Hi,

A few months ago a very cool events took place. Some of the players were able to make auction on LoTR heroes, and have to construct a deck with what they got in the end.You can find it here:

Since Seastan doesn't want to make another one for the moment I choose to do so. Since I'm on command I want to discuss with you the rules when can use before starting the inscription.

Here is the rules set I want you to comment:

1- We need to be at least 10, and it can't have more that 43 people who subscribe.
2- I will pick at random (2x the number of registration players) heroes. This is the pool of heroes*.
3- Each of those hero start with their printed threat-3 Bid. (For example it is 3 for Pippin or 6 for Eowyn).
4- Every player on the list can make additional bid using the following system:
a- To bid you need to select a hero and say a higher number than the previous bid.
b- You can only lead the bid on three heroes. If no one make higher bids you are stick with those heroes!
c- When the auction if finished you will have won all the heroes where you have the higher bid. You're initial threat will be the sum of all of them and you can how many of them you want (you can have 3 heroes but still play strider, but you will suffer the threat of the 3rd hero).
5- There will be here a full resume of all the actual higher bids
6- You can subscribe for multiple slots if you intent to play in multiplayer with the selected heroes. If you do you will have to tell how many people you "are" and you will have the possibility to bid for up to 6, 9 or 12 depending of the answer. Then you can split heroes among all your players.
7- When we will have a full week without any bids the auction will be officially ended and you can start building.
8- Then you will have to play against some adventures. Some ask not to reveal names of those before the end of the auction. So I will only choose and reveal them later. You can either play easy mode, normal or nightmare ;).
9- Optional additional building rule: you can't use any cards from the packs where you heroes are (only from the sphere of the hero if it is the core set)

*Only 2 heroes because I think there will be defection, it may have people who want to build strider deck and I want real competition for the listed heroes. I still can add heroes if we see a major problem. As opposite if I put too many heroes it will be too late to change: we can only remove the one that no one picked.

Now I want to have your feedback about this. Especially @Seastan

I'll agree dropout is a problem, since a wealth of unclaimed heroes undercuts the bidding process. OTOH, too few heroes and a bidding shortage would be frustrating (I don't much want to be in a hero auction where the heroes are generally overpriced), especially if waiting for more heroes to be added would allow them to be grabbed at a better price.

So what's the alternatives, given that dropouts are expected? How about this method:

1) Start with 3x (6x for two-handed, 2x for strider) heroes -- but start with them all *randomly assigned* at Threat - 3 to actual players. That way, all the heroes start claimed.

2) For bidding, you increase the threat over the current holder for a hero *and* release a hero you own to the previous holder at its current threat cost. So if I start with (random) Dori/Elrond/LeEomer, I can bid on TaEowyn and give the current owner Dori in her place (at his current threat). Then someone can outbid me for TaEowyn and give me the hero they don't want.

I think this would drive bidding without having either a wealth of unclaimed heroes or a situation where the heroes become dramatically overpriced.

Other suggestion -- please don't do Blood of Gondor. I hate that quest.

Edit -- never mind, I was thinking of Morgul Vale.

I'd still avoid Blood of Gondor simply because it uses Battle questing, though. Unless you want the bidding driven by the foreknowledge of the quest.

/in

I found the auction very difficult to manage in terms of the number of heroes to make available. Release too many and most heroes will only get one bid and people will get crazy discounts, release too few and people are incentivized to just wait until more heroes eventually get added. I like @dalestephenson's solution to this quite a bit. You still do need to incentivize earlier bidding in some way though. I tried to do this by offering to lock in the bid on heroes that have stopped getting bids, but maybe there is a better solution to this.

Blood of gondor is only a battle during stage 2, and it make a big difference since, as usually, you start with many cards and have to first clean to pass the stage 1. But I understand what you say, it could make more need of battle hero. I can simply swap between mandatory and optional quests. Do you prefer deadmen's pike?

I see that bid start at one threat on the other thread. I think that lead to tons of unnecessary bids. That why I start with 3 threat. Threat -3 seem a better start. I will thinking about it today to see if I see any problem, if I don't I will edit the rules tonight.

The rules says that you can't make any bid if you already hold 3 heroes. So it is either this rules or "when you make a bid you give one of you heroes to the player you bid over". I see three solutions:

1- I delete the original rule;

2- I keep the original rules so this one can work

3- I make a distinction between heroes gained by bid (that can't be replaced by a new hero) and hero released by someone (that you can give to someone when you gain a new hero). It make rules more complicated for making a list of hero potentially more clear, but it is not even sure.

But, this don't have anything to do with the number of heroes released. It doesn't change how many heroes are available, how much you have to bid to have them. See how many people will join but not participating in the bid process is essential to know how many heroes I must give. If I want that all the heroes are played (that my intent) give 2 heroes per player can make for each 4 players: 1 who drop, 1 who play strider and 2 who plays 3 heroes. It seem realistic to me, don't you think? Seastan have you any data on the first auction.

Give 3 heroes per players, and/or force player to announce if they play strider (with tension over heroes I expect to people choose to play strider because a 3rd hero will be overpriced, not because it was their initial intent). But I don't see if there is a need to put tension to make every heroes have to be picked (that I will prefer for sure, but I want a good solution for everyone, not just me) or if make people to get more choice is not that bad since they still have to make complicate deckbuilding with the heroes avaible. That is why I need feedback from people who already do that. If I put 2.5 heroes per players on the stack I will probably be enough, 3 is only great in a world were everyone can do as they want, so play if they register. And many years at organizing things show me that you have to anticipate because everyone can have trouble in their life.

No matter what it will not be interesting to wait until new heroes were released because at 99% this not gonna happen. Choosing between 2, 2.5 or 3 heroes per players is more a matter of how many tension do you want over heroes. And, again, I want your opinion about that :).

The point of my scheme (which I'll admit is more White Elephant than silent auction) is that the number of heroes available matches the number theoretically wanted, and new heroes are added only if new players are wanted. Because non-participating players also claim heroes (by initial assignment) there's no pool of unclaimed heroes, and if the non-participants are raided for their heroes they'll naturally end up with less attractive heroes. Because there will be no extra heroes without extra participants, there's no incentive to wait for new heroes to be released.

Now a promise to not release new heroes *at all* even if it's clear that there aren't enough heroes does remove any incentive to wait -- however, I think it may reduce incentive to participate, even for people who have already bid. Speaking for myself only, trying to make some unusual polyglot hero combo work at a substantial threat discount sounds way more fun than being forced into a Strider deck because I'm paying significantly more than threat for the two heroes I have. If I'm running a Strider deck, I want to do it in secrecy, and if my options are a 28-threat strider deck or a 40-threat 3-hero deck, I would be sorely tempted to just bag it.

Still, if my sentiment is common I'd naturally expect people to be more content with their great deals than to start bidding wars, and in that respect the White Elephant bidding might be fairly static. (I've seen this behavior in real White Elephant parties as well, where most people keep their initial gifts rather than steal.) How to incent people to steal, and thus make the auction more interesting?

How about this -- for each initially assigned hero you keep, raise your threat by 2. This means that keeping your original three would only get a 3-point threat discount, while if you replaced your initial heroes completely and weren't outbid for them, you would get a 6-point threat discount. Give people an incentive to steal, and they will steal. (You could alter these numbers somewhat, and starting at Threat - 3 with this rule would result in a maximum discount of Threat - 2, which may not be as fun as having the chance at a Threat - 3 hero. Perhaps have the initial hero at Threat - 4 instead, since the effective floor would then be Threat - 3 ?)

Which quests to play is a separate issue than the bidding mechanism, and knowing the (potential) quests in advance could inform the bidding -- this could be good or bad depending on your point of view. My preference would be to defer the choice of quests until the bidding is done, and give two options for each quest.

Just now, dalestephenson said:

How about this -- for each initially assigned hero you keep, raise your threat by 2. This means that keeping your original three would only get a 3-point threat discount, while if you replaced your initial heroes completely and weren't outbid for them, you would get a 6-point threat discount. Give people an incentive to steal, and they will steal. (You could alter these numbers somewhat, and starting at Threat - 3 with this rule would result in a maximum discount of Threat - 2, which may not be as fun as having the chance at a Threat - 3 hero. Perhaps have the initial hero at Threat - 4 instead, since the effective floor would then be Threat - 3 ?)

After posting this, I realized that the effective floor would *not* be Threat - 2, since you could get stuck with someone else's unwanted hero at its original Threat - 3.

I'm against Blood of Gondor because the Hidden cards mechanic can be too randomly swingy. If different questing modes are an issue though, in addition to stage 2 being Battle, it starts as a Siege quest until you explore the Crossroads, so I'd view that as another pretty solid reason to avoid it.

I don't know the white elephant you speak about and when I look for it I lost one hour of my time on wikipedia speaking about buildings that was never really functional ^^.

There is no fundamental difference between giving initial heroes to everybody or to let them in the floor. Giving 3 heroes per players means there will be more heroes than players. So anyone can make a large selection. And probably end with, like the last time, 90% of the heroes with a lower threat than their initial amount (including you with a 9 threat Boromir, like playing Boromir wasn't easy enough ^^). To me there was clearly not enough pressure on the bids. I sure don't want to be in the excess you show when all the heroes become completely overpriced. I'm looking for something in the middle and what you suggest seem to lead to the same situation, don't you think?

I change the scenario for Deadmen's pike and go to an initial threat of each hero of "printed threat -3" (and to me Mirlonde or TaEowyn abilities will still work, it changed the printed value of the hero).

I would like to participate in this but I'd second Dale's suggestion of waiting until later to choose / reveal the quests. The reason I say that is because seeing both The Siege of Cair Andros and Deadmens' Dike on the list is putting me off a bit. Plus, Siege of Cair Andros (at least on normal mode) represents a bit of crapshoot for what would hopefully be some very interesting and unusual hero lineups.

Love the idea though and thank you for running it.

Another idea; the Hero pool starts with x heroes, with x beeing the number of players. When you bid successfully on your first and second Hero, add one hero (of your choise) to the card pool. All starting heroes have 3 threat, the first a person adds have 5 threat and the last one have 7 threat. You cannot bid on a Hero you have added.

14 hours ago, Rouxxor said:

I don't know the white elephant you speak about and when I look for it I lost one hour of my time on wikipedia speaking about buildings that was never really functional ^^.

There is no fundamental difference between giving initial heroes to everybody or to let them in the floor. Giving 3 heroes per players means there will be more heroes than players. So anyone can make a large selection. And probably end with, like the last time, 90% of the heroes with a lower threat than their initial amount (including you with a 9 threat Boromir, like playing Boromir wasn't easy enough ^^). To me there was clearly not enough pressure on the bids. I sure don't want to be in the excess you show when all the heroes become completely overpriced. I'm looking for something in the middle and what you suggest seem to lead to the same situation, don't you think?

I change the scenario for Deadmen's pike and go to an initial threat of each hero of "printed threat -3" (and to me Mirlonde or TaEowyn abilities will still work, it changed the printed value of the hero).

Sorry, I should've explained the White Elephant party. It works like this:

Everyone brings a wrapped present to a party -- ideally, the gift should be both unusual and useless. (For the most recent one my kids went to, one of the gifts they brought was a thrift-store unicycle). The first person selected picks a gift and opens it. Each subsequent person has a choice -- either open a new gift, or steal a gift from someone who has already opened a present. If they steal a gift, the person they stole from then has the choice of either stealing a gift or opening a new present. The game ends when everyone has a present. The two rules that keep the game from going on forever are that you can't steal a present back that was just stolen from you, and once a gift has been stolen three times, it can no longer be stolen.

The essential feature I was trying to borrow from it is that everyone gets a gift whether they choose to steal a gift or not. Since predicting the actual activity rate of interested players is impossible, I was trying to think of a structural method that works to mitigate the effect of non-bidding players. Modifying the White Elephant concept by giving everyone gifts up front, and turning the "steal" into a swap, is the best idea I can think of.

Is there a practical difference between this and starting with a similar-sized pool of unclaimed heroes? I think so, which is why I suggested it. In the original, if outbid for a hero you held, you could instead pick an unclaimed hero knowing that no one was competing for it. In the White Elephant scenario there are no unclaimed heroes, so you have no way of knowing which heroes no one is going to compete for -- or which players aren't actually participating. A player who doesn't participate in the auction *doesn't* leave unclaimed heroes obviously available, he's indistinguishable from someone who is content either with his initial heroes or the ones he subsequently gets stuck with. With an incentive to steal (or at least an incentive to lose your original heroes), there will certainly be activity.

Will there be enough activity to drive threat past original values when there are enough heroes for everyone to play? I rather doubt it. But as I said before, I see a significant threat discount as an *attraction* of the auction, not a problem with the auction. Getting TaBoromir for 9 threat is a bargain, but I bid on Boromir precisely because he was a bargain -- if someone outbid me for him, I certainly would have gone for a different tactics hero. As overpowered as Boromir can be, in my mono-tactics deck with TaTheoden and Dori he wasn't overpowered; even starting at 23 threat my deck struggled with Stewards Fear and Wastes of Eriador, at 33 threat it would've been no fun at all. I don't see the point of the hero auction to determine what threat should be in a free market for heroes; I see it as a fun game to end up with "bargain" heroes, so while I think there should be incentive to create bids, I don't think it's actually necessary to create bidding wars driving threat past original levels.

IMO, if you have so few heroes that bidding pressure will not allow *most* heroes to remain below threat, you have too few heroes available in the first place -- and more to the point, there's absolutely no way to figure out where the "sweet spot" is to set the size of the initial pool to get your desired behavior. If you rule out adding heroes, you risk the initial pool being too small without being able to guarantee it's not too large -- if you allow adding heroes "if needed" you incent waiting for the new bargains instead of overbidding on the ones that exist. While non-participants are guaranteed, the *rate* of non-participation, which is the key bit of information for the pool, is *not* guaranteed and *cannot* be predicted in advance. But I predict that participation will go up if the bidding is perceived as "fun", and predict that participation will go down if the bidding is perceived as punishing. The idea that players who wanted to run a one-handed solo deck may voluntarily drop down to a Strider deck because of bidding pressure worries me.

Still, you may be more interested in the auction determining relative worth of heroes than in a mechanism for creating under-threated decks. In that case, here's an alternate suggestion that may work better:

Give players a fixed budget of "hero dollars", say $10 for each hero they desire. This is all the money they have, they cannot spend more. *And no matter what they spend to acquire a hero it does not affect their deck's starting threat*. Provide a large enough hero pool for all desired heroes, so that even if everyone plays (unlikely as that may be), there will be enough for everyone. Because there's no threat discount, there's no longer an incentive to entirely bid on unclaimed heroes instead of heroes you like better that are already claimed -- and because the pool of money to spend on getting the hero is both fixed and useless outside the auction, there's an incentive to use your entire budget while bidding.

In short, I think there's no way to predict the level of non-participation accurately enough to have the initial pool be the "right size" for bidding to have the desired properties. The remedy has to be structural and adaptable to varying levels of non-participation -- and to function even in the face of 100% participation. Providing 67% of the desired heroes or 83% of the desired heroes isn't guaranteed to do that, either choice could be too large or too small for the behavior you want.

Here's another possibility if you want to retain the "feel" of the original auction while trying to guard against too many heroes -- start with too few and promise more heroes to be released -- at a lower discount. Something like this:

1) Release *one* hero per hand (players register as one-handed or two-handed players) at a -4 threat discount. Players bid on these heroes until the bids die down, and with so few heroes available most teams will not be fully formed.

2) Release a second group of heroes, *one* hero for every hand with < 3 heroes who bid in the previous round, at a -3 threat discount. Again, players bid on heroes (not restricted to new additions) until bids die down, and again there will not be heroes available for all teams.

3) Release enough heroes to fill hands of players with <3 heroes who bid in the previous round, at a -2 threat discount. Players bid on all heroes until the auction is done.

Here's another idea which I think would make things simpler. You add a reward for bidding into the rules.

Release a list of 3X heroes, where X is the number of players (subtract heroes for people who announce beforehand that they are building a Strider deck.

1. Each hero starts at 3 threat.

2. You can only be the top bidder for 3 heroes at a time.

3. At the end of the bidding, the player who made the most bids gets an additional -2 starting threat and is allowed to start with 1 bonus resource on the hero of their choice.

4. The next 3 players with the most bids get to start with an additional -2 starting threat.

5. The next 3 players with the most bids get to start with an additional -1 starting threat.

The specifics could be played around with a little, but by incentivizing bidding in this way, you add an extra interesting layer of strategy to the bidding process. For example, you may see Fatty for 3 threat and think you could just bid 4 for him and no one would outbid you. However, if no one ever outbids you, you are limiting how many total bids you can make. Instead you want to bid on "the best deals" which would be heroes you consider really undervalued so that you will be outbid again. And with a reward for frequent bidding, I think the whole process will be much more active.

1- @dalestephenson & @Mr_Underhill For the scenario I see people who wait to know it only after, and no one who seem to know it in advance. So I remove it and will rethink about it later so it will probably change.

2- @dalestephenson & @Seastan & @DurinVoronwe Thanks to add content to the debate about how many heroes. Your idea for putting heroes and/or select them may upgrade a little bit the process but also make it way more complicate that a common auction (as we see in a auction sale). Simplicity is, at me, also a real good way to make it work. It could be dissuasive to have a complicate process. As in board game if someone don't understand well the rules it can make it a bad experience for him and others since he have to interact with them. Since I haven't see a rule who, as my eye, really solve the problem I prefer to stay with simplicity. But if someone want to talk further about his solution we can argue further :).

3- I have thought about a real simple solution: everyone who subscribe choose if he add 2 or 3 heroes to the pool, no matter how many heroes he want to play at the end. So everyone have a little choice about how many tension there will be in the auction. As I read you I have the feeling that most people will choose 3 heroes so it will most about select heroes with a small discount (not too big since we start at -3 only so it only can be a -6 for all your heroes), who it fine. Do you also think that this simple solution a good compromise?

4- If we don't agree on another simple solution I propose to go with 3 heroes per person. Get a maximum of -2 threat reduction per hero can be enough.

I like Seastan's goal of promoting bidding, but agree with Rouxxor that simplicity is better. My main complaint from the original auction was that adding heroes completely deflated it for me, so I agree that we need to lock the number of heroes at the beginning. These would be my suggested rules:

1) Randomly assign each person 3 heroes at -4 threat. These are the "starter heroes". You have no obligation to keep these heroes. When you make your initial bids, you have to declare which starter hero you are replacing. Those heroes become unassigned and can be bid on at -3 threat. No late entries will be permitting, so no new heroes will be added.

2) You can then bid on any heroes, starting at -3 threat. Any bids becomes your "active heroes" and you can only have 3 active heroes at a time (i.e., you are committed to them unless someone outbids you).

3) If nobody bids on any of a person's heroes for 3 days, they lock in all 3 of their heroes.

4) If a player does not make a bid within the first week, they are dropped from the auction. Any starter heroes that are still assigned to that person are removed from the pool. If someone has already bid on that person's starter heroes, then a random unassigned hero will be dropped instead such that there is still exactly 3 per person.

5) Determine the quests either after all bidding is complete, or gradually throughout the auction (i.e. announce 1 quest per week so people that are done can get started on playing)

These rules accomplish what, imo, should be the goals of the auction. It maintains exactly 3 heroes per person for a nice, tight, auction. No new heroes are added, so you can plan ahead. Heroes lock after 3 days of no bidding on your heroes, so there is incentive to bid early and get deals. And overall it is fairly simple. Thoughts?