In case you’re like me and blog.forumwarz.com won’t load for you, here’s the latest blog post:

forumwarz Posted:

We’re getting pretty close to launching our first major feature since Episode 2 was introduced back in October. It’s called Kyoubai, and it’s an auction house that allows player to auction their items to each other for Flezz.

The name Kyoubai was chosen by the horrible denizens of Flamebate in a series of polls. It is one of several Japanese translations for auction, but it also sounds a lot like Ok, you buy!.

The mascot of Kyoubai will be BidSquid (a cartoon squid with a cowboy hat and a gavel). He’ll be the one who corresponds with you when you are outbid or when you win an auction. He’s going to be designed by the talented artists at Dooomcat. They’re the ones who designed the awesome homepage for Forumwarz, as well as the player clbum portraits you get when choosing your clbum.

How the auction house will work:

* You can select virtually any unequipped item from your inventory and put it up for auction.

* You set the starting price, as well as a length of time to run your auction (12, 24 or 72 hours).

* Optionally, you can set a buyout price or a reserve price.

* The auction house will charge you a listing fee based on the parameters of your auction. Generally speaking: the longer the auction, the higher the fee.

* Other players can then bid on items. There is a minimum bid amount based on the current bid on an item. However, you can choose a maximum bid that is much higher than the minimum. In this case, your maximum price remains hidden, but you will automatically outbid any bids that are less than your maximum.

* At the end of the auction, the highest bidder wins the item. If the item does not sell, it is returned via tubmail.

New Items to Trade

* We plan to introduce new and rare items via the auction house. So keep an eye on it from time to time to see if there’s something you’ve never seen before. You’ll never know what you might find.

* We are going to introducing more rare .MOAR files soon. For those with lots of excess flezz but no patience to grind for Pink Floyd type of files, the auction house will be a great tool!

* We are planning to introduce ItemBuildr in the future, as a way to get a constant feed of new and awesome items into the economy.

When’s it coming out? What’s next on the Forumwarz agenda?

Most of the coding is done. We are mainly waiting on the artwork. If things go well, it will launch by the end of the week. If not, next week for sure!

Afterwards, we’re going to focus on enhancing Forumwarz Domination. There are plenty of discussions going on in the Domination Forum, and we plan to go a long way to address the major issues as well as to make Domination much more fun and open to all players.

One concern that immediately presents itself is that 12 hours is really too short a timeframe for a legit auction. People have different timezones, the need to sleep and to put food on their family, so 12 hour auctions aren’t open to all.

MC Banhammer Posted:

My concern remains, if you set your own starting price, what’s to stop this from being a way to stop the people atop the flezz leaderboard from using this as an almost-guaranteed way of transferring flezz to their own alts? You’d only need two of the leaders working in collusion to pull it off.

True. This is why a closed economy (one were no money, items, or anything game-related can be interchanged between characters) was awesome, and made ForumWarz special.

Requesting Auction SubForum

handofg0d Posted:

What’s to stop ET from blocking sales from one (legal) alt to another?

That’s not my concern. My concern is two different people at the top of the leaderboards coordinating with each other to transfer large amounts of flezz to their alts, by setting the opening bid on a worthless file to an exorbitant price.

MC Banhammer Posted:

My concern remains, if you set your own starting price, what’s to stop this from being a way to stop the people atop the flezz leaderboard from using this as an almost-guaranteed way of transferring flezz to their own alts? You’d only need two of the leaders working in collusion to pull it off.

There’s a maximum minimum price based on the cost of the item.

Raepdog Posted:

Okay that’s bad. But people transferring 100,000,000,000,000   from cheater account to a non-cheater seems a bit more important to me, game play and competitive fairness beats leader board.

Cheaters can’t use it.

Evil Trout Posted:

Cheaters can’t use it.

Evil Trout proving once again why he has his job.

Evil Trout Posted:

Cheaters can’t use it.

...Yet another reason why buying fourm visits needs to not be counted for full frontal cheating. After a month or so it’s worthless.

Evil Trout Posted:

Un-cheating is still something on our list.

The Trout’s on fire today!

Wylin Posted:

ok, what I see first is that you could have an alt not on the most flez list farm constantly for expensive harder to get .moar files, set a minimum buy-it-now price on it and buy it in the same second with your flezz alt, then sell it for a higher price.

ET said you can’t bid on your own stuff with any of your alts, so that isn’t even an issue. I think we are bound to see some short term attempts at working the system, we always do. It will depend on how broad the range for min/max cap ends up being. I don’t see it being a real problem. Hell, it’s not going to be any problem at all if the max cap is low enough.

Of course a low cap risks creating a situation where people just don’t use the auction house at all. I mean if I farm a great file and it takes 60 visits to complete and doesn’t sell for much? Why would I bother selling it and giving someone else a 60 visit advantage on me? I think this part is going to be especially true for Dom players – farming vs buying. Obviously if you are pistachio looping it is in your interest to skip farming grinds. Anyway you slice this it should be interesting to see how things go.

scullyangel Posted:

ET said you can’t bid on your own stuff with any of your alts,

Ah, I didn’t see that part, so we can do what I said but we need a partner. I wonder if I could find anyone to sell me a minimum (buyout) priced pink floyd right away so I don’t need to farm for it.

Klannies, hook me up!

Master_Troll Posted:

imo un-cheating needs to work the same way cheating does – You “give up” whatever your advantage was (Doesn’t uncheat game dolphin for obvious reasons) and then you lose cheater status/get half your BP back? imo it would be fair.

You don’t use visits after the cap except for dom really and cheaters are banned from dom anyways so I think it would be fair. But then, I’m not CZ so it’s their decision in the end.

I know it’s not really the thread for it, but uncheating should cost BP not refund them. Also, everything should be wiped except cred and storyline peens. Pretty much any other situation would be highly abusive. (If visits stay it would be simple to get the most forums visits. If flezz stays, same. If peens stay, that probably wouldn’t matter much since the only ones that have been enhanced by cheat ability are JingJing and the Turkey peens.)