Anybody Have Any Reasons Why They Go to Certain Auction Threads? / Economic Insight and Help

@Dinaro

To be honest, the markets on the chatter page are a mystery to me. Even if you have super good wolves with wonderful markings, high stats and cheap prices, your thread will get no attention for a week - even if you're bumping it constantly. You could put your thread all over Wolvden and it'll be like it just goes under the radar. The popularity of auction/flatsale pages is most associated with the trends of Wolvden and auction/flatsale pages might just be low right now because everyone's after the Fox Base.

page counter

Also page counters DO work on wolvden so...there's that... just search HTML page counters and copy the code in of course it is also counting every time I refresh the page so i can't say the numbers are exact or just click the word page counter that's the website I used right quick

Ha...ah...I feel like there are so many things wolvden COULD do to help facilitate trade, but yeah overall it is a mystery how this site manages to function and a mystery I am sorta? Trying to piece together right now. Granted the site is still super knew so who knows how it'll change and adapt.

Yeah, you're right. Wolvden just needs some time to figure itself out lol

Here to add my two cents to this...

First of all, I hate auctions.

It's not the interaction part of it that I don't like (even if my anxiety likes to show up if I just think about bid on something) but more the uncertainty of it and the absurd growing prices. I hate to see a pup I really like, bid on them and then have somebody else bid more and get the pup. It's fair, that's how auctions work, but I end up feeling frustrated because I couldn't get the pup I wanted.

But the thing that I probably hate even more is how prices can only grow and grow until they reach a point you start to ask yourself if the buyers are out of their minds. For muties and really really rare pups, I can understand you would want to battle with bids and that the price can grow. But I saw very normal pups (sometimes even some potatoes) with bids that reached 10GC or some absurd prices like that... pups that on TC you would never buy for more than 50sc... And that because you can only bid more (sometimes you have to respect a minimum increase) to get that pup or make a high offer so that other people won't bid more than you.

So, if a thread has "auction" in its name or if I open it up and saw mentions of bidding, I immediately close it and don't even look at what they offer. They could have the prettiest wolves, they could start their bids at 1sc, but I won't even look at them.

As a buyer, I prefer flatsales threads that have links to TC, where I could buyout the pup or made an offer. I don't have problem with offering, but usually I prefer to have a buyout shown so I kinda know what the seller is expecting to get. Unless it's a Pay What You Want, then I'm okay with not having a buyout (hoping it's a real pwyw and not a "offer something but I can say no if it's too low").

And what I think it's really important is that those threads need to be up to date. They don't need to have 50 pups or get new pups every day, but if a pup is sold, the seller should try to update the thread and delete the sold pup infos as soon as possible, so that other viewers can't get interested in a pup that is not available anymore. And about this, sometimes I see players leaving the pictures of sold pups on and just adding a "SOLD" note near it. I can understand it makes you feel better to show others that you are successfully selling pups, but I find it frustrating to see images of pups I might like just to discover that they are already sold. If you have time to edit your post and add that "sold" note, then you should be able to also at least delete the picture...

Personally, I don't care much about too many infos on the thread, sometimes too many infos are just confusing. What I think are the basic infos you must have are adult image of the pup at real opacity, sex, stats, base and number of markings. And a link to see the pup page so that you can check out anything else.

Unfortunatly, flatsales only threads are hard to find (I see always just auction threads), so I mostly use TC to search for new pups or a couple of adoption thread I have bookmarked.

As a seller, I have a flatsales thread with both flatsales and pay what you want. I show the adult image of the pups for sale with basic infos and provide links to both the pup page and the trade in TC. PWYW pups have a separate section with just the actual pup image and a link to the trade, because they are usually plain looking pups I almost don't care if they are sold or not.

I bump the thread often and bump the single trades as well and, I have to say, I manage to sell more or less half of the pups I put on the market.

Hope this was of help (and sorry about my venting against auction XD)

I don't buy many wolves, but when I do I usually check the trading post so I can specifically search for exactly what I want without have to browse through hundreds of threads with spam titles and auctions.
Because, let's be honest, the wolf sales chatter is a complete mess. Just looking at that... ugh.

I flat-out refuse to participate in an auction. There is no wolf I want so badly I'm going to go through the hassle of babysitting a thread and messaging users. I do enough busywork and correspondence at my actual job, I just want to click one button and: new puppy.

Occasionally I'll click on a Recent Activity sale that looks promising though, and I want to see:

• Well, to even get me to click on it in the first place, an informative title, like the bases you have, rare marks, good stats
  
• Pictures with the wolf's natural opacities, ideally as an adult
  
• Links the wolf page and/or it's trade. I can get the rest of the info myself then
  
• ... but a short description is nice too
  
• The wolves are current up for trade and have a realistic buyout or specific wanted items listed
• Optionally, the price of the wolf right there on the thread

My ideal wolf sales thread is just a standard boring list with adult images, a link to the pup, a link to their trade, and a 1-line description like "Female, Galena, 7 marks + Auburn shading, 312 stats, Romantic, 50sc or 1gc

I don't want to see:

• Some CSS is okay but I'm here for wolves
  
• Images of wolves with their marking opacities set to 100. Don't care; not helpful
  
• Requested trade items like "i dunno," "try me," "make an offer."
  
• tiny images or font, Small, but not forum-tag sized, images are okay but no font smaller than default
  
• Lots of highlighted words
• Light colored font I shouldn't have to highlight an entire post to read it
  
• "PM me" and wolves not up for trade
• "Clutter wolves." Like already sold, parents, their stud...
  

I do like seeing images with 100% opacity, because I'm usually looking for a specific appearance and I'm willing to use opacity changers to get it, so if a wolf has merle or whatever but in its natural state it's invisible, I want to know that, and it's much easier to get an overview of the markings and appearance possibilities from a 100% opacity image than to read through a markings list.  That said, I definitely also want an as-is image, otherwise it's just misleading.

The thing I want most in auctions is for the title to say when the wolves were added, for the auction end time to be clearly stated, and for the stats to be very obvious (preferably high-stat wolves in a separate section from low-stat ones). I don't care about personality or fertility much at all. I want to see the wolves on either the default background or some other backgrounds that actually exist on the site - not edited with transparent backgrounds or outlines or circles or what have you. I prefer the images to be full-sized. I don't like large lists of all the wolf's genetic information - I can see the nose on the picture, don't make me scroll for ages to see the next wolf.

Flatsales are nice when the prices are good, but I don't mind auctions at all, and in auctions it's much easier to get sensible prices - a lot of flatsale threads I see are either too cheap so the good wolves get bought out before I have a chance to look at them, or too expensive so nobody's buying even if the wolves are great. (Auctions with overly high starting bids have that problem too.) 

The thing I really want most is for Wolvden to implement ping lists so I could just ask breeders whose pups I like to ping me when they add new wolves...

@Piffle I completely get that, nobody here likes auctions lmao. I forgot about PWYW though that's another good selling point. But as far as auction prices go I have no idea what's the deal with them, and I feel like it isn't the auction post itself like, on the TC there was a group of pups without a price and the owner said to ask them to separate, now when I do stuff like that heck I'll give you the pup for free, but this person told me that single pup was 10GC ?! 10?! I should have asked why they thought it was worth so much, but I felt it to be rude at the moment. ANYWAY the point of that story was that the user also had a successful auction thread so I figured since people bid up so high they can get away with ridiculous prices on the TC.

@Owlbear I never thought to use highlighted words, but they were the first thing I noticed on your comment so I guess they work ha, but I can see how lots of highlighting and font changes and such are headache inducing. I do wish chatter would clean up, but since wolvden doesn't have an official auction house where you can bid on things real time we are kinda stuck with it. Even if the TC had an option of 'accepting highest offer by x time' we would be much better off to try to get the auctioneers over.

@Nika That's a good point when you subscribe to threads you only get notified when somebody posts. One auction thread I follow posts when they add new wolves, but while that is good for the way wolvden functions right now, it is clutter. I tend to just look at when the post was edited last to assume when things were added if it isn't stated of course people also edit to add bids so it isn't exactly a science

Yeah, in my experience people do a lot of editing to add bids so the edit time isn't very useful.  And subscribing to auction threads is really annoying because then I get a notification every time anyone bids on anything...