I'm going to start this help page by telling you it's not going to be as helpful as the shorthelp and longhelp files that you can use on the muck. That may sound strange, but it's true; the help files on the action itself are smart and will tell you what's going on for the particular combination of a particular incarnation of the Auction II code, the current circumstances, and the individual user. Really. A few entries will tailor themselves to what's going on right at that moment, some will tell you different things depending on your status at the auctions, and quite a lot will tell you things about yourself. Rather than just sitting there as a static block of text, the Auction II help files will attempt to tell you what you actually need to know.

However, I'm taking what I can and putting it online. A list of useful commands and excerpts from the shorthelp and longhelp files are here. For the fuller and smarter help, though, you still have to go to your muck.

Commands

abort      Stops an auction in progress
atm        Gets money; see here
bid        Self explanatory, right?
chain      Adds someone to the sales chain; see here
gamble     Loses money; see here
give       Gives money to another; see here
history    Lists recent history; see here
longhelp   Shows you the longhelp options
owner      Sets your owner or checks that of another
rate       Check user ratings; see here
petprefs   See the short or long online help
shorthelp  Shows you the shorthelp options (see below)
status     Tells you what's going on
unchain    Takes someone off the sales chain; see here
vote       Lets you vote on a single question

Shorthelp entries available on the web are: ATM, chain, gamble, give, history, money, name, petprefs, RTFM, rate, and unchain. There are more on the Auction II system itself.

The entries under longhelp are more verbose.

ATM
To get money, type 'ATM'; this will give you the standard payout of silver unless you have more than the preset wealth limit or have withdrawn money too recently. To see your account information, look at the ATM. See 'shorthelp money' to learn more about the monetary system.

The secondary ATM commands are #learn (to update the Auction II's database on you) and #demote (to turn gold into silver).

Chain
Type 'chain NAME' to add the person NAME to the sales chain. Only auctioneers can chain anyone, but you can always chain yourself. To find out more, type 'longhelp chain'.

Gamble
To use the gamble action, type 'gamble' with the amount of money you wish to bet. You have a chance of winning an equal amount of money or of losing what you gambled. There are limits, though; you may not bet more than a preset limit at once, nor may you bet if you are too rich. (The numbers vary from system to system; check your own auction for the local parameters.) The purpose of this feature is to allow the theoretical possibility of a poor bidder having enough money to buy an expensive slave. You are unlikely to become rich through gambling.

Give
The give command allows one person to give gold to another person. (Silver can't be given away.) The syntax is 'give person number', as in 'give Dina 10'.

History
If you type 'history' you will see a synopsis of the sales activity for the preceeding week (more or less). It's possible to check the recent record of a particular person, too, by adding their name. Typing 'history #last' will show the previous week's record (only two weeks at a time are stored as of version 1.1).

Money
There are two kinds of money used in the Auction II system, silver and gold. Silver comes from the ATM and (if you're lucky) gambling; it may not be given away. Gold only originates from sales but may be given to other users. When buying, silver is spent first because it's easier to come by (this may change in later versions; at the time of Beta-release there's a bit of a debate on the long term practicality of this). There are several subtle features in place to prevent people from becoming infinitely rich; when you're ready to read about them, see 'longhelp taxes'.

Name
The Auction II code keeps track of people by dbref when it can, and keeps a name list to look up users as needed. This can be confused by using @name, or if someone's never used the ATM or bid commands (which check to see if it knows you). If you think you've confused the system this way, or if you just want to be sure, type 'ATM #learn'.

It's possible for the system to get confused if an old user gets @toaded and the dbref is re-used for a new player that also comes to the auction ... but it's never been seen to happen yet and would be easy to straighten out if it did.

Petprefs
The petprefs feature is used to tell buyers what a slave offers...and would prefer to avoid. This information is stored on the player by typing '@set me=_petprefs:TEXT', where TEXT is the pet preference information you want people to see when you go up on the auction block. Read 'longhelp petprefs' for more information.

RTFM
RTFM stands for Read The, er, Fine Manual. If you RTFM you will not have to ask the regulars questions that they are tired of answering.

Rate
The rate command lets players give feedback on each other. Usage is simple. To find out Foo's ratings so far, just type 'rate Foo'. The rating numbers range from 5 (great) to 1 (awful). To rate somebody, you must be associated with them in the sales history (see here); the syntax is 'rate NAME NUMBER [COMMENT]'.

Unchain
Unchain is the command used to remove a slave for the sales chain. The chained user, that user's registered owner if any, and the auctioneer all have the privilege of unchaining.

Longhelp

Chain
The sales chain is actually very simple. The command 'chain' is used to put people onto the list of slaves to be sold; the command 'unchain' will take people off that list. You can look at the chain to see who's up for sale next. You're not allowed to be on the chain twice; trying to add a player to the chain who's already there will appear to work but have no effect.

You are allowed to chain yourself; you are allowed to chain another person only if you are that person's registered owner or if you're the auctioneer. The auctioneer can chain any player (puppets can't be sold, so they can't be chained, either).

Typing 'chain me' or 'unchain me' will be enough for most users. Also check out 'shorthelp unchain'.

Money
When we first started talking about doing a slave auction on FurryMuck again, we discovered that the hardest part to work out was the monetary system. We probably spent more time discussing money than everything else combined, trying to work out a system that avoided the problems of previous auctions.

Very rich users (particularly auctioneers) and money giving abuses dominated the discussion; it was quickly obvious that some kind of wealth control was needed to keep the auction economy from going out of control. Some things became obvious:

* Having 'free money' that people could then pool together with friends and alts was a bad idea. If every person was given a certain amount per week, then people with alts could become quite wealthy. But people liked being able to give money to each other!

* The auctioneer should not be very wealthy! Several varieties of problems from past auctions came up on that subject. Also, if the owner of the auction is inexplicably wealthy, users will begin to doubt the honesty of the system.

* The problems with money come not from having it, but from one person or a few people having much more than anyone else (especially when the rich person owns or runs the auction). Wealth should be spread pretty evenly among the users, with everyone able to enrich themselves if they care to, and there shouldn't be economically privileged users. (That's why in the Auction II system auctioneers don't get a salary or a percentage of sales; they are volunteers, with no economic reward. On the other hand, if you want to reward your local auctioneer socially, go right ahead -- they deserve it!)

Eventually we hit upon the idea of having two parallel kinds of currency that spent the same but would operate differently for financial control purposes. Silver would be given away to all patrons who wanted it, but couldn't be given away; gold could be given to others, but would have to be earned so that the supply would be limited. They'd still spend the same, of course, with silver going first because silver was easier to get.

Of course, the idea that the free money should stop when a user already had plenty of money was an obvious one.

There are other features in place to keep the economy balanced, such as taxation (see 'longhelp taxes'). The gold tax at the time of sale for rich owners was planned all along, to keep the large scale sellers' wealth more reasonable. The realtime silver tax was added in later after it was clear that many of the regular patrons were near the wealth limit and had very similar amounts of money; the realtime tax nibbles away at the total and contributes to a greater variety in account balances. A weekly tax of 2% to 10% is probably best.

Another intentional feature is the channeling of the sales profits to the slave's registered owner. While a potential bonanza for those with large harems, it also provides for the disappearance of the money when there is no registered owner. Some people don't care about the profit, and taking money out of the economy helps keep inflation down. Also, it was nice that an owner could rent out a slave and make money doing it.

Most of the numeric settings can be changed, so that the auction owner can attempt to fine-tune the local economy.

Petprefs
The petprefs command is used to tell buyers what the slave offers, likes, and would prefer to avoid. The petprefs command will not process MPI.

You can store a master copy of this data on yourself in the _petprefs: property, where it will be updated when you type 'petprefs #set'. You can also set the auction's echo of your properties manually by typing 'petprefs #set NEW PETPREFS'. The full rundown of commands is:

petprefs         If an auction is running, shows the slave's petprefs
petprefs NAME   This will tell you the petprefs (if any) of the person NAME
petprefs #chain Shows you the petprefs of all slaves on the sales chain
petprefs #clear Removes your system petprefs
petprefs #help  Self explanatory.  (This is also 'shorthelp petprefs'.)
petprefs #here  This shows the petprefs (if any) of all people in the room
petprefs #set   If you have text in your _petprefs: property, it updates
                the recorded petprefs to that; if not, it prompts for text.

Privileges
Not all users have the same privileges under the Auction II code. Puppets are allowed to do almost nothing at all. Most users can bid and buy and sell and gamble and generally use all of the public features they like.

There are also auctioneer privileges; only they may put someone up for sale. Auctioneers may also look at another user's account information, and have a few other perks. (There's no personna non grata flag to set that will chase out people you don't like--the auction owner will have to do that.)

Taxes
Both silver and gold are taxed, but in different ways.

Silver is taxed in realtime, at a certain percentage per week; the number is set by the auction owner and should generally be kept between 2% and 10%. (Don't bother trying to just stay away for a week. The system keeps track of these things.) The rate of taxation can be raised if the population starts getting too rich or lowered if people are too poor. For what it's worth, rounding is always in favor of the user. Since silver comes from the ATM for free, it's no big deal that it gets taken back again, eh?

Gold is earned, however, so it's not taxed indefinitely the way silver is. There is no tax on gold at all unless the recipient already has over an arbitrary amount of gold, in which case the income is reduced on a sliding scale. The formula is (incoming gold * gold tax number) / current gold. (The gold tax number can be changed, too, of course.) The object is to make it fairly easy to get some gold, but difficult to become very wealthy in gold.

Me: If you really insist, there's nothing to stop you from sending email to me at [email protected], but I don't check it all that often. If you're in a hurry, page-mail me on FurryMuck, okay?

You can go back to the main page from here.