Friday, June 12, 2015

When Selling a Character (with Shameless Plug)...

I'm currently selling one of my characters.  I figured I'd dispense with being coy and just link the sale thread (I'll remove the Eve-board link when the sale is complete, to help out the new owner).  However, this is really just context for the real point.

One of the rules within the Eve Character Bazaar is that you cannot "bump" your post more than once a day.  Posts that have recent replies appear closer to the top than posts which do not, and by limiting every original poster (OP) to one "bump" post, the ISD team is trying to keep things fair.  And that makes sense... if every character for sale posts every 10 minutes, it would be impossible for buyers to navigate the forum.

But CCP never states what, exactly, a "bump" is.  When I hear "bump", I think of a post by the OP meant primarily to push the post back to the top of the heap.  But what about when you receive some bids via Evemail and others in the forum thread?  In my case, I posted each of the bids in different posts (they came in at different times) so they would appear in sequence to show the bid progression.

In my mind, these posts weren't bumps, since I was providing critical information to keep bidders informed about the current high bid and how many bidders were involved.  I was, in effect, a proxy for the Evemail bids.  Without alerting the other bidders of the bids they're competing against, I'd be wasting their time by letting them operate on old information.  It was the same role as an auctioneer announcing online bids competing with in-person bidders, for instance.

Apparently, this is a big no-no, and my thread was locked.  And that's fine, but the situation could have easily been avoided if the rules were clear about what constitutes a "bump".  If the rule is, in fact, that the OP can only post once per day regardless of content, then they should clearly state so to save everyone's time.

In communication, specificity is everything.

3 comments:

  1. Perfect (subcap) drone skills? I'll forgive having specialisations at 4 but your character can only use T1 heavy, repair and mining drones :)

    I wouldn't qualify your post as a second bump. You post an update and inform the latest forum bidder that his offer is no longer the highest one.
    Bumping would have to be two posts by you in a row (in 24h) since in that case you could have edited your previous post instead.

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  2. 25. you may reply .. with bids or questions regarding the character/s. All other posts are off topic and will be removed. Posts of this nature will be counted as your daily bump.

    That's probably the motivation behind the lock. Seems that in practice you can only post once a day since posts either count as the daily bump or are considered offtopic and will be removed?

    In the past my interpretation was that a reply counted as a bump so that you were not allowed to simply post '*bump*' for the next 24h but that you were still allowed a valid reply to new posts.

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  3. You could keep a 'current maximum bid' line in the OP, and update it as eve-mail bids come in. Folks aren't always going to re-read the OP, but it's a way to keep the current info in play.

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