Updates to Horse for Sale searching

[Silverine]

The plan right now is to do a massive manual deletion of the ads, and then setup a script that removes ads older than 6 months or a year. Whatever makes the most sense. Everyone let us know what you think the best time limit for ads are and we'll figure it out.

That is amazing to hear!

From my position: I think 6 months is plenty of time for a horse to find a buyer, especially if the market isn't as cluttered. But others may have better insight than I do.

I'd say it would possibly be okay to just put the limitation on ads that are "Offers Only" but then I could easily imagine a rise in people putting an exorbitant buyout with the offer option to get around the limitation. *sigh*

[EclipticEnd]

I did a quick tour through the pages and found:

Pages 321-443 are dated December 2019 to December 2015 (122 pages total)
Pages 252-321 are dated December 2020 to December 2019 (69 pages total)
Pages 186-252 are dated December 2021 to December 2020 (66 pages total)
Pages 125-186 are dated December 2022 to December 2020 (61 pages total)
Pages 1-125 are dated for present day to December 2022 (125 pages total)

Therebouts 28% of all ads have been made this year. Keep in mind that we're four months into the year and that these ads are therefore relatively active; many of these horses will (hopefully) have found homes by December 2023 and many new ads will also appear.

72% of the market are older than four months and relatively inactive. This includes around 3180 advertisements and is over twice the number of the active ads. These ads are much less likely to go away on their own due to their age, but it can and does happen.

The numbers (not including those of 2019-2015) suggest that an average of around 65 pages are leftover each year. That's a whopping 650 ads and is only 8 pages away from two ads per day for that year. Without the limit added, this number would likely continue and only keep adding to the market's numbers.

Six months ago was October of 2022 and assuming we're looking at October 18th, the pages would end at page 137. It's somewhat likely that the pages would stay at around that number depending on the player activity. This would offer around 1,300 horses for players to peruse which seems like a large number still, but in actuality is only about 30% of the total we'd otherwise be viewing. It's a large difference which I'm completely in favor of.

My worry is that six months is still a significant amount of time, especially when dealing with inactive players. This could be an area in which the Premium role might have a good impact; Premium players are less likely to be inactive in my opinion since 1.) it's a grind to get the role with PT (we've nicknamed the horses Grinders even) and 2.) it's otherwise only attainable with actual money. Perhaps allow the Premium players the six months and limit non-premiums to three months? That way active players can relist their horses without it becoming repetitive (it'd be four times in a year assuming the horse doesn't sell within the first ad campaign) and inactive ones won't be haunting the market for half a year.

[BlackOak2]

If we're talking about options themselves (and after reading all of the insight already - how could I add much more than what's already been offered??? - VERY well scripted and thought out, thank you!)... I think I like the options as follows (an amalgamation the above options, plus a little of my own).

Inactive basic accounts are usually (and this is in all online games) the largest problems. So if a basic account has ads up and haven't been on in 30 days, all of their horses should just be pulled from the market. If they haven't been back in that time, they're probably not interested in the game. But I also think this should be limited to just newbie accounts. Those under 6 months... actually, I think it's appropriate to do under 3 months since sign-up.
Most of our quitting newbies do tend to last a bit longer than in other games.
The horses they'll likely have in this time are AC stock, cheap stock and perhaps a couple halfway decent grinders. Maybe they'll have a couple of higher 'on-paper' (at least) horses. But great! If they remember the game and remember their login, then they'll come back to something to start up with again.
This will mean that a newbie (under 3-month) account that hasn't logged in for 30 days, will not be clogging the market in 31 days from their last login.

For the rest of our players, I think it's fair to categorize them thusly:
Private Sale only should really be limited to (and after reading everybody else's thoughts) 3 months. These horses fall into higher pricing or limited interest. So finding homes for these does take longer, but they're (in my opinion) the bigger issue. A person needs to log on to find out if there have been any offers, however, they don't need to login to that account to see, they can simply take a look at their horse from another account.

All other sales should be 6 months. Although this sounds like a long time, and it still is!, there are still a lot of horses that move slowly.

WHEN our market is cleaned up, I think there will be a lot more interest and time spent on looking at older ads. Especially when there will be more horses up for sale and we can hone to exactly what we want: Ban-ei, 14 to 16 hands, 7 years to 13 years.
If we allow for just a little extra time, then we'll be able to find (hopefully) something that's a lot closer to what we're looking for.

I was at first, a 'year' voter. But after hearing the hard numbers, I think 6 months is a more appropriate length. Some of us take hiatus's for that long.

After rereading my own and thinking on it as well. Maybe I am a 3 month-er after all. And that would be for ALL ads, regardless.
Although I would certainly like to choose the length of time for a horse to be up-for-sale (24-hrs, five days, two weeks, one month, max = 3 months). I also would want that length of time to show as well. Would that be too close to auction ads? I wonder...

*shrugs*

[Hidalgo]

I have not been active for a quite while due to time constraints and a busy life, but this is very exciting!

After rereading my own and thinking on it as well. Maybe I am a 3 month-er after all. And that would be for ALL ads, regardless.
Although I would certainly like to choose the length of time for a horse to be up-for-sale (24-hrs, five days, two weeks, one month, max = 3 months). I also would want that length of time to show as well. Would that be too close to auction ads? I wonder...

I personally agree with the notion of a 3 month length for private sales, but I also like your idea of leaving up regular sales longer. I have actually gone pretty far back on the sales page and bought horses that had been up forever, not just for market cleaning.

I'd say it would possibly be okay to just put the limitation on ads that are "Offers Only" but then I could easily imagine a rise in people putting an exorbitant buyout with the offer option to get around the limitation. *sigh*

I think any horse that is UFO with a buyout price should just be set to the same constraints as one that's offers only, and that would clear up the problem of people setting a super high buyout to keep the ad up longer. I also love BlackOak's suggestion of being able to choose the length an ad stays up, possibly as a premium feature? (Although to me 6 months still seems kind of an outrageous length of time lol.)

Also possibly an option to set up an auction with a set length of time? Say the seller sets a minimum buyout and then people can add their bids to this, and like auctions on other games, when the time is up, the horse automatically goes to the highest bidder. But we do already have a decent auction system in place, so that's not really necessary but it would be fun.

[BlackOak2]

It would be nice to at-countdown-end, have the horse automatically go to whoever's bid was highest. A second box we could highlight.

[Silverine]

It would be nice to at-countdown-end, have the horse automatically go to whoever's bid was highest. A second box we could highlight.

I agree that this would be nice, but from a developer standpoint I see this as being a bigger hurdle than the currently suggested simple timeout.

[HorzeLover101]

Did some number crunching. At the time of my data collection there were:

4,422 total horses on the market

Of those horses:

About 90 (2%) were posted in the past 24 hours
331 (7.5%) were posted in the past 7 days
778 (17.6%) were posted in the past 30 days

That means that 82.4% were posted more than 30 days ago.

Just in case people were wondering why we need market cleaners. It appears that if your horse isn't snatched up within the first 24 hours the chance of it being purchased decreases almost exponentially as time goes on.

It also really brings up the issue with "Offers Only" horses just sticking in the market forever. I love private sales, but there really does need to be a limit on how long those listings last.

Hence the market cleaners! Idk if you've checked out my page but ive been tracking numbers since 2021. And each year a do monthly numbers! Since the change to the market I need to make some updates such as not purchasing any horses with in the last 30 days. That will help lower the risk of buying horses "certain" players are selling to abuse the market cleaners $$$$.
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=36181

[HorzeLover101]

The plan right now is to do a massive manual deletion of the ads, and then setup a script that removes ads older than 6 months or a year. Whatever makes the most sense. Everyone let us know what you think the best time limit for ads are and we'll figure it out.

Honestly you could get rid of the feature of horses posted within "certain time frame". If you just add a time effect to the ads being posted.

Option 1:
Non-Premium Members:
- Unlimited "normal" horse sales
- Limited (2) Offer Only sales; This needs revised to possibly increase depending on how many horses you own at the time. Example.... You have 10 horses so you can put 2 horses for offers only/ 20 horses you can put up 4 for offers only / etc
- Normal horse sales; Time restriction of 7 days before it is deleted or has to be "renewed"
- Offers Only Horses; Time restriction of 7 days before it is deleted or has to be "renewed"

Premium Members:
- Unlimited "normal" horse sales
- Unlimited Offer Only Sales
- Normal horse sales; Time restriction of 14 days before it is deleted or has to be "renewed"
- Offers Only Horses; Optional Selection of different time frames of 1-28 days. This allows a true "auction" type sale of the offers only option.

Also I do think we need to implement on the "offers only" horses a "minimum" bid starting price and a buyout price button.
Example..... I have a horse that I feel like I could sell it for 500k. But if i have to I will take at LEAST 250k. So when i post my horse for sale the minimum bid will say 250k.
Hence the first player can offer 250k. The next person that bids must bid 1,000 more then the previous bid. (increments in 500-1000 I believe is decent for the average player - but if it seems low i would do possibly an allowed selectable "bid increase" selection such as """player must bid at least 500, 1k, 2k, 5k, 10k more then previous bid to be a valid bid"

Horse #1
Min Bid: 250k
Min Bid Increasement: 5k
Buyout: 500k (Premium option only)

With this being said,
Buyout price button will only be offered to premium users only.

With this information it allows even more benefits for the premium users. PLUS these benefits are mainly time frame extenstions. So if a new player starts playing and creates all these sales then leaves 7 days later. those horses will remain in limbo. So thats why i think its a good idea to offer the longer/optional periods of time to the premium members. Since most players wont by prem unless they think or "know" they will be sticking around for a bit!.

Thank you! I know this was long but a good thought process

[kkhorsegirl]

this update helps a lot! could it be possible to add a search tab for owners? in a suggestion topic i have suggested a owner search because you may want to see if someone you like to buy horses from has any for sale, people have told me to look at the owners sale pen/pasture but when it has horses and i look none of them are for sale as it said on the pen/pasture title or notes.

[BlackOak2]

this update helps a lot! could it be possible to add a search tab for owners? in a suggestion topic i have suggested a owner search because you may want to see if someone you like to buy horses from has any for sale, people have told me to look at the owners sale pen/pasture but when it has horses and i look none of them are for sale as it said on the pen/pasture title or notes.

Some sales pens have horses that ARE for sale. But because of restrictions or simply time, they're not actually put up. Any horse in any sale pen that interests you, do contact the owner with a ping.

'Your horse X is in your sales pen. I'm interested in them. Would $$ be a reasonable amount?'

From there the barter can begin. Or, it'll force the owner to rearrange or rename sales pens and horses. Some of us do get a little lazy with keeping a farm organized, but the moment we're alerted to some interest, we clean it back up.

For me, when I'm churning through turns, any horse that appears in my sales pens or barns, don't get put up for actual sale, because in a day or two, they're aged out. The time it takes to put a horse up, with an appropriate sales ad, when there's only so much chance for the horse to be sold, it's just easier to throw them in there and move on.
Those are different for horses that I'm actually looking to sell, though. I'll actually take the time to put those horses up, with a good sales ad and I'll even slow my turn usage for the duration. Of course, I also expect such horses to go in about 24 hours to a new owner. I'm not often slowed down by them for long.

Anyway, just a helpful note, if you needed to hear it.