I am bidder C above. Mostly I was trying to win the Jewel Beetle and hope for a lucky roll. I was expecting a larger number of entries and was optimizing for chance to win rather than expected profit. I didn’t put a ton of effort into modeling the exact EVs of the lots, and many of my bids were adjusted to be slightly above the nearest multiple of five.
Same here as “D”—given a goal of “score highest” winning a high value Beetle auction was the best way to do it. I did try to tweak my valuations such that I would either win a bunch of auctions up front, and then not be able to bid on Beetle, or not win the early auctions, and then have a chance at a Beetle win.
Sadly, the EV (excluding beetle) was only ~600 sp, so there was no manipulation of “let others win the first few auctions, then when they run out of money clean up with low bids at the end”
The Jewel Beetle was weird. It was what, like 8% to auto-win everything by winning the Beetle? Except there was just one roll, overall. So in each group of four, one person auto-wins, and then it becomes a cross-group auction where whoever got the Beetle for way less ends up winning. Seems like with very few people participating overall, going for the Beetle caps your odds of winning at 8%, which is not great. With very many people participating, like 100, going for the Beetle caps your odds of winning at the chance there is not a cohort with pure non-beetlers, otherwise whichever of them wins the beetle probably just wins.
Very good points. I actually made a counting error, and estimated the odds of Beetle Wins at ~20%
And then also failed to account for more than 4 players.
I am bidder C above. Mostly I was trying to win the Jewel Beetle and hope for a lucky roll. I was expecting a larger number of entries and was optimizing for chance to win rather than expected profit. I didn’t put a ton of effort into modeling the exact EVs of the lots, and many of my bids were adjusted to be slightly above the nearest multiple of five.
Same here as “D”—given a goal of “score highest” winning a high value Beetle auction was the best way to do it. I did try to tweak my valuations such that I would either win a bunch of auctions up front, and then not be able to bid on Beetle, or not win the early auctions, and then have a chance at a Beetle win.
Sadly, the EV (excluding beetle) was only ~600 sp, so there was no manipulation of “let others win the first few auctions, then when they run out of money clean up with low bids at the end”
The Jewel Beetle was weird. It was what, like 8% to auto-win everything by winning the Beetle? Except there was just one roll, overall. So in each group of four, one person auto-wins, and then it becomes a cross-group auction where whoever got the Beetle for way less ends up winning. Seems like with very few people participating overall, going for the Beetle caps your odds of winning at 8%, which is not great. With very many people participating, like 100, going for the Beetle caps your odds of winning at the chance there is not a cohort with pure non-beetlers, otherwise whichever of them wins the beetle probably just wins.
Very good points. I actually made a counting error, and estimated the odds of Beetle Wins at ~20% And then also failed to account for more than 4 players.