Full Adult Mainland Region "The Churchyard" at AUCTION

[Qie Niangao 4,497]

"The Churchyard" auction closes in less than 24 hours. It's a regular Linden auction so obviously I have nothing to gain from it and I won't be bidding on it myself. Nonetheless I peeked in and it looks like a pretty nice, grid-edge, shoreline region (so can't sail far but it'll make nice beach and plenty of space for off-world surround); somebody could have some fun with it.

(This isn't exactly the usual topic for this forum, but I don't know a better subforum and this is the first I've noticed a full Zindra region at auction for ages. Admittedly, I don't watch that closely, but it seemed exceptional to me.)

[SarahThe Wanderer 953]

A Regular Bidder won't win it, some land baron with bots gonna get it, you only win very bad parcels that no one wants.

 

[Sylvia Tamalyn 15,821]

I don't know why someone would need to use bots to win an auction. One person can just place his high bid and go about his business. That's how I, certainly not a land baron (and with no bots) won an exceptional parcel in Bay City through auction, at a very reasonable price for Bay City. It's always worth trying a bid for a good parcel.  

[Gabriele Graves 1,509]

It is what happens in the last minutes of the auction that needs speed.  Once LL auctions reach their close time, they just close.  It is quite common in other types of auctions to extend the close time by a minute or so to see if there any more bids before closing (why not when the goal is to get the best price?).  So for LL auctions speed at that point, when the auction is about to close, is critical and bots can refresh for new data far more quickly that someone using a browser, detect a new bid and then post another bid in almost no time at all.

Edited November 25, 2020 by Gabriele Graves
corrections.

[Qie Niangao 4,497]

54 minutes ago, Gabriele Graves said:

It is what happens in the last minutes of the auction that needs speed. 

Yes, but not for a bidder who's comfortable setting their maximum bid and leaving it be, as @Sylvia Tamalyn describes. There are certainly land dealers whose business depends on buying low who may try to use a bot to "head fake" other bidders into sticking with a lower bid than their actual maximum, but that only works if those other bidders are also trying to manually trick others the same way. Anybody bidding their true maximum have nothing to lose from last minute bot-bidders.

Peeking back at the auction page for this one, I see a lot of that "head fake" behavior with bidders only leading in small increments of L$10,000 or L$25,000 (ignoring the L$10 increments that only show where the previous maximum increment was set), constantly adjusting their maximum bid. No law against it, maybe it's even exciting, but that's the kind of bidding that will get defeated by last minute bot bidders. It's trying to use these auctions as if they were old, familiar "going once, going twice" events, and they just aren't.

(Just in passing: several Nobel prizes in Economics recently -- including this year -- have been awarded for advances in auction theory, including devising auctions that are very unfamiliar indeed but effective at setting markets with different characteristics. I'm not economist enough to know what's being optimized with the Linden land auctions, but one factor must be to support distributed, totally asynchronous, "set and forget" bids -- the very opposite of high-frequency trading.)

[Gabriele Graves 1,509]

I perhaps misunderstood.  I saw Sylvia's question as one querying the benefit of anyone using a bot and why anyone do this instead of set and forget, including the land dealers.  My response was just to give a perspective on why those who do use them, use them and really I was meaning the land dealers.

 

Edited November 25, 2020 by Gabriele Graves
rephrasing

[Sylvia Tamalyn 15,821]

5 hours ago, Gabriele Graves said:

I perhaps misunderstood.  I saw Sylvia's question as one querying the benefit of anyone using a bot and why anyone do this instead of set and forget, including the land dealers.  My response was just to give a perspective on why those who do use them, use them and really I was meaning the land dealers.

 

My question was in follow-up to the comment right above mine, which had implied that you cannot win an auction unless you use bots. 

[SarahThe Wanderer 953]

This and That.

[Gabriele Graves 1,509]

13 hours ago, Sylvia Tamalyn said:

My question was in follow-up to the comment right above mine, which had implied that you cannot win an auction unless you use bots. 

Yeah, I did read that but for some reason your question still read to me like a general ask for info.  Nvm, my bad and thanks for the clarification.