There has been some recent controversy on the Auctioneers and Auction Technology groups on Facebook. Much of this has been related to the Slide 4 debacle involving Proxibid's shifting market philosophy/business approach.
Recently, David Fuller, the developer of a Facebook social networking game called Auction Plums, has been making posts in defense of Proxibid on those two forums. In these posts, Fuller claimed to have held more than 10,000 auctions in 2011. This is an absurd claim. By stating he has held this number of auctions in one fiscal year, Fuller is claiming that his social networking game Auction Plums - a game featuring a virtual auction environment in which players bid on virtual representations of real world items with an in-game fictional currency - count as auctions he's held in 2011. This claim is both facetious and disingenuous.
The common understanding by a layperson, is that an auction is an event held at a specific time and place, where physical items, real estate, or intellectual property are sold, with the sale price being negotiated by an auctioneer, who is acting as an agent for the seller in order to effect the transfer of property to the buyer, or bidder. Whether this sale takes place on the internet as a timed auction, in person, or a combination of the two does not matter - the relevant items being that there is a transfer of real legal tender in exchange for some commodity - typically this commodity is a physical item. The "sale" of graphical representations of items in a virtual environment, purchased using a virtual currency, is quite simply not the same as a traditional auction taking place in the real world OR over the internet using an online bidding platform. Auction Plums is in Alpha testing. This is incomplete software, being tested on the general public via Facebook. It is not an online bidding platform - no real physical items or real commodities are exchanged via purchases made through Auction Plums - aside from the potential for participants to reload their energy and BidderBux (BBX) through the exchange of YET ANOTHER VIRTUAL CURRENCY, Facebook Credits (to be fair, when I clicked on the in-game purchase button to see if I could purchase BBX, a pop up window opened where it was possible to purchase them directly with a credit card as opposed to purchasing Facebook Credits and THEN exchanging them for BBX).
As a direct response to these claims, I decided to perform a full review of Auction Plums.
To begin with, I'm going to state my credentials, and why you should listen to what I have to say as it relates to both video games, as well as auctions.
I'm a professional Auctioneer, licensed in the state of Missouri. I'm a member of the National Auctioneers Association (NAA), and I hold the following NAA designations - Certified Auctioneer Institute (CAI), Certified Estate Specialist (CES). Additionally, I graduated from the World Wide College of Auctioneering in 2011. I'm the Comic Manager and Marketing Manager for Mound City Auctions, and have been involved in the business and industry starting part time 12 years ago, and full time beginning in 2005. I have performed hundreds of auctions - both in person and online - during that time. I've sold millions of dollars of real merchandise, actual commodities that people can own, not 1's and 0's on a server.
I bought my first video game console in 1989, when I was 6 years old, using my own allowance, and my second system in 1993, with money I raised myself by walking around my neighborhood and offering to paint people's home addresses on their curbs for $5 apiece. I am a gamer. I currently own more than 10 video game consoles including an NES, SNES, N64, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, Playstation,
Playstation 2, GameCube, XBox, Xbox 360 (all of which I use regularly). I custom built my own gaming PC - it has more than 1 TB of hard disk space, 12 gigabytes of RAM, an intel core i7 quad core processor, an nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti graphics card with 1 GB of dedicated video RAM, dual 20" HD monitors, a snazzy clear sided case, and a Corsair Liquid Cooling system.
My shit is hardcore.
I've been playing video games since I was able to pick up a controller. I own hundreds of them. As far as other "geek" cred goes, I'm a comic book collector and a bit of a comic book expert - having set more than 600 world records on the high sale prices of vintage comic books. I placed 50th in the world during the 2007 Magic: The Gathering Legacy World Championship Tournament. I have spent more than $2,000 on building a couple of Warhammer 40,000 army (click the link, its basically like grown men playing with sci-fi themed army men that you have to build and paint yourself - yes, it IS that sad. But fun). I have a 4 year long running discussion/argument going with one of my best friends about the nature of timeline theory as it applies to the Terminator movie franchise - this same friend and I starting writing a plot treatment for a 5th Terminator movie about a year ago. I spend my vacations attending various comic book and gaming conventions across the Midwest. I've memorized entire seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I have a level 36 Cyborg Bounty Hunter on Star Wars: The Old Republic. I had (I've since quit playing) a level 80 Gnome Rogue on World of Warcraft. I have played, still play, and am intimately familiar with more video games, board games, and role playing games than you are probably aware even exist. I am a geek's geek, a nerd's nerd.
In summation: I'm qualified to fully review this game on both its merits as a video game, as well as its relationship to the Auction industry.
Auction Plums is a social networking game, in the same vein as Zynga's Farmville, or many of the other games whose main form of marketing themselves is in the continuous stream of "achievement" posts they pump out onto the Facebook timelines of those who play them, drowning your Facebook home page in constant reminders that Suzy wants you to come see the sheep at her Farm in Farmville. These are the types of games that have only recently come to prominence in the realm of video games, being simplistic in their graphical requirements, and offering little in the way of depth or immersion. These games are basically the late 2000's and 2010's version of Solitaire or Minesweeper - contradictory by nature as they exist primarily as a means to kill time while you are already killing time by browsing Facebook.
That being said, I feel I should reiterate that Auction Plums is still in Alpha - there are features that are not yet usable in the game, which could improve it once implemented. I'll cover this in a bit.
The main attraction to games of this nature, is that they exist in nearly every iteration as a form of a neverending, but simplistic and easy grind - you end up repeating the same actions ad infinitum, generating a small cumulative return (making your farm look nicer, accumulating points, etc.). The better variants of this genre tend to exhibit a puzzle nature, or other form of simple yet addictive gameplay elements - for example, Angry Birds is a VERY simple game, combining the concept of gravity based combat originally appearing in games as far back as 1962's Spacewar! with a semi destructible environment, and a very simple narrative of the "rescue the kidnapped X" genre. Simple games, simply put, are not bad things in and of themselves - they have the added benefit of a shallow learning curve, granting them a certain ease of access to the public. However, in order for a game of this type to work best, it needs to have an addictive quality to it's gameplay - something which Auction Plums is sorely lacking. Stated succinctly, the entirety of the "game" portion of Auction Plums revolves around visiting the virtual Auction House, selecting an item from the catalog, and participating in a virtual auction for that item, where instead of having a pre-recording auction chant, the current bid is simply displayed on the screen in the form of a modified speech bubble emanating from the games auctioneer, Betty Botter. During the bidding process, resources appear on the screen in the form of clickable rewards - BidderBux, Energy, and Plums - the BidderBux are your currency for paying for the items, the energy is expended every time you enter a bid, and the plums are basically a graphical representation of experience points you collect in order to progress to the next level...a concept that this game wholly refuses to flush out in any kind of sensible manner (more on that in a minute). So far, this all seems fine...until you play one or two of the lots through, and realize that by bidding on the lot, you end up recouping a large amount of BBX. This is a serious departure from how ANY real life auction happens - typically when you purchase an item at an auction as a bidder, you spend money, you don't experience a net gain in your wallet (I feel like we'd probably have a few more regular bidders at our auctions if by bidding on an item, $20 bills just kind of appeared out of thin air, waiting to be scooped up from the floor). If this is meant to be an example of you purchasing these items & then re-selling them via an alternate venue at a profit, then that's fine...but it clearly isn't the case as the game itself shows, all the items you purchase are stored at your estate, where they are showcased in various buildings (house, barn, shed, etc.). As your in game character accumulates more and more value in the items they purchase through the Plum Junction auction house, your estate gets nicer and nicer looking - your trailer home becomes a doublewide for example. If you are keeping all the items you purchase, what exactly is the BBX that springs into existence at the end of the sale of EVERY item supposed to represent? I would strongly recommend that the Beta version of this game needs to include a couple of venues for reselling items your character has purchased in the auction house, in order to better showcase what an auction in the real world is actually like.
More importantly, after playing through a few lots in the auction house, it will become readily apparent that the truly important resource is Energy - required to place every bid, and the only way to replenish it is to either spend real money in the real world on more of it, wait for it to recharge slowly over time, or to recruit new players from your friends list on Facebook. This kind of tactic, recruiting the player to spread the game in exchange for an in-game reward, is a staple of modern browser based games, and in a large part is responsible for the barrage of spamming non-players receive when they log into their Facebook accounts. Not that this has been a major problem for Auction Plums as of yet, I'm speaking here in general terms about this genre of game.
A little note about the plums and leveling. For those of you reading this after looking at the post I put up on the Auctioneer forum on Facebook (most of you reading this, I expect) I'm assuming you don't have a good amount of familiarity with modern gaming. The concept of levels and leveling I'm referring to here is NOT the traditional "Mario beat level 1, on to level 2" type of thing. This doesn't involve a change of scenery in the game, or a new location being unlocked, or anything of that nature. In this instance, the "levels" appear to be intended to be used in much the same way as levels are used in a role playing game - increasing your level makes your character stronger in some fashion (typically through increased health, increased damage, increased resources, or new abilities). This is poorly implemented in Auction Plums. What this game needs is a clearer sense of growth potential for these levels, in order to grant motivation to its players to keep playing the game (aside from getting out of that doublewide and into a ranch). Benchmarks, or unlockable abilities (for example, quicker regeneration time on energy, or maybe a once per day usable ability to "sneak" a bid in so the other computer generated auction participants don't know who bid, causing them to be confused and delaying their response time to bid themselves by a few seconds). Little improvements in this area would go a long way toward making this into an actual game, as opposed to the current snoozefest it is.
The main screen of the game shows the Plum Junction town square...er...town circle? Whatever. In it there are 4 buildings - the Auction House, the Proxibid Auction Showcase (coming soon!), the Town Hall (coming soon!), and Price Finders (coming soon!). As you've probably already figured out, only the Auction Hall works. Since there isn't any written information provided about these other three game locations in the games help file, I'm going to have to make educated guesses as to what they will eventually become once this game moves from Alpha to Beta to Actually a Damn Game that People will Play.
The Proxibid Auction Showcase sounds to me as if it will likely be a portal showing current and recent listings of items sold in real auctions on Proxibid.
Town Hall seems likely to be a place to meet with and interact with the avatars of other people playing Auction Plums.
Price Finders seems like it will function as a search engine for real world auction results for real world auctions...which would be somewhat impressive if the people at Real Plums can bring it to fruition (something I don't see as being very likely - the real world resources necessary to make this a fully fleshed out real time database of prices realized means that it will have to by its very nature either have an extremely limited scope on what it holds pricing information on, or it will become an ENORMOUS time sink for the poor sap tasked with maintaining accurate records for anything and everything sold at auction anywhere all the time).
Last, and least, I want to touch on the graphical qualities of this game. As a Facebook browser based game, the graphics are pretty much exactly what you would and should expect - cartoony, cutesy, super-deformed characters with giant heads. Nothing much to look at, but nothing much to complain about either. I guess my biggest issue is that I think Betty Botters' gavel-rimmed eyeglasses are kind of stupid, but whatever, that's just my opinion. Not a huge problem. The only other thing I can think of that needs to be included, is the ability to customize your own avatars appearance in the game. 'Nuff said.
The thing, as an Auctioneer, that I think we need to focus on in relation to this game, is that it will by its very nature, act as many people's first interaction with the Auction Industry - much in the same way as Auction based reality tv shows. It is not necessarily up to the task. I feel that with some refinement, and addition of some of the things I mentioned in the review, it would do a much better job of both simulating a true virtual auction environment, as well as stimulating players into actually wanting to continue playing for more than 5 minutes. Auction Plums is far from the worst game ever but it could use some upgrading.
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