Auction II, The History File

Back around Odometer Day a bunch of us were hanging around in the Willing Victims Guild and got to saying that it was too bad that there weren't any slave auctions on FurryMuck any more. This was a popular subject of conversation for several nights running and we kicked around various ideas, particularly what had gone wrong with previous auctions on Furry and other mucks. After a while we discovered that we had a pretty good idea how an auction economy should run; the idea of splitting the currency into two types was invented in these evenings, and I'm sorry I don't remember who first thought it up.

It turned out that I was the only one with the willingness and the MPI expertise to tackle the problem. So I made a room and an action, and started coding. After a while I had something that mostly ran most of the time but was very crude, and I was well on my way to either polishing a lot more or getting bored and abandoning the project when I noticed that the rapidly approaching February 22nd was a Tuesday.

What better time to introduce the Auction II code than on 2-22-2000, a Tuesday?

So the announcement was made and I spent a few evenings frantically patching the most severe bugs. The first auction happened on time and was a fine success. We were weekly from the start and the auctions have been going strong ever since.

There have been a few odd points, of course. For example, we'd been running for a few months when the regular Tuesday night auctions moved to Wednesdays... (My real life intervened; when we started I was free Tuesday evenings but busy Wednesdays, then it turned out to be the other way around.) Fortunately, most people adapted easily to the change in schedule!

And, of course, there was the unfortunate incident when Dragonoix lost his auctioneer privileges... It wasn't pleasant, but I did learn from it. Among other things I learned that the voting code I had written needed to be much more secure against cheating. The Dragonoix story is another one, though.

In July of 2001 I finally got around to putting up a page to publicize the Auction II system, which I've decorated with a picture of me by Amberdrake (see right) and who you can contact on FurryMuck.

About the same time, I started making some modifications to the economy, to keep the creeping inflation under control. At the request of many users, and after a vote, I increased the ATM limit to 2000; at the same time I reduced the gold tax onset to 500 gold. It soon proved that the latter was unpopular, so now the gold tax onset is back up to 1000.

As you've noticed, the Auction II code is now available for download. I know many additions I still want to make so it's not 'finished', but it's ready to be used now. Version 1.0.2 is all you need to run your own slave auction.

As I write this (November 24th, 2001) I'm tinkering with Auction II system on FurryMuck but haven't produced changes major enough to justify making another version release. Those of you who want to see the bleeding edge of development will have to show up on FurryMuck and read the bulletin board in the auction hall! Later versions will come out, well, later.

(June 2002) The release of version 1.1 took longer than I expected it to take, and not because there wasn't enough added! A full tenth is justified by adding a new command, I think, and I added two: rate and vote. The rating system to let users give feedback on one another should have been written long ago but I can't do everything at once; the vote code mentioned above needed to be completely rewritten from scratch but is secure now that it tracks voters by dbref and understands puppets.

The economic variations are the most interesting thing, though. Early in 2002 users were handing gold around to avoid the wealth tax on gold, and there was even a gold glut building up. So some things changed with how the system handled money. A give tax of 1% was instituted to keep giving under some control. More importantly, I rewrote some of the sell code so that gold or silver could be spent preferentially in whatever proportion was desired, having realized that spending silver first was not as good an idea as we'd assumed it was back in January of 2000. Going over to a proportion of 10% silver and 90% gold in sales (assuming the buyer's account included that much) worked pretty well. It took care of our gold glut and seems stable in the long run too.