Pitboss 4 Signup

[Bobchillingworth]

Apologies if someone already suggested this, but what about if you all just bid on preset leader/civ combos set by the lurkers? That way you don't have to perform any calisthenics trying to divine the proper value of traits or civs before bidding even starts, and I can assure you that the lurkers will set you guys up with some interesting combinations

[Nakor]

I'm ok with anything you guys come up with, provided that is doesn't take forever to get to some sort of agreement and rules.

On a sidenote, Gaspar and me will be forming a team for this pitboss game.

[Cyneheard]

This doesn't make a lot of sense for me. I thought the main aim of an auction was to (help to) determine the market price for an object. How can Fin be worth $131 when 3 or 4 people are willing to pay more for it.

I think that the main difficulty is that we haven't hit on an ideal way of 'selling' a scarce resource. Isn't there anyone out there with enough economics to suggest a suitable method that will work?

Well, if we do it by each player is maximizing their Consumer Surplus, then I think the system works: I take the trait that gives me the largest surplus available. Fin sells for $131, because A and B have something else that they'd rather have than Fin for $131 or even $141, and have therefore removed themselves from the marketplace for Financial.

The problem is that that the other person's price isn't in a vacuum: it's dependent on the price of the other goods, so information's flowing in both directions: from Financial's prices to Expansive, and Exp to Fin...while assuming that you only get to put forward prices once.

In all honesty, there is no ideal way to run such a system.

In an auction system, information only flows one way (either reverse-price, where it's expensive traits to cheap ones, or if the traits are auctioned in some sort of order), and of course by-post methods are also limited in how the information's incorporated.

The reason to use second-highest price:
It's to better model a live auction. In a live auction, if I say "I won't pay more than $150 for Fin", then if no one else is willing to pay $140, then a bid of $141 wins the bid for me. It also has the added bonus of a player's only rational option is to bid the highest price that they're willing to pay; otherwise, am I better off bidding $150, or bidding $145, and risk losing Financial to someone else, to save $5 for other traits, even though I'd rather pay $150 than lose the prize.

So, to better-model the live auction, the original "most expensive bid" resolution mechanism is probably better, instead of that consumer-surplus rule. But a live auction would be superior to a system like this, if you can get a single committed time from all of the teams.

Bob's system is certainly simpler, assuming you trust us lurkers to come up with decent suggestions and choose the synergy options on our end.

[luddite]

So far I like Cynehead's auction system the best. Although I'd suggest that, rather than bidding on just traits or civs, we allow players to bid on whatever they want in a given round of the auction. with 5 players, you could make a bid like: Fin 200, exp 150, india 140, byzantine 130, cre 100 and everyone would win just one of the things they bid on.

[SevenSpirits]

Cyneheard, I thought about your simultaneous mass auction idea a bit more. I decided we were analyzing it wrong, trying to apply to second price and other ideas to it to magically make it fairer and not getting anywhere near far enough. Instead we need to come from the other side: first try to simulate a sequential mass auction as perfectly as a simultaneous second-price auction simulates a simple auction. Once there, we can try to simplify. However, I can't think of a way to simplify. So here's how it would have to work from the players' perspective:

1) Submit a gold valuation for each item.
2) ???
3) Receive an item for some gold!

Here's how it would work behind the scenes:

1) Receive player max bids.
2) Subtract X from each max bid, where X is their highest max bid. Place these bids. (All are negative or zero.)
3) Repeat until all players either are winning an item or have reached their max bids:
a. pick a player not fulfilling either of those conditions, arbitrarily. (The order is actually irrelevant.)
b. increase all their bids by one.
Note: players tied at the high bid are not considered to be winning the item.

When this simulated bidding war finishes, each bid is locked in. Each player will be either winning one or more items by exactly one, or winning no items. Award each player in the former position their most expensive item. Then remove their bids and repeat. If only tied items remain, award the item to a random tied player. Players always pay their exact current bid.

This is deterministic except for bidding ties and is very fair. The only drawback is it's not very transparent (it's hard to understand exactly how it works). I don't think there's a way to turn it into a more straightforward process without introducing a lot of potential for either gaming the system or random jackpots.

I do think this would have good and fair results and is worth considering, and I'd call it the best available simultaneous (and thus, fast) auction system. However I must admit that simple drafting compares favorably to it, for people who find the obscurity of the rules to be irritating. (Not that the obscurity should actually affect people... all they have to know is to place bids such that they would be about equally happy winning any of the items for those prices (and will most likely get a better deal).

[Cyneheard]

So far I like Cynehead's auction system the best. Although I'd suggest that, rather than bidding on just traits or civs, we allow players to bid on whatever they want in a given round of the auction. with 5 players, you could make a bid like: Fin 200, exp 150, india 140, byzantine 130, cre 100 and everyone would win just one of the things they bid on.

Interesting.

Be aware that not everything will be available in round 3, so the opportunity costs of trying to win a civ in round 1 (or two traits in 1 and 2) get really complicated.

Seven, let me think about your system and comment later, because in a 2-minute read I don't get it.

[Locke]

OK I am sorry. I dont want to hurt people's feelings. But I look on first page and I see that Cyneheard and 7 Spirits and sunrise are not even playing in game and they are doing all the setup. I think that is wrong. I think you are just making game interesting for people watching. But I will shut up and not post again. Wake me up when you are done cause I can not understand you right now.

[Ilios]

This thread is making my head hurt.

+ 1


Has anything actually been decided yet?

[luddite]

+ 1


Has anything actually been decided yet?

I think most of us who are actually going to play in the game just don't have that strong of an opinion about the setup rules Maybe some people would like to volunteer to test out the different auction systems? They could run a few auctions with each of the proposed rule sets, and see if any obvious imbalances or annoyances come up.

[plako]

I think most of us who are actually going to play in the game just don't have that strong of an opinion about the setup rules Maybe some people would like to volunteer to test out the different auction systems? They could run a few auctions with each of the proposed rule sets, and see if any obvious imbalances or annoyances come up.

Well at least I'm playing although in reality I'm quite indifferent how leaders are chosen although I'm intrested in trying something new.

It seems that all the normal auctions are either too slow or become so complex that I really don't want to use my time to comprehend them. The reverse version would be good, but getting all teams on the same chat at the same time seems pretty hard task and half an hour suggested by Sunrise feels quite short time for an auction that you try for the 1st time.

I'm starting to think that just either limiting the options or spicing up the snake pick a bit could be good enough. Here is my earlier suggestion:

Snake pick with 3 rounds. Trait-trait-civ (one must only pick existing trait pairs). Pick order for nation that goes 1st could be e.g. 1-10-10. In every round traits would be available only once. No duplicate leaders allowed.

Concerning the above suggestion since the pick positions can't be totally equal value. Here is suggestin how picks could be randomized

1: 1-10-9
2: 10-1-10
3: 2-9-7
4: 9-2-8
5: 3-8-5
6: 8-3-6
7: 4-7-3
8: 7-4-4
9: 5-6-1
10; 6-5-2

If we want some bargaining. Maybe everyone could get 100 gold that could be used to buy better position in the pick order in some of the picks, but I don't know if anyone would be intrested in selling and this would end up giving everyone just 100 gold.