How To Auction

[SPYBUG96]

Hey everyone. I'm fairly tired of seeing Auctions made by people who clearly don't get the point of auctioning their items. Some of the auctions are very funny, like the ones where the minimum bid is the value of the item and it is a very expensive item.

First:

AUCTIONS ARE NOT A WAY TO SELL YOUR ITEMS / HARD TO SELL ITEMS!!!! Auction is a way to make some of, but not all of the value of the item you are auctioning though it is possible to make the full price of the item or more after a few entries.

Second:

The minimum bid should be reasonable to the actual value of the item you are auctioning. Aka not more that it is worth and not exactly how much it is worth.

Third:

You don't always need pure, and you might have the ability to make more with items depending on the %. Also perople are more willing to bid items than pure.

Fourth:

Don't be a dick with the item %. If you make it so low just ask for pure. Item percent is the percent of the backpack.tf price that you want. So If you have it set to 50% and an item has a suggested value of 10 ref, then the person who bids this item will only register for 5 ref.

Fifth:

What you think of as a "valuable" item that you are auctioning might not be what others consider valuable.  Aka parts, paint, special numbers, special levels, Halloween, etc. And you need to realize this when creating your auction.

And that's all I got so far. Going to add pictures soon.

[Tweets]

In general it's also best to ignore 'price modifiers' such as parts or paint completely. The only one that has enough of an effect to justify it changing the price in an auction (which is supposed to be either for fun or to get rid of an item you can't sell for a potential profit at the risk of a loss) is Killstreaks, IMO.

 

Generally an item value percentage of 75% or higher is a good idea, since it's enough to take an overpay cut if someone wants to give you their junk items, making it worthwhile for you, but not to the point that they need to empty their inventory if they don't have enough metal. I keep it at 80% in any auction I do, since I really dislike handling the items but don't want to prevent people from tipping the scale a bit with a few items. 90% is a good idea if you don't mind handling the items, since you can sell them on for a slight profit and people won't mind using them. Remember that higher-valued items lose more value in this percentage, so if you're auctioning a low-value item, you may want to use a larger margin than if you are auctioning off something worth 10 keys (as a loss of 2 scrap value and a loss of 2 keys value are massively different but can still be a 10% margin).

 

I suspect that the rules targeted at auctions will ban a few of the unpopular practices, though right now I'm not aware of the discussion even existing within the staff, likely as it's such a young feature and people want to see if any problems arise that will need to be stated in the rules before bothering to come up with any.

 

As for the minimum bid, it can actually be a good thing to have a very low one, as it encourages competitive bidding, which can net you some profit. This also has a higher risk, so it's best to set the minimum bid an amount that you would feel a bit annoyed if you got but hope that it goes higher.