Player Auctions As Money Sinks

Recently, Brian "Psychochild" Green, of Meridian 59 fame, wrote two posts on the basics of an MMORPG in-game economy for the blog Game Design Aspect of the Month. I don't know if it was my green tea or my attempt to multi-task (and therefore my distracted state) whilst reading the posts that gave me a brilliant flash for a potential money sink.

During the of reading part two, I was struck by the sentence:

Except for taxes such as a fee for posting and/or selling goods, buying an item from an auction isn't a drain in terms of the game economy.

Taken at it's face value, anyone who has played World of Warcraft for more than a couple weeks understands this concept. However, I was struck with an idea for a "new" sort of money sink based on those awful bid-to-auction sites that have sprung up somewhat recently.

If you aren't already familiar, these sites (which I will neither name nor link to as they I find them morally reprehensible) entice people with promises of $20 Ipods and Xboxes. The catch is you must pay a fee for each bid you make. And each bid pushes the auction clock back X seconds. And you still gotta pay the closing price plus applicable shipping. Do you see where I am going with this?

I find the actual penny auction or pay-to-bid reprehensible because of their manipulative business plans that essentially disguise the fact they are gambling sites - if they identified themselves as such I would merely think the phenomenon foolish -- not potentially criminal. But if we were to apply this model to an MMORPG, it may produce some rather interesting results that could provide fun for the players and a large gold-sink for the game masters.

Upon quick reflection, I would structure them as special events that give the players the ability to win special items created solely for those events. Whether the items are merely cosmetic or uber phat lewtz is beside the point, excepting in their ability to generate player interest.

The players would buy bids to our special-event auction in lots, as an example say 500 gold for 49 bids. Now each bid will have a set price that cannot be deviated from; for our example we'll say 10 silver. (In our example we assume 100 silver = 1 gold.) Each time a person bids, they do not actually pay the 10 silver, but actually the 10.2 gold. To the player, they are paying "nothing," however, since they already paid for the bid previously when they bought the allotment. Keep in mind that, if strictly following the real-world penny auction model, the player will still also need to pay the final closing fee.

Continuing our example, let's say I oversee the game Planet of Pewcraft and I hold a special event auction where I auction off 50 Mounts of Worthlessness; I create the interest in the event largely by the fact these items are only available from this auction. Therefore there will only ever be 50 of them on a given server (until I start selling them for $25 in my graft item shop -- MWUHAHAHAH!!! /pinky finger), creating a high level of exclusivity. We can start the bid timer at a 72-hour countdown.

You can imagine that a good number of players will pour their hard-earned gold into buying bids. And buy bids they will, because it will then become a competition among the players to keep outbidding each other. And each bid costs 10 gold (though to the player it is 10 silver) and sets the clock back 10 minutes. This results in a self-perpetuating bidding war that could go on for weeks, driving the amount of gold sunk into bid-buying into potentially fantastic amounts. And the final bid price, should we choose to go with that aspect of the model, itself would be the icing on the gold-sink cake, even if closing at "only" several-thousand gold.

This is a rough sketch of an idea, as there are a lot of things to consider about how an auction would work both from a technical (what happens if because of the time extensions your auction never runs out?) and customer service (hopefully you don't have big gold-farmer population) standpoint. However, if carefully designed and executed in terms of knowing your players, I think an event like this could even work to "reset" a server's game economy by removing huge amounts of currency from the system.

Anyway, just a thought that allowed me to procrastinate an hour away.