Curse of Meridell
Jun. 5th, 2005 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alfvaenOn Neopets, I've been devoting most of my energies to getting a map to the Secret Laboratory.
See, apparently there's a Secret Laboratory, where every day you can put one of your pets under the Lab Ray and it'll mutate into another kind. Now that I've gotten my fourth pet and keep second-guessing which race I should've chosen, I'm ready to see how many different kinds I can turn him into. (I named him "Azpiazu" in anticipation of his fate.) I've heard warnings that you shouldn't do this with your favourite pet, because they can lose levels and hit points and stuff, though I don't know if there's a point of no return(or diminishing returns).
The things is, you need a map to the Secret Laboratory. The map consists of nine pieces, each of which is an item which you have to acquire somehow. Supposedly you can get them through random chance, but I gather the odds of that are slim at best. So I've been buying them. They're 50,000 Neopoints a pop in Neopia's shops, though. I've managed to acquire five of them(as you can see in my gallery, along with my pathetic collection of Neopets key rings--not sure if that'll work if you're not a Neopets member), four of them by purchase and one as a generous gift from a Neofriend(and fellow Cult of Pain member).
Last week, I decided to check the auctions on the Neopets site(because, yes, there are auctions). Imagine my surprise when I saw laboratory map pieces being prices as low as 4000 NP! Admittedly, these ones had some time left in their auctions, but still, it would doubtless end up cheaper than 50,000, right?
So I spent the last few days bidding in auctions, obsessive topping whatever bids were made. I quickly discovered one major flaw in the Neopets auction system. See, when you make a bid, of, say, 5000 NP, it immediately places those Neopoints in "escrow", as it were--that is, it removes them from your total and doesn't give them back until the auction is over. Note that--until the auction is over. Not "until you are outbid". So if you bid in one auction, are outbid, and give up on it, you can't get your bid's NP back until the end of the auction. What kind of lamebrained idea is that? Grumble.
Then I discovered that it didn't seem to matter what you bid during the course of the auction, but near the end of it. The first auctions I bid in were started by people in East Asia, so they ended at 2:00 AM, and I didn't win them. So the next ones I tried were ones that ended in midafternoon. It's hard to tell exactly when they end--on the list, it says ">24 hours", "8-25 hours", "2-8 hours", "30 min-2 hours", or "<30 min". The intent is, I imagine, to eliminate the kind of behaviour where everyone tries to cluster their bids in the last minute. Except that it's easy enough, if you put in a little bit of effort, to figure out when the auction closes. I've never started an auction myself, but it looks like you can set the duration of the auction; still, from looking at the first bid, especially on a high-demand item like secret lab map pieces, it's easy to guess when the auction started, and you can look at the range of durations to see when it's likely to be ending. Then you just refresh the auction's page every minute when you think it's close to crossing into a different duration range(at 2 hours, or 30 minutes, or whatever), and you can pinpoint it fairly accurately.
And that's what I saw. I knew when the auction was going to end, and I was prepared to bid frantically at the last minute, but I wasn't prepared for how people were frantically raising the price so that they wouldn't get outbid by someone who was bidding at the same time. So from 10,000 NP it skyrocketed up into 40,000's, by which point I got disgusted and just gave up. Saving a mere 10,000 NP(which I can earn in a day or two if I play a decent amount of games)didn't seem worth all the hassle and wasted time of trying to out-Hubert a bunch of rabid bidders.
So it just seems like a bad auction model, but it's probably the best you can get on an online site with thousands of people on it at any given time. The main shops on the site are automatically restocked every few minutes, but it's rare to see any of them with any stock, because it gets snapped up almost instantly. I found that frustrating when I first started, but now I work around it. People put things in their own shops, but it's easy to comparison-shop, so prices tend to settle at reasonable levels. But I'll stay away from auctions in the future. They're a fool's game.
See, apparently there's a Secret Laboratory, where every day you can put one of your pets under the Lab Ray and it'll mutate into another kind. Now that I've gotten my fourth pet and keep second-guessing which race I should've chosen, I'm ready to see how many different kinds I can turn him into. (I named him "Azpiazu" in anticipation of his fate.) I've heard warnings that you shouldn't do this with your favourite pet, because they can lose levels and hit points and stuff, though I don't know if there's a point of no return(or diminishing returns).
The things is, you need a map to the Secret Laboratory. The map consists of nine pieces, each of which is an item which you have to acquire somehow. Supposedly you can get them through random chance, but I gather the odds of that are slim at best. So I've been buying them. They're 50,000 Neopoints a pop in Neopia's shops, though. I've managed to acquire five of them(as you can see in my gallery, along with my pathetic collection of Neopets key rings--not sure if that'll work if you're not a Neopets member), four of them by purchase and one as a generous gift from a Neofriend(and fellow Cult of Pain member).
Last week, I decided to check the auctions on the Neopets site(because, yes, there are auctions). Imagine my surprise when I saw laboratory map pieces being prices as low as 4000 NP! Admittedly, these ones had some time left in their auctions, but still, it would doubtless end up cheaper than 50,000, right?
So I spent the last few days bidding in auctions, obsessive topping whatever bids were made. I quickly discovered one major flaw in the Neopets auction system. See, when you make a bid, of, say, 5000 NP, it immediately places those Neopoints in "escrow", as it were--that is, it removes them from your total and doesn't give them back until the auction is over. Note that--until the auction is over. Not "until you are outbid". So if you bid in one auction, are outbid, and give up on it, you can't get your bid's NP back until the end of the auction. What kind of lamebrained idea is that? Grumble.
Then I discovered that it didn't seem to matter what you bid during the course of the auction, but near the end of it. The first auctions I bid in were started by people in East Asia, so they ended at 2:00 AM, and I didn't win them. So the next ones I tried were ones that ended in midafternoon. It's hard to tell exactly when they end--on the list, it says ">24 hours", "8-25 hours", "2-8 hours", "30 min-2 hours", or "<30 min". The intent is, I imagine, to eliminate the kind of behaviour where everyone tries to cluster their bids in the last minute. Except that it's easy enough, if you put in a little bit of effort, to figure out when the auction closes. I've never started an auction myself, but it looks like you can set the duration of the auction; still, from looking at the first bid, especially on a high-demand item like secret lab map pieces, it's easy to guess when the auction started, and you can look at the range of durations to see when it's likely to be ending. Then you just refresh the auction's page every minute when you think it's close to crossing into a different duration range(at 2 hours, or 30 minutes, or whatever), and you can pinpoint it fairly accurately.
And that's what I saw. I knew when the auction was going to end, and I was prepared to bid frantically at the last minute, but I wasn't prepared for how people were frantically raising the price so that they wouldn't get outbid by someone who was bidding at the same time. So from 10,000 NP it skyrocketed up into 40,000's, by which point I got disgusted and just gave up. Saving a mere 10,000 NP(which I can earn in a day or two if I play a decent amount of games)didn't seem worth all the hassle and wasted time of trying to out-Hubert a bunch of rabid bidders.
So it just seems like a bad auction model, but it's probably the best you can get on an online site with thousands of people on it at any given time. The main shops on the site are automatically restocked every few minutes, but it's rare to see any of them with any stock, because it gets snapped up almost instantly. I found that frustrating when I first started, but now I work around it. People put things in their own shops, but it's easy to comparison-shop, so prices tend to settle at reasonable levels. But I'll stay away from auctions in the future. They're a fool's game.
