Author Topic: "Auction-aire" - gamesurf's Cullen-style Price is Right  (Read 31140 times)

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Offline rockyboy34

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Re: "Auction-aire" - gamesurf's Cullen-style Price is Right
« Reply #150 on: July 29, 2020, 09:56:58 PM »
I will bid...$55555

Offline gamesurf

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Re: "Auction-aire" - gamesurf's Cullen-style Price is Right
« Reply #151 on: July 31, 2020, 06:15:11 PM »
*DING!*



$55,555 for rockyboy34, making an un-five-gettable showcase bid.

JhayPrice, take a look at your showcase!

*a brass version of Super Trouper is played*

This showcase begins with a lovely sofa and chair combo!



From Wayfair furniture, this hand-crafted leather sofa and chair combo provides a rich and stylish addition to any home! Impress guests beyond your wildest imaginations with plush cushions and hand tied springs for lasting durability. Perfect comfort for any living room!

And you can entertain high-class parties in your living room with this high-tech karaoke machine!



This karaoke package includes a DJ system with USB/SD inputs, professional-quality mic-mixing amplifier, and recording capabilities, two professional passive speakers, and two microphones!

And, after you're done singing, how do you follow up the party after the karaoke party? You entertain them at the after-after party, of course, with more singing, of course--gathered around this baby grand piano!



This 60" baby grand piano sounds with warm clarity and can fit in multiple settings! Years of musical enjoyment await you, assuming that you were diligent as a kid and actually practiced. If not, there's always Chopsticks.


*Super Trouper slowly fades to The Winner Takes it All*

And, finally, now that you've auditioned all of  you've made so many friends at your party, you can take them all camping with you...

in this new trailer!



It's the 2020 Jayco Hummingbird! This 13' trailer includes a bed, TV, refrigerator, microwave, sink, bike carrier rack, A/C unit, exterior grill, and 25 gallon tank capacity. Camp out in the wilderness in style! It only has one bed, though, so your friends will need trailers of their own.


And this showcase, where is sure to impress your high-class friends with your ability to entertain, can be yours if The Price is Right!

JhayPrice, that is your showcase! What do you bid on it?
Quote from: Bill Todman
"The sign of a good game, is when you don't have to explain it every day. The key is not simplicity, but apparent simplicity. Password looks like any idiot could have made it up, but we have 14 of our people working on that show. There is a great complexity behind the screen. It requires great work to keep it simple."

Offline JhayPrice

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Re: "Auction-aire" - gamesurf's Cullen-style Price is Right
« Reply #152 on: July 31, 2020, 09:48:21 PM »
I'll bid $21,212 gamesurf.

Offline gamesurf

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Re: "Auction-aire" - gamesurf's Cullen-style Price is Right
« Reply #153 on: August 03, 2020, 04:21:48 PM »
*DING!*



$21,212, he says, and we'll find out the winner right after this! Don't go away!

---

Welcome back!

Jhayprice, let's start with you. You bid $21,212 on your showcase.

The Actual Retail Price of your showcase is...



...for a difference of...



nine thousand, five hundred and seventy dollars.

rockyboy34, in order to win, you must come closer than that amount without going over.

You bid $55,555 on your showcase.

rockyboy, the actual retail price of your showcase IS!



Forty two thousand dollars---I'm sorry, you're over!

*MRRP!*



JhayPrice, you win!



JhayPrice has won over thirty-six thousand dollars in fake cash and prizes today!

*JhayPrice and his friends and family run across the stage in the Winner's Walk*

To those who watched, who submitted bids, who played along--thank you. Thank you for entertaining a goofy idea and being willing to try something new. Your participation makes golden-road.net great. This is gamesurf, reminding you--help control the virus population. Wash your hands and wear a mask!

Goodbye, everybody!

*the band plays the TPIR main theme to break*

This is AnnouncerTron 3000, speaking for The Price is Right! A G-R.net HYO Production!
Quote from: Bill Todman
"The sign of a good game, is when you don't have to explain it every day. The key is not simplicity, but apparent simplicity. Password looks like any idiot could have made it up, but we have 14 of our people working on that show. There is a great complexity behind the screen. It requires great work to keep it simple."

Offline gamesurf

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Re: "Auction-aire" - gamesurf's Cullen-style Price is Right
« Reply #154 on: August 03, 2020, 04:55:35 PM »
POSTMORTEM

First off, I have to apologize for the showcase rounds taking longer than they ought to have. I've been caught up in some real-life travel and that's left me away from my computer.

Second off, the winner's totals:

JhayPrice: $36,752 (a chaise, $4,000, a sofa and chair combo, a karaoke set, a baby grand piano, and a 13' trailer)
rockyboy34: $3,340 (a pair of smartwatches, a chess set, a child's go-kart, a collection of Edgar Wright Blu-Rays, a dumbbell, and a board game)

...and, that's it! I didn't intend for everything to be won by two people, but that's how it happened!

Showcase 1 breakdown:
Industrial vacuum: $2,300
Greenhouse: $1,299
Sauna: $3,447
Dodge Ram 2500 Tradesman: $35,335

Showcase 2 breakdown:
Living Room group: $6,000
Karaoke set: $919
Baby Grand Piano: $5,860
Trailer: $18,003

Notes on the bidding system
So on the bidding system. I had noticed that on most HYOs, where bidding contestants are predetermined and everybody goes in a certain order, quite a bit of time is spent waiting for one person to bid. Don't misunderstand me--on a real TV show, with four people present, the format is perfect. It's easy for viewers to follow, it moves quickly, and it serves its real purpose of moving the game along and rewarding somebody without taking too much time or focus away from the pricing games.

But I wondered if there was a way to retool bidding so that it would be a better suited for a forum, with people checking in and checking out at different times during the day.

I was looking for bidding system that
-   Allowed a “jump-in” bidding format, instead of mandating people go in a certain order
-   Allowed multiple people to bid at once, since I thought that might be a good fit for a forum format
-   Mitigated the “fourth bidder advantage” and gave people a reason to bid/freeze early if they thought they knew the price.

I playtested three different formats with 5-6 friends. One where you raise to whatever amount you wanted, as long as it was >$20 more than your previous bid; One where you could raise to whatever amount you wanted, but must freeze immediately if it was below the top bid, and the Cullen-style rules that we settled upon, where raises must be over the top bid

In a way, I felt option C was the simplest and most orderly. Either you make the bid you want and lock it in and never worry again (just like the one-bids on today's show work), or you raise over the top bidder and try to get closer and closer to the ARP. Plus it was the format that seemed to work best with 5-7 people, and that's honestly the turnout I expected for each IUFB.

Did it work? Yes, to a degree! It got a lot of participation, I felt there was some added strategy to the bidding, and it made bids get more tense as the top bid drew higher (is it too high NOW? is it too high NOW? etc.)

However, I probably won't be doing this again for two reasons.

1)   It’s a mother to host—you gotta be on top of things. Keeping the bids straight, refereeing bids, making frequent graphics to guide people along. It requires significantly more involvement than the one-bids, and I admit I was pretty exhausted by the end of it.
2)   I feel the open-ended format ran into some growing pains that were much more severe than I thought.

What do I mean by growing pains? Well, when you have five or six people active raising and freezing, it works well! There is a reason Cullen TPIR lasted so long, after all. But it turns out translating it into a forum format with 12+ bidders doesn’t scale nearly as well. When you have 12+ bidders, at the liberty to bid whenever they want, and one person makes a high bid, it’s less a game of pricing knowledge and more a game of “who was lucky enough to be online at the right time”.

For example, somebody can place a bid, log off for a few hours, and log back in only to find that somebody else bid $25 more than they have, and the top bid is now $1,000 more than it was originally. Their options are now 1) pray they got lucky and freeze with a $25 range or 2) raise their bid an extreme amount. Through no fault of their own, they’re likely to find themselves in situations where they obviously have zero shot at winning.

On the other hand, the best way to play it is just to treat it like a normal one-bid, by placing the bid you want and immediately freezing if you know the price, or waiting until the last minute to underbid and snipe the bidder of your choice if you don’t. This is counter-intuitive to the whole “auction” presentation. If many people do the optimal strategy, bidders who play the game as intended get punished.

Maybe this could be fixed by raising the cushion or not allowing raises over a certain amount or by getting rid of the “all raises must be higher than the top bid” rule, but I think it’s time to head back to the drawing board and stick with something more traditional for future go-rounds.  It was an interesting experiment but I don’t think I’ll repeat it.

Setups & Lineups

The key consideration behind the lineup was "how to keep qualifiers for the showcases interesting".

Step Up was first. It was a hard setup. I assumed there would be a bailout and somebody would get on the board.

Make Your Move was second--a good quickie with a decent prize package that would edge out Step Up for top winner if it was won.

It's In The Bag was third--depending on how the first two games went, I wanted somebody to either be required take some risks to become one of the top two winners (if the first games were won).

Finally, Switcheroo fourth so even the last contestant of the day would have a shot at making the showcases.

Music
I had quite a terrific time putting together the soundtrack for the show! The vibe I was going for was to keep the jazzy, brassy feel of the TPIR cue library, but to otherwise not to try to closely emulate the show too closely. Think "College Marching Band Halftime Show" mixed with "Disneyland Main Street U.S.A." It was fun looking through all sorts of crazy German brass band covers on Spotify and finding tracks that you'd never expect to hear on TPIR, but captured that energetic, jazzy feel in a way.

Again, thank you so much for everybody who participated and was being willing to entertain this experiment! I'm happy that so many of you were willing to give it a shot and try something new over this long break. Thank you all so much for playing and watching!
Quote from: Bill Todman
"The sign of a good game, is when you don't have to explain it every day. The key is not simplicity, but apparent simplicity. Password looks like any idiot could have made it up, but we have 14 of our people working on that show. There is a great complexity behind the screen. It requires great work to keep it simple."

Offline rockyboy34

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Re: "Auction-aire" - gamesurf's Cullen-style Price is Right
« Reply #155 on: August 03, 2020, 06:27:17 PM »
Who knew, I had a chance to win big four times, and I blew it each time.  :P

I had no idea on the price of the showcase. All I had was $4K for the sauna.

Offline LiteBulb88

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Re: "Auction-aire" - gamesurf's Cullen-style Price is Right
« Reply #156 on: August 03, 2020, 07:26:04 PM »
Great show, gamesurf! Whenever you try something totally new like this, there are going to be kinks to work out, but it was still very nice to see something new that still felt like The Price is Right. If you want to try this format again, here are a couple of suggestions that you're welcome to use or ignore:

1. I absolutely agree that something needs to be done about the "jump bids" we saw. It wasn't a coincidence that I got my bid on the last IUFB in with 59 seconds to spare--the only way I could think of to protect against jump bids forcing me into that "my bid is too low but the current bid is too high" conundrum was to place a single bid at the very last second. My thought on how to fix this is to not allow jump bids. Set an opening bid of $500, and then all bids from there can be no more than $100 more than the highest bid, with underbidding following the usual rules. Admittedly, this doesn't fully help people who don't check the site all that often, but it would at least make it so that users who check the site often are less likely to get trapped.

2. Maybe it's just me, but I wouldn't allow the same person to be on stage twice. Nothing against rockyboy34, and their bids aren't the reason I didn't make it on stage, but it just doesn't feel very TPiR-ish to have the same contestant play multiple pricing games.

If you host another show, I'm looking forward to seeing it and participating in it!

Offline rockyboy34

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Re: "Auction-aire" - gamesurf's Cullen-style Price is Right
« Reply #157 on: August 03, 2020, 08:16:39 PM »
Nothing against rockyboy34, and their bids aren't the reason I didn't make it on stage, but it just doesn't feel very TPiR-ish to have the same contestant play multiple pricing games.

Even though it did favor me, I kinda agree that it did feel a bit unbalanced.

Offline JhayPrice

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Re: "Auction-aire" - gamesurf's Cullen-style Price is Right
« Reply #158 on: August 04, 2020, 02:27:50 AM »
Whew, one shot really paid off! I still want to congratulate rockyboy for getting up onstage thrice. Great bidding you made there. And as always, an excellent show gamesurf!