Wrap Up Post

[aat_mod]

Wrap Up Post

Hello, everyone! We’ve dug into the responses that you’ve left us on the screened feedback post (link). Thank you to everyone who responded! This is an atypical kind of fandom event, so we were glad to hear about what worked for you and what you enjoyed, and appreciated the feedback about what didn’t work out as planned. This post is the overview of these suggestions. It focuses on what worked and what could have been improved. If anyone out there is inspired to run their own round of auctions, we hope this post may help you figure out how you’d like to structure your own event!

Before we dig into specific feedback, we’ll get the one question that’s been burning in everyone’s minds out of the way. We may run Auctions, As Threatened again. No promises, but there may be a next time! The earliest we were thinking of doing so is 2027. If we decide to do another round, we’ll announce the next round on this Dreamwidth comm, on our Discord, and via fandom calendar.

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This post will be long, so head on over to the post page if you'd like to use this handy index to explore:

(Editor's Note: If you can read this without opening a cut tag, you are on the post page.)

Stats!

Feedback From Mods
What the Bot Did
If you do not have a bot
If you do have a bot

What Worked
The Setup: DW & Discord
The Auction Rules
AuctionBot
Crimes

Suggestions For Changes
Signup Flow, Interest Check & Scheduling
Bidding & General Auctions
Crime in general
Organized Crime
Penny Auctions

What We Might Do Next Time
Easy Changes
New Bot Features
Server Engagement

Conclusion

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And now, onto our feedback!

Stats!

With the help of auctionbot, we have a bunch of stats for you to view! The stats sheet is split up into these tabs:

• Totals — Total numbers and averages of things like works, explicit works, and so on.
• Creators in Orders — Displays various categories from person who made the most wordcount/equivalent to the least.
• By Creator — Displays various categories with creators listed in alphabetical order.
• Registration — Shows how many people registered with auctionbot each day.
• Auctions — Data about auctions, like winning bids and max number of wins.
• Crimes — Data about crime, like how much crime was done each day
• Roles — Lists all special server roles.
• Mod Convictions — Lists all mod convictions in the order they were made.

Click here to view the stats sheet!

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Feedback From the Mods

Auctions As Threatened was incredible! Two of our mods had helped run We Die Like Fen: Nothing But Auctions Edition:™, and even then we didn’t quite know how this event would unfold. The mod consensus is: this event worked because karanguni coded a bot.

This event could not have existed in the form that it did without AuctionBot to keep track of bids, auctions, reminders, schedules, totals owed, assignments, auction wins. The bot made auctions run so much more smoothly than anticipated. We expected a LOT of things to break, or require manual intervention. And in the end, the bot basically did all of the things.

We used a total of 3 bots: Ticket Tool (link) to handle mod concerns on the server, Carlbot (link) to let participants grab roles, and k’s custom bot, AuctionBot, to handle all of the auction and assignment functions.

What Auctionbot did

Scheduled the main auctions.

• An auction schedule was provided to AuctionBot.
• AuctionBot posted lists of upcoming auctions every 12 hours.
• 15 minutes before the auction began, AuctionBot created new channels for each auction.
• Details for the person’s auction were provided by AuctionBot, including username, fandoms requested, mediums requested, link to karaguni’s autoapp (link) and general bidding instructions.
• Announced beginning of bidding.
• Sent out reminders to a pingable role for each auction’s start.
• Announced Bids as they were placed to the server.
• Told participants via visible-to-only-you message in the auction channel if your bid was not accepted. Reasons for a bid not being accepted were:
• Your bid was too low. (A minimum bid had to be either the opening minimum of 500 words, or 50 words above the previous high bid).
• Your bid was too high. (Bids were capped at a maximum of 500 words above the previous bid)
• You were bidding against yourself.
• You had already hit the word count cap of owed words in auctions that had already finished (cap was set at 10k).
• There was another error that stopped your bid from being registered.
• Announced the winner when the auction was over.
• Moved the channel down into an archive area once the auction was complete.
• Recorded win information in the mod google sheet to track assignments.

Image Caption: auctionbot announces a new auction!

Offered Reminder functions

• Once all auctions were scheduled, you could use the bot to be reminded of the start of specific auctions.

Tracked Assignments via DM

• auctionbot DMed you when you won an auction or received a split_win assignment.
• Scraped the AO3 collection and then posted scrape notifications to Discord.
• Scrapes of AO3 would register the participant’s updated wordcount owed.
• Note: auctionbot could not see the wordcount of mediums other than fic, so after a mod reviewed the scraped works every few days, works that weren’t fic received a revised wordcount total.
• Kept track of defaults. Participants could default on partial wordcounts, or their full amount.
• You could see your assignments and the works fulfilling your assignments at any time by using the bot command /my_wins and the works you submitted with /my_works.

Scheduled the first round of penny auctions (defaults & no bids)

• A penny auction schedule was provided to auctionbot
• auctionbot posted lists of upcoming auctions every 12 hours.
• auctionbot moved channels back up into the active zone
• auctionbot announced the auctions, announced the opening of bidding, kept track of the bidding, and announced a winner as before.
• Minimum and maximum bid increments were set low to encourage low-stakes bidding.

Created penny auctions automatically during the All Penny Auctions All The Time Phase

• A participant defaulting on any amount of wordcount for an assignment would immediately trigger a penny auction starting.
• Participants were encouraged to default on 1 word of an assignment to create more penny auctions.
• No Upcoming Auction lists for this phase of auctions.
• auctionbot would move the auction back up into the active zone.
• auctionbot announced the auctions, announced the opening of bidding, kept track of the bidding, and announced a winner as before.
• Minimum and maximum bid increments were set low to encourage low-stakes bidding.

Tracked a silly stat.

• Our silly stat for this event was “Crimes”.
• You could DM the auctionbot and receive a number of crimes you’d done, as well as a list of crimes you’d committed.
• Mods could use a command to list a leaderboard of the top crime-doers.

Detailed List of Bot Commands & Instructions to Participants

Here are the auctionbot instructions that participants were provided. This list omits some mod- and minion-only commands–which were used to do stuff like get a list of a user’s complete crimes or wins, run unscheduled scrapes, and pardon or assign crimes.

Participant Bot Guide

The auctionbot is here to help run auctions and give you information about your wins/assignments and works!

Note: Bot DMs

While you do not need to be open to DMs to bid on/win auctions, the @auctionbot bot will need to be able to DM you to give you other types of information, such as your list of wins, crimes, and assignments.

Registering

You need to register your exact AO3 username with the bot in order to participate in auctions. Use the /register command anywhere in the server. Your AO3 username will be publicly printed out at times. If you need to have multiple usernames associated with your works, please email us at auctionsasthreatened@gmail.com (don't open a ticket please!).

If you change your AO3 username during this event, you can update your registration with /change_registration This will change everything under your old username to your new username

Auctions

The bot will announce all upcoming auctions for the next 12 hours in #⁠auction_bot_announcements.

15 minutes before each auction, a new channel will be created called USERNAME_auction. The bot will tell you who is being auctioned, link to their requests in the app, and give you other logistical details. You can chat in the channel but not bid at this point.

You can get the role @auction notifications to be pinged when auctions start in all auction channels. You can get individual reminders for auctions using /remind, providing the user you want to be reminded for. You can use /list_reminders to see what reminders you have set up.

When auctions open, you can bid using /bid. Your bid must be equal or higher to the minimum bid to start, and then at least the minimum increment afterwards. Bids are capped at 500 words more than the previous bid. You cannot bid over yourself. If you owe more than 10,000 words (less works you have posted), you cannot bid.

Since many people can be bidding at once, bids are put on a queue. Due to the magic of the internet needing to actually go through physical cables, you might get just barely outbid by someone in front of you. You will be told when this happens.

You can use /endtime in the channel to get the end time of the auction. You can use /minimum to get the minimum next bid.

You can check the status of all of your bids using /my_bids

When auctions finish, the winner will be pinged in the channel and also DMed. You can check your wins (and other assignments!) using /my_wins, which will be DMed to you.

Finished auctions have their channel put in an Archived Auctions category.

Bot Commands

You can use these commands in the server and in DMs to @auctionbot. It's probably easiest to use the bot DMs!

/my_bids
Responds to the command telling you what active bids you have, and whether you're the highest bidder for that auction.

/my_wins
DMs you what wins and open assignments you have. What you see here is what the mods expect you will be creating works for.

/my_works
DMs you what works you have posted to AO3, their status, and the wordcount equivalent the work has been assigned (if any) by the mods. This data will not always be up to date, as we scrape AO3 only irregularly and mods do not instantly update wordcount equivalents.

If you've registered a sock then /my_works will show your sock's works too once the works are approved.

/my_crimes
DMs you a list of your crimes. You criminal.

/default
If you need to default on an assignment, use this command. You can use /my_wins first to check out what assignments you have. Provide the username of the person you want to default on, and how much wordcount you want to default. Partial defaults are okay! You can use /my_wins after defaulting to double check that everything went through okay.

/split_win
Gasp! Crime Bee snuck in a command! This is used for organized crime, if you're some kind of ne'er-do-well.

(Note that using this to send wordcount to someone who doesn't want it is really against the rules—get permission from the people you're sending wordcount to!)

/remind
DMs you a reminder for the auction of a specific user. Reminders default to 5 minutes before the auction starts, but you can enter a custom number of minutes using an optional field.

/minimum
Use this in an auction channel to check what the current minimum bid is.

/endtime
Use this in an auction channel to check when the auction ends.

If you do not have a bot

If you are interested in running your own auction event, and do not have a bot, the best suggestions we can give are:

• Have a large mod team. Have 2 or more mods per ten people signed up to oversee and track auction posting and bids. The We Die Like Fen auctions event (which did not have a bot) had 7 mods acting as auctioneers for about 55 creators, and that wasn’t enough–we ended that event exhausted and it took 5 years for a version of the event to run again, despite us running it while freshly trapped inside in April 2020. 3 or 4 more mods to help with auctions and data entry would have been really great.
• You may need to advertise your event more than expected. Auctions aren’t as common as other fan events, so you may need to get word out about your event earlier than you might for an exchange.
• Participant caps may help your team not be overwhelmed. If interest in the event is high, you may consider limiting participant numbers to something you can manage with your mod team size.
• Make sure participants know what rule-breaking behavior is so they don’t engage in auction-breaking behavior by accident.
• Consider not having word count caps for participants. You might not be able to track participant word caps in real time, or miss someone who has gone over them.
• Use a spreadsheet to track participant assignments. The bot kept track of assignments for us, but you'll have to do it by hand and you'll have to do it live as auctions finish up. This is, by the way, why you need so many mods: to manually run the auction, to call the winner, to announce the winner, to manually send the winner's assignment, to manually do the data entry to put the winner's assignment into the sheet...the sheet they will then have to refer back to when participants need help remembering what assignments they have.

If you do have a bot

If you do have a bot, many of AAT’s basic auction set-up rules were well-received, and you could use this event’s rules as a template to run a successful auction. We would advise any bright-eyed potential auction runners to look out for these things:

• AAT was VERY set-up heavy. The majority of our work was done prior to the start of the event. Fence started writing the event rules and documentation 12-14 months before the event opened.
• Get your mod team ready ASAP. This event was in the planning stage for about a year, but the main phase of work took about two months prior to the event opening for signups.
• Be prepared to give the event more attention than other kinds of fandom events. Auctions are more work-intensive than running even a very complex exchange like FIAB, especially because they need active Discord server moderation in addition to the core event mechanics. Keeping track of and responding to participant behavior is very important to keep the event running smoothly and requires daily interaction with the server.
• Make sure you have a dedicated bot stuff mod. Coding, testing, maintaining, and updating the bot accounted for a large chunk of the event’s work. You will want a mod who can respond to issues ASAP.
• Learn from our mistakes: don’t break your AO3 collection!! The first hiccup in our event happened when we closed signups and realized we could not download a CSV of signups. Getting AO3 Support involved, and technical support involved let us know that they couldn’t unbreak our collection.
• Our problem was caused by the Offers section being set to have no fields aside from Optional Details.
• Even if you choose not to do any kind of matching or assignment generating on AO3, if you decide to create an exchange collection, you need to make sure to include a field to “match” on in the Offers section of the AO3 signup.
• This field could be Fandom, or the field you are using for medium.
• The bot will break during the event. Plan for how your schedule might change if the downtime is longer than an hour (during auctions) or more than a day (outside of auctions).
• Find help before you need it! The core mod team was 4 mods; we also had help from an additional 4 minions to do nominations, work checking, question answering, etc. We had a good amount of help; however, the workload would have been improved by having an additional 2 more main mods to tag in when the event moved from signups into auctions. This would have allowed for the mods to rotate in their duties, and afforded people that had been working for a few months straight to have some downtime when the event moved from planning to actually happening.
• Work checking is very important to this kind of event. The auctionbot scraped the collection regularly to create a spreadsheet that recorded basic things about works uploaded to the AAT collection like creator, title, AO3 reported wordcount, fandom, and who the gift is for. Work checking was integral to this event.
• Including several mediums in AAT made the event similar to a mini-Fic in a Box. This meant that we needed to check works to make sure they hit the minimum requirements for those mediums as well as accurately assess those mediums for wordcount.
• Our event didn’t use AO3 to generate assignments. We had to make extra sure that that the correct fandoms were given and that works were gifted to the right people/that the recips weren't left off the gifts -- we had issues like this cropping up more often than in exchanges with AO3 assignments.
• auctionbot’s work scraping helps immeasurably with work checking, but you will still need a solid team of human workcheckers to make sure that authors get credit for the wordcount they’ve created and participants receive what they’ve requested.

The event was VERY rewarding to run. The most common piece of feedback that we received was that this event was very good for making friends, and that made us feel like the event succeeded. :D

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What Worked

Onto the participant feedback! We’ve broken up the feedback along several thematic lines, and grouped them together.

The Setup: Dreamwidth and Discord server

• Dreamwidth comm was beautiful and the info was well-organized.
• The server was organized helpfully.
• The three-tier ticket system worked.
• Festival of very short canons was appreciated! Participants were curious if any fanworks were created for the FoVSC canons. According to a manual search of the collection, 8 canons that were promo’d received fanworks in AAT!
• Good boundary setting/clear guidelines from the mods.
• Announcement channel for announcements of new rule stuff/clarifications of rules/FAQ helpful as the event progressed.

The three-tier ticket tool system. Participants clicked the “create ticket” icon to open a ticket with the appropriate tier of the mod team.

The Auction Rules

• Participants found the bid cap to be a good addition to the rules. The cap of 10k was considered a good cap by most of the feedback that remarked on it.
• Participants enjoyed the variety of mediums they could request or create.
• 24 hour felt like a good length for auctions.
• Participants found the lack of anon period very good especially because you can talk to everyone about all your stuff (being excited about assignments, talking to requesters about their requests) – this was our second most common piece of feedback, and probably ties into how great the event was for making friends!
• Participants found it very motivating to create works for the event. The low obligation of the works made it feel like there was low-pressure, and the gamification of treats and wordcount laundering made people excited to create even without an assignment.

AuctionBot

• The use and function of auctionbot was enjoyable to participants. The instructions were clear, and the reminders very helpful.
• It was pointed out how nice it was to not need to talk to a mod to do/check various things, and instead could just use commands in your DMs to track your assignments, your turned-in works, and the wordcount that your works received once those works had been through work checking.
• Participants were delighted by how well the bot worked overall.

Crimes

• Organized crime was very helpful for logistical reasons and for spreading out the responsibility of making a gift.
• Many participants liked being able to share wordcount and form cabals to get people more gifts.
• Having a silly stat in the game (crime points) was fun.

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Suggestions for Event Changes

Below, we’ve collected and organized feedback for the event about things that didn’t work as intended, along with some commentary by the mods about how you might potentially achieve that feedback with different event rules or a different event structure. A suggestion appearing in this section does not mean that we will use that feedback if we run this event again; these suggestions are presented for people who are considering running an auction event themselves. This section is best viewed as a snapshot of concerns that some participants had that may lead us to redesigning parts of the event to address the underlying issues of flagging interest/attention, uneven secondary gameplay (crime points), and a boost to auction competitiveness to make the auctions more enjoyable to single bidders.

The final section “Things we’ll most likely do next time” contains the changes we’re likely to do.

Signup Flow, Interest Check & Scheduling

• Shorten number of auction days during initial auctions. Some feedback noted that the energy of auctions seemed to lag over the period of initial auctions. Suggestions include shortening from a 10 day auction period to 7 days.
• Depending on how you are handling auctions (bot versus human mods), you should schedule as many auctions as your team can handle.
• AAT chose a longer auction period of 10 days because we had concerns about auctionbot’s ability to handle heavy bidding. auctionbot performed far beyond our expectations! By the end of the event, the auctionbot was holding up quite well, a shorter initial auction period could therefore be easily accommodate in a future round.
• Different handling of socks. Some suggestions mentioned weeding socks out of the treatless list posted near the end of AAT. Other suggestions suggested that we consider putting people’s socks later in the auction schedule to prioritize auctions of people’s main accounts.
• If mods wanted to handle socks differently, consider having participants tell which accounts are socks when they are signing up. (Possibly in the optional details box for offers? Or by using a Google Sign Up sheet in addition to AO3 signups, as Battleship did for its 2025 round?)
• Alternatively, an event could also ban socking if they were concerned about sock requests in their event.
• We wouldn’t necessarily suggest disallowing socks completely, because having more requests than bidders is pretty important to this event format.
• Use polls or interest checks. Poll people to find out which auctions have the most interest so they can be scheduled more optimally. The goal would be to have a more sustainably even interest in auctions across the whole auction period.
• If you wanted to add an interest check to your event, consider adding time in the schedule between signups and auction schedule announcement.
• Suggested additional time: at least five days to collect responses, and at least two days to process those results into your scheduling.
• Note: interest checks and polls may not accurately reflect auction interest. In AAT, bidders could sign up to bid at any time, thus creating heavier interest than expected in an auction. Participants hitting their word cap early in the auction week could also cause an auction that previously had many interested bidders have no available wordcount to bid in that auction.
• Ask participants about when they would like to be scheduled. Consider asking people as an optional question during signup of when they’d prefer to be auctioned. You could ask whether they’d prefer being scheduled in the beginning, middle, end of the auction week, or possibly earlier/later if they have timezone conflicts, and would like to be awake for the end of their auction. Asking people for their preferences may let people be more comfortable with their auction position.
• Some participants who are scheduled into the last day of auctions don’t enjoy being last, and some participants prefer being towards the end of the auction schedule. You can increase participant satisfaction if you match up people who like going first with earlier days/participants that like going last in later days.
• In other kinds of events where participants need to opt into a day, usually participants sort themselves into an even distribution across all available days/times/timeslots.
• However, you can’t promise that everyone will get their preferred timeslot if there is a bunching up into one part of the week.
• You probably can’t ask this type of question using AO3’s signup interface. If you wanted to collect this info from participants, you’d likely have to use a Google Docs signup form.
• The hassle of using Google Docs to collect signups and AO3 to collect requests might make this suggestion a “wish-we-could-do” rather than a “we-definitely-want-to”.

Bidding & General Auctions

We received suggestions that were aimed at making auctions more competitive by changing how the bidding worked. Some of these suggestions would totally overhaul how bidding might work, and other suggestions could be integrated into a wordcount-based bidding gameplay.

The lack of intense competition was a feature rather than a bug for some participants–although that doesn’t necessarily mean that an auction event should never be competitive. There will be trade offs, though, so we also suggest that the more competitive an event is, the more intense and active the moderation of the community should be.

• Token bidding. Instead of bidding wordcount, have a set number of tokens that people could use to place bids. Using tokens could abstract the wordcount into something more akin to “money”.
• The AAT mods don’t have any experience using a token-based bid system for auctions.
• If you chose to use tokens instead of wordcount, consider how many tokens people could start out with, or whether tokens are capped, or if tokens can be earned through other gameplay elements.
• A possible token system system might include a token being equal to the minimum wordcount of the event (500 words for example), and then cap people’s tokens at 10 or 20 tokens.
• While this might make any bid chain shorter, it could cause people to hedge their bets on what they bid on, and therefore create a more level playing field between bidders, because someone might need to save their tokens for a later auction.
• This might be a system you & your co-mods want to explore if you don’t like the idea of bidding wordcount.
• Hard caps. Instead of using a soft-cap system like AAT did (wherein an auction can be bid up to any amount as long as the participants are below their cap limit prior to the auction starting), use a hard cap system where each participant only has 10k, and once you hit that cap (in wins+bids), you can’t bid more.
• There are technical limitations to the hard cap system which means that a bot programmed similarly to auctionbot may not be able to treat a bid as the same thing as already-won-wordcount. Some people are bad at math on-the-fly and would cause (real) math crimes.
• Another drawback to hardcapping is that if you foresee a lot of high bidding, a hardcap system means that the first person who gets an auction to 10k wins it (because no one can bid above that amount).
• If you want to hard cap, you may want to design your bot/structure your auctions ahead of time so that (a) an auction finishes the moment it reaches the cap, and/or (b) that bidding wordcount can be mathed with already-won wordcount, so you don’t have to rely on participants remembering to hold back as they reach their cap.
• No earn-backs. Instead of letting people “earn back” their 10k, people have wordcount that they can spend once and then it’s done.
• This might limit people’s ability to participate in low-states bidding later in the exchange. The Penny Auctions are pretty fun, and it might be bittersweet to participants that engaged in heavy high-stakes bidding at the beginning of the event to find that they’re locked out of silly low-stakes bidding towards the end.
• You may also consider a partial solution of “earn-backs are possible, but not during the initial auction phase”. Having earn-backs start after the first round of auctions would mean that players could stay competitive during the initial auctions, but also could join in the fun of pennies later if they’ve posted their assignments.
• If you don’t do assignment earn-backs, it may not be that necessary to scrape the collection for works more than once per day/once per week. This could reduce the usage of your auctionbot, if hosting costs or ao3 rate limiting are an issue for your bot.
• Lower limit. Rather than having a 10k limit, maybe use a lower limit that’s closer to the average length of work for the first round of the event (something in the 3-5k range, maybe?)
• The average work created for Auctions As Threatened was ~2.5k (or its equivalent in mediums that aren’t fic).
• Choosing a different limit will change the dynamics of bidding. If you like spectacularly high bids and want to encourage that, a higher bid limit is better. If you like more modest final bids, a lower bid limit may encourage that behavior.
• You can check out AAT’s stats here (link) if you’d like to make your decision based on the data we observed from our event!

Crime in general

Thoughts about the crime portion of the event were perhaps the most evenly split in our feedback.

• Competition: Above, we discussed that some people wanted auctions to be more competitive for single bidders. Other people had suggestions about making crimes more competitive! You could do things like…
• Reduce or eliminate crime points given for splitting assignments.
• Give crime points only for treats, or give special crime points for treats.
• Create new types of crime that we hadn’t thought of pre-game. In general, feedback showed that there was a yearning for more types of crime.
• More gamification mechanics. People mentioned how much they enjoyed increasing their crime stat. More types of crime gamification could lead to more people posting more treats, or focusing on different area(s) of gameplay.
• People in general enjoyed sharing, but some participants didn’t like how much sharing crime and big organized crime groups dominated the activities of the event.

Organized Crime

• Smaller organized crime groups: Some participants suggested limiting the number of people who could collude together in an auction, as this might increase competition, benefit solo bidders, and let people engaging in organized crime get to know each other better.
• Restrict the number of times an assignment can be split, regardless of wordcount.
• Limit the number of times participants could use the /split_win command total across the event.
• Enforce a minimum wordcount number per split (100 words, 250 words, 500 words, etc) so to split one assignment many times, you would need a large number of words to start with.
• These things may or may not be possible with auctionbot; we’re not sure. Enforcing them without a bot would be very hard.
• Organized crime should be more personal. Some participants didn’t like the level of preparation that organized crime required. The idea of having to use spreadsheets or complex math to collude with others was daunting and off-putting to many. This issue was related to having large organized crime groups that needed to figure out who got what on the fly, and made splitting wins involve a level of setup unanticipated by the event moderators.
• As mentioned above, incentivizing smaller groups could involve a range of technical solutions from the bot (capping the number of times an assignment could be split, or capping the number of times a participant can use the /split_win command).
• Or as we explore in our next point, how organized crime happens could be changed by restructuring the event.
• Less time to collude: Offer less time to collude to limit organized crime/increase competition. Prevent people from planning organized crime so far ahead, so that everyone is on a level playing field at the start of an auction.
• This would require secret requests, or secret rules; an event could do one, or both of these things if you wanted!
• If you decide to have secret rules that only allow collusion later in gameplay, you would have to withhold part of the gameplay of the event from your participants. This might lead to confusion. The best way to introduce a mid-event rules addition is to prime your participants for fun rules additions before the event begins (e.g. tell them there will be surprises, or twists, or new mechanics introduced during play), and then roll out your rules additions with the help of mods that can answer questions about the new mechanics.
• If you wanted to have secret requests, participants couldn’t plan how they bid until the requests are visible. This might also cut down on excitement/bidder participation because it would be harder for bidders to tell if there are any requests they’d be interested on bidding on. Many bidders did enjoy looking at each new auction as it came up, but you still need to get potential bidders into your event space somehow first for them to do that.

Penny Auctions

The overall response to penny auctions was positive, and the feedback we received about how they could be improved was basically along the lines of “how can there be MORE pennies for us to experience?”

• More pennies. Participants expressed a desire for more people to go to penny auction. There was a feeling of missed opportunity around the participants who didn’t get to go to pennies because their creators didn’t default.
• Smaller starting pennies. Some penny auctions started high, for the full amount that was defaulted on, which made those auctions a little more daunting/less low-pressure than intended. Instead, there was the suggestion that penny auctions should start lower; instead of the amount defaulted, maybe all penny auctions above the minimum assignment amount should start at exactly that threshold (for AAT, that would mean starting every penny auction below, or up to, 500 words).
• Single penny auctions only. Regardless of amount defaulted on, Have all pennies start at 1 word for maximum small-bidding fun.
• Have pennies open longer. Since penny auctions were being generated by defaults later in the event, maybe holding open a penny auction for a longer period of time would let people have time to look at them since they’re not scheduled.

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Things we’ll most likely do next time

Easy Changes

• Communicate clearly about delays. Come up with a clearer plan for how the event handles delays. Communicate this plan in the rules/organizational information at the beginning of the event. Things that might cause delays that we would want to address:
• auctionbot going offline for more than an hour during an active auction
• If there are delays with pinch hits
• If there’s a need to delay due to mod availability
• Formalize fandom promos. For people who got no bids in first round of auctions, we often informally asked them in their auction channel to talk more about their fandoms. We should create a more formal expectation that we’ll do that for everyone who doesn’t get a bid, or offer more time pre-auction for people to do it in their channel and talk to people about their requests.
• Clarify certain mediums rules:
• Make note that you can create mediums that are worth less than 500 words (like emojis or icons) to make as many of them as you want/need to reach the assigned word count.
• Update the requirements for collages. The collage medium has some pretty specific requirements around how it uses images, due to a need for works hosted on AO3 being transformative. We would refine these rules and possibly link to examples of fannish collage that sufficiently transform the images used in the work.

New Bot Features

These bot features will be at the top of our priority list for a future round.

• Outstanding Assignments. Participants who had many assignments noticed that once you've got 10+ assignments, it could be hard to figure out which ones you still needed to fill. We would like to have a new command to report only outstanding assignments (e.g. only the ones that you haven't posted yet), or somehow separate this information in an easier-to-read way in /my_wins.
• Word Laundry crime update. Due to a technical limitation with how auctionbot was coded, we discovered too late that the word laundry crime wasn’t getting applied to people who were receiving assignments via /split_win. For the next round, the word laundry crime should be automatically assigned to anyone who posted a treat, and then later received assignment words from either winning an auction or getting words through /split_win.
• Give auctionbot crimes. Mods would like to be able to assign crimes to auctionbot itself with the /pardon command. The Bot sometimes committed crimes during the event (like when it unexpectedly posted a user’s auction twice), and we’d like to be able to track that.
• Good Bot. Server members should be able to call auctionbot a good bot and receive a response. We feel this would increase general server enjoyment. :D

Server Engagement

These suggestions are the the ones we’ll have to think about the most, since they’re the most logistically challenging. Broadly, our goals for sever engagement are:

• Encourage more activity in the post-auctions period. A dip between auctions and pennies made people disengage.
• Put organized crime discussion on the server somehow, maybe in open bot-created threads or hidden bot-created threads that are made when each auction channel is open for bidding.
• Encourage more competitiveness in the auctions.

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Conclusion

How we might go about achieving those ends will be a matter for discussion for the mod team before we run the next round of AAT.

Beyond specific changes that we noted in Easy Changes and New Bot Features, our thoughts about how we might change the event to respond to flagging interest/attention is to (likely) shorten the main auction phase to one week, and then either encourage more penny auctions to be created or (potentially) have auctionbot randomly generate penny auctions. It’s kind of a wild idea, so that’s a very theoretical suggestion. Even if there are more activities available on the server, there is almost always a lull after auctions/assignments are set and people turn to working on their gifts; so this might not be a fully solvable problem.

As for the uneven secondary gameplay (crime points) and a boost to auction competitiveness, we are considering capping /split_win in a future round so that people will have to find new ways to earn crimes!

The soonest a second round may happen is in 2027, so possibly see you all again in a couple of years!