filtered (by item name and/or selection in the tree of item groups on the left). In your example, in case a new mining amp gets added or sold the order of the listed auctions is likely to change. And I'm not talking about "all are moving up or down one row", no, completely rearranged.

Is all of this bad? Yes, it is. I'm on your side, this should be changed.

I saw your 1st answer, but it's just too technical for me..

You say it can't be done.
Well, it doesn't seem very complicated to me.

When the user sorts by ascending markup, if some identical items have same markup = secondary classification by auction creation date.

When the user sorts by ascending buyout, if some identical items have same buyout = same thing, sub classification by auction creation date.