Solved

Auctions - 3.4 Clarification

Deleted my original post -- things are getting wonky and i'm going to wait till the morning to see if it's going to fix itself.

Rewriting my original post.

Section 3.4 does not communicate that coins spent on bids are nonfundable even if you lose. If that is truly the intended game mechanic then I ask for the section to be more explicit. If it's not the intended game mechanic then how do I go about getting my coins back.

Frustrating to learn that the hard way.

Think about the consequences if you are allowed to get the coins back, someone can bid up a driver without any repercussions. This forces you to be careful about who you select.
If you need more coins you can always purchase, or be on the lookout for the possibility for free coins

Look at the consequences of bidding and losing .... that is losing real money if spent... that is not cool and worse yet when not communicated to the player (which is by far the greater evil). Putting money on in game currency that can be lost without any return is a big problem especially when not properly communicated..

Fortunately I only lost what was earned by racing but that's not much less troublesome.

The very nature of auctions - at least to all the ones I've participated in - have never kept what was bid unless it was a winning bid. Selecting a button with a single token doesn't tell me I lose the token, it tells me if it's the winning bid, I would pay that single token. Do you also keep the cash I bid? I don't think so because my history has not been impacted. Double standard, at the very least, misleading. Discourages me from purchasing tokens because I may as well lose 5 dollars worth of tokens to someone who has Twenty worth and get nothing for my investment. Buying outright is not always possible; I'm sure you can track the numbers of how many camp out on the page. Many times I find a 5 star that seems to be new to the page (2+hr auction) and it already has 1 bid on it.

Exactly. The game Top 11 uses the same "coins to bid system" that (for me) ruined the game. It made game money 100% useless. In Top 11 I had 6 Billion "dollars" ... but the inability to actually spend that money haha. It's a case of not even being able to play at all. I'd try to buy a player and the price is 5M. I only have 12 tokens, so I'd happily pay 15M - shoot even 30M, because I recognize that I have a limited number of bids. But I'm forced to keep increasing the bidding price by something like 2%. I eventually run out of tokens, and someone wins the auction @ 6.5M - spending like 45 tokens.

I think a much more reasonable solution is, when you bid it costs a coin and that coin is gone forever - BUT, you can decide how much to bid. If the current price is 300k, and I only have 5 coins. I'm not going to bid 310k, I'll bid 500k or something.

Case in point, I convinced my wife to play (she's a huge F1 fan). She installed the app and decided to purchase a driver. She found a driver she wanted and proceeded to bid. The other guy kept bidding. Clearly they both really wanted the driver but didn't have the option to increase the bidding increments by more than 10k (or whatever it was using). So she spent 30 coins, eventually ran out and lost the bid. She goes, "yeah this is stupid" and uninstalls the game.

The buy now option is not a fix for the bid problem. Especially when a bid already exists (as I mentioned in my last post).

If it's a bid, it should be treated as a bid and all bid items returned if lost. As I said before, you're asking players to risk losing real dollars (if tokens were purchased which is more than likely) for no return of an investment when bidding. That's not cool at all.

You also create a paralyzing situation for the loser. Now they can't get anything (since they have no more tokens). All of their hard earned tokens or cash spent on tokens lost to the abyss because they were outbid. Can't stress it enough, not cool.

I think it would be better if the coins returned but not all of then, something like 8 in 10 coins returns, you would be carefull when bidding but wouldn't get that "i lost all my coins(money)" feeling

That's an interesting idea.

Friday I was thinking of other options as well -- i get that it's a premium service and that bidding doesn't actually include the tokens.

I was thinking along the lines of making access to bidding for 7 minutes costing 2 tokens -- with more tokens giving more time if needed.

Yes - the buy now is nice, it just doesn't work out for me. Any half decent driver/staff member of course already has bids.