Improvement to the auction ?
-
@testrun said in Improvement to the auction ?:
F1) "sabotaging" games with a bad faction*-- this was OP's key point (and most people's concern), and no one has really addressed their suggestion directly
I did suggest this:
I think it would be nice if you could have the app pick the 4 factions that will be auctioned off randomly. That way you get to play all the permutations of factions, which is really cool (and that greater kind variety is kinda the whole of the point of having the auctions) and you could never get deliberate trash picks.
Which I still think is a solution to the "trash-picking" problem that should be pretty easy to implement (and also saves some time, as players do not have to contemplate what faction to introduce into the auction). It's how I usually play offline and would choose to play here if it was possible. It is a lot of fun to see, for example, how a game where gaia-forming is heavily rewarded develops when the factions are Lantids, Taklons, Nevlar, and all those strange combinations can come up when you have random selection of the factions + auction.
-
@lucasrrr sorry, when I said "no one has really addressed their suggestion directly", I meant their suggestion for an improvement- the option for the zero bid to swap boards
I played similarly in person too and still usually randomize when playing with friends on here (we hit random twice and pick between the two results). I definitely like seeing new combinations of factions and trying to play a faction in unusual conditions.
Re: randomizing all four boards here- this is technically possible already through coordinating in the chat, but it might be nice to formalize it. As far as whether it fixes trash picks-- the question is whether people dislike the "spirit" of it, what they see as deliberate metagaming; or whether they just don't like a bad faction being there because of how it influences the bidding / not wanting to get stuck with it. Randomizing would of course fix the first, but not the second, as there's a 4/14 chance the worst possible faction still gets selected and the same bidding war to avoid it happens anyway.
In my mind, it's possible to resolve the bidding war part of things with a closed bid system, but still preserve the ability to have unusual factions in the game.
(And these two options could always be combined-- randomizing factions would work as an independent option you could select during setup) -
@testrun ah, of course, should have picked that up from your discussion of @oelepetoetje's suggestion below that
I think a good closed bidding system would be a nice way to solve what you've termed F3) -- the delay caused by slow incremental bidding -- which I don't terribly mind, but definitely could do without (also agree that this is completely independent from and could be combined with randomizing faction selection). Do worry such a system might not be intuitive for a lot of players though.
-
I'd like to think Gaia players can handle some complexity :) but yeah it's definitely less intuitive and the purchase prices might make people go "huh?"
It would probably work best if the game logged the individual bids similar to how I demo'd above in order to be transparent about why people got the factions they did for the price they did.
If the text at the start is something like "Select the maximum price you would pay for each faction", and then the game log at the bottom showed bid-by-bid how it played out, I think that would be pretty clear. (And obviously, there could be a page explaining how it works, like there already is for the existing auction)(The downside of needing to log step-by-step would be you couldn't take shortcuts in the algorithm, but I don't think it would be too much of a burden on the sever. There's the chance people could deliberately / coincidentally place matching very high bids which could add a few hundred "moves" to work through but as long as you batch them for writing to the db that shouldn't slow things down)
-
I think the official app for Gaia Project will go with a closed bid system, there is an ongoing thread about it but the developer on BGG.