Auction House Abuse.. potentially?
 

I'm simply speculating, but I can imagine a scenario where people use the auction house to circumvent/workaround the lack of direct trading.
(I think lack of trading could very well be considered a feature, rather than a lack of one, in the context of preventing collusion, etc)

That said, you can currently go in and put up a card for 5pp with a 6pp buyout at minimum. Two players could fairly easily coordinate exchanging any card for 6pp by communicating the moment player A puts the card up for auction so player B can quickly buy it out with little risk of someone else getting it first.

I guess I'm wondering if this is a concern or if anything is in place to prevent this sort of potential abuse?


I think simply not allowing a Buy Now price on very short auctions would probably work well enough. People could still try to create auctions on "off" hours but there would be infinitely more risk for them.

Yeah, that's a definite possibility we're aware of.

So we have some safeguards in place to catch this sort of thing and are working to add others.

We'll fix this, only auctions that run 6 hours or longer now offer a buy-now price option.

How does that fix anything? If two people agree to put up card X for buy-out price Y at time Z it does not matter one bit whether the auction nominally runs for an hour or a day because it is going to be bought out anyway.

True. Hmm. Crap. :P OK, back to the drawing board.

In the end, people WILL exchange cards this way anyway, but what do you want to watch out for? Normally you'd say why shouldn't they; the problem comes from abusing the system, when two accounts are really just one guy shuffling Gold+ cards to his primary account.

You probably want to watch for auctions that end in quick-buys within seconds, either for very low or very high PP and involving one account again and again. Filter out all quick-buys that end in under X minutes for Gold/Silver+ cards, then have the system check the user names.

I would never do such thing (and I have spoken out loudly against even single-player cheating big and small in the past), but I have a PC and two laptops at home. Steam accounts are free, and in a sale two more copies of OOTP19 would come only 20 bucks, and I could even have all three accounts running at the same time while feeling very important to myself... with such a setup you can snap cards back and forth in seconds at even random prices because the odds that someone catches the auction by accident are near-zip.

Do the quick-buy filter thing above rather than time-limiting quick-buy auctions. The only other efficient way to disable this cheatery would be to disabling quick-buy auction altogether, which would be a terrible solution.

Also, why not enforce a minimum quick buy price? i.e. 5 PP for commons, 25 PP for bronze, 100 PP for silver, etc. Not a panacea, but at least it will prevent selling off gold+ cards for 5 PP.

Edit: Didn't notice that there are already such minimums.