I have a brilliant idea, why not, instead of wasting time with "penalizing" people who took advantage of a worthless exploit in The Eliminator, something be done about the absolute bottery being done in the Auction House?
I absolutely cannot get any of the FE cars (and the Furai; what can I say, I nuked it in a fit and it's the only race car I want back 
) without being sniped within seconds of an auction going live by what I can only presume is a bot. It's pixels on a screen, ffs, it's not like it's actual PC hardware or some 🤬.
Incredibly frustrating.
Auction House is an ancient system at this point; feels like it was designed for a very different time (which it practically was, considering how far back it goes with relatively-few updates outside of search filtering etc.). With normal cars, you often either get stuck in a bidding war until someone ends up buying out the lot out of frustration (for higher than it would go in the autoshow
), or nobody bids and you get it for base -- there seems to be very little in between, and bidding wars are rather frustrating due to refreshing being slow. And if it's a rare/desirable wheelspin/playlist car, then good luck competing with the bots/macros.
I don't think outright
replacing it would be necessary, but just to float an idea, something like an "import/used car marketplace" could be interesting in my mind (playing off the aftermarket car system, but NOT updating/replacing it -- it could share theming, but would otherwise be entirely separate). In essence, players could submit X price (in credits, of course) which they'd be willing to pay for something, and if someone feels like selling that car for that much, then it would go to the first person who put up a buy offer for X credits (and then the next, etc). Or, a seller could list a car for Y price - even if there are no current "buy" offers high enough - and if someone felt like paying that much for it, then it could sell for Y credits to whoever bought it first. Think something a bit like the Steam marketplace, but with in-game currency only, of course (and anonymous + with limits similar to the auction house's dynamic buyout adjustments, both in an effort to help prevent grey market sales).
Of course, in the case of especially rare/desirable cars, this could probably still be subject to botting/super high pricing making it inaccessible to some, but it feels like it could at the very least be a
bit better of an experience than having to constantly refresh/attempt to snipe cars via the auction house. (And, the slowness of the auction house's updates wouldn't pose most of the same issues.)
Probably not a perfect solution regardless, but just spitballing.
