Lockwood HQ Auction?
by BONZO, HSM Editor
The Lockwood showcase has been updated, and given a complete overhaul. It looks dramatically different than before, with some hints of a winter holiday spin. This transformation has taken it from showroom to boutique with a hint of corporate headquarters, with the offices on an upper floor and screens on the lower level with one displaying real time twitter feeds from @LockwoodLKWD. If you take a close look, you’ll notice a Horse bomb with the Drey Horse looking down on the show floor, and the ubiquitous Blueberry bulldog Stitchkin is still around in the offices across the way.
What is up with that little guy?
Lockwood popped him up randomly in the showcase during the egg crushing promotion, moving his spawn location sometimes just sniffing the ground in place, and other times walking in circles as he sniffed. Even in the Bermuda triangle that seems to be the Gift showroom, which appears and disappears from the navigation menu, he was hidden in there like some Easter egg.
The Lockwood showcase really didn’t need an update to the space itself, and it seemed to work well for a platform to continuously update seasonally or periodically for specific promotions. The new headquarters seems like a smaller space, with only a couple of rooms branching off the main showroom. One of the new displays is of jewelry, which up until now very little was done to showcase these items specifically. How could you when they are so small, and minimal by avatar perspectives. Lockwood resolved that issue by making the display larger. There is also a display for Uproar, and Iron Fusion. But no display for Figment as a fashion brand, or Sodium at all.
Now granted, there really isn’t anything new to showcase for these clothing or gaming brands, and there is a display of the jewelry for Figment, but it comes off rather diminished from the larger display available before the egg crushing game took over the former showcase.
There are two major hints of what is to come from this new headquarters, though. At the very center is a large display of a Fool Throttle rogue outfit-clad female riding a lion. The lion mount is not a great revelation, it is already out, but this isn’t Maliki – rather it is Kiburi, the white lion. This version hasn’t been introduced into the market yet, so it is a hint of a future release, or a tease.
The other hint of something new to Home period, not to mention to the Lockwood showcase is – an auction event?
Yes, an auction!
How that is going to work remains to be seen, but it is a very interesting prospect. Now my guess is that it will be a silent auction, sign-to-bid type of feature, a display of what is being auctioned and a sign on list with the kiosk which will let you out-bit an opponent.
What will you bid?
With Lockwood, it’s not so clear. Remember, Lockwood did introduce a couple of different currencies. The Sodium credits, Lockwood tokens, and the Uproar credits, not to mention Mercia gold. I am guessing that it will be a bid with real PSN wallet money, or Lockwood gift tokens. The latter seems more plausible, because I feel that the PSN wallet money would require a lot more of the legal hassle with Sony as a whole, and since Lockwood has an established contract for their own currency with Lockwood tokens, it would be easier to just use those and also it would work as a promotional incentive to purchase Lockwood tokens and essentially cut out the middle man. However, their contract may be restricted to token use with in the Gift Machine only, so who knows. For all we know, they may introduce bid money as a new currency form for this specific purpose alone. Whatever the case may be, this is an interesting proposition, and I can’t wait to find out how it turns out.
The poster for the auction event shows a background of mostly wearable apparel. From Drey and Figment’s lines, but hopefully they will auction more than just those items and actually introduce new items to bid on.
I am a little conflicted by this.
On the one hand, I love the idea; it sounds interesting, but there is a potential for a negative precedent to be set here. I am taking a wild stab in the dark that bundles will be auctioned, bear in mind, I don’t have any foreknowledge of any of this, but I am making an educated guess based on the lack of incentive to bid on an individual item if you can just purchase it from the store without having to bid on it. Bundles would give Lockwood a way of selling limited amounts of items. The reason for bidding to begin with is because you are buying something that isn’t readily available.
While a bundle of current items in the store would fit that bill, another possibility is exclusive items. Which could very well be the case, as hinted by Kiburi the white lion mount. Kiburi was already a limited edition item, a mount version would be an exclusive. So if only a few of these will be sold, how much would you be willing to bid?
Live Twitter Feeds on the Screen
Now the bad precedent is that it could encourage the sale of limited edition items for a high bidding price if it is successful, and if Lockwood doesn’t set a maximum bid limit. On the other hand, they could auction off bundles of existing product with generous amounts of content and make it worth bidding for. It remains to be seen.
I honestly miss the old showcase. I felt it was more expansive and had more floor room to show off wares, and hopefully it will make a come back. This HQ seems to be a promotional space to test out this auctioning event, but also as a means to update for the holiday. There are hints at possible commodities making their way to the Home consumer soon, like the aforementioned Kiburi, but also the frozen fountain under the Lockwood logo, colorful versions of the Figment couches, and ornament trees with animated glowing stars. But for now stay tuned, we’ll see how this auction pans out.
December 3rd, 2012 by BONZO | 7 comments
BONZO is an editor and artist for HomeStation Magazine.
Twitter
I saw this in the EU forums and this is what LKWD had to say about it:
” Hi all,
There hasn’t been any sort of auction in Home before, so this is going to be a bit of a trial run for us both –we’re running it to see if such an event works within Home. A lot of work has gone into developing this event, which is why we decided that a bidding tax was necessary for the potential success of the Auction Machine; we could be wrong, however, and we’ll need your feedback on this when it launches.
We’ve decided to offer three different tiers of item rarity with the Auction Machine, and with each tier comes a different bidding tax cost. The amount stated in the current description is incorrect, as this version of the Auction Machine contains an outdated description –sorry about this. The actual amount will be 10% of the starting price for the item. We have set these prices according to the rarity of the items, so they cannot be artificially increased by early bidders.
As we’ve said above, this is just a trial run, so we’re going to be paying close attention to your feedback –the more brutally honest, the better! :smileytongue:
Kind regards, Lockwood”
Something I think would really be fun (though probably not practical) is a Home version of eBay, where we can put our unwanted, discontinued items up for sale in something like a Gift Machine. Payment would be in in-Home currency, which you could either use to buy more products, or participate in user-generated auctions.
I am totally against the auction idea. Here’s why. It feeds to the collector’s grabby mentality. In my headier comic days there wass always a box of action figures that would come with 25 basic , unwanted characters and 1 rare. The collector’s grabby scramble meant that it forced a mini bid war. I think that with some of the mentalities we see in home, we will end up with a few people that will be buying all, while the others sit on the sidelines counting their LW tokens. I think, and this is my belief, that in this economic environment, everyone should have an equal stab at the same goods. Leave it up to the individual to refuse to buy. I can see the view from LW, that this will cause a frenzy around special items and thus any press is good press. I just look at more than a profit margin, and see the dissatisfied and saddened masses that may look and say…”I wish I had gotten that”. Perhaps the statuss quo is better for the profit margin. Let people openly buy from the gift machine or the open store, that way I can, if I want, buy as many copies as I want, for all my accounts.I know this is speculation, but I really would hate to see an auction come to home.
Sealwyf: good idea, I love that.
Great write Bonzo.
I share you apprehension, Strom. If what they are selling are unique items, how high might the bidding go? Over a hundred dollars? I can see it happening. And how much rage might be generated among the Home users who can’t afford a $20 PSN card on a regular basis?
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it all plays out.
People said X7 was a class divider, heh, watch this space…
I’m sure that I’m pointing out the obvious here, but this is an artificial rareness. It’s not a coin or stamp or whatever that was issued in the hundreds or thousands and only a few are still extant. Lockwood is basically creating fakes,in my opinion and I’m disappointed in them.
Also, bidders might want to ask, how rare IS rare? So are they setting a limit on the number available? Ten? A thousand? How many of the top bidders will win then? I would feel sorry someone who bid $50 as the highest bidder and the next nine people with lower bids also received the item. (But, not too sorry because they knew the risks.)
I know many people who have stated that they won’t bid because of the “tax” and I believe there are a lot who won’t bid once they think about what a made-up rareness really means. Lockwood might have as well have said something like, “We’re selling only 1000 of such-and-such an item.” and just set a high price. At least that way people could see the rareness of their item and know the cost up front.
It’s no more (or less) fake than the “collectibles” created by the Franklin Mint. For that matter, even the unique prizes created in Home, such as the leaderboard champ jackets in the Casino, are deliberately created as limited editions. In that case, owning one represents a genuine achievement, complete with bragging rights. In the case of the auctions, it simply represents deeper pockets, or a stronger desire to own a particular item.
I can see cases in which I would be in there bidding with enthusiasm. As you can tell by my screen name, I’m obsessed with seals. If one of the items was a one-of-a-kind or limited-edition Sea Lion Companion, the SealWyf would probably not be able to resist jumping with with all four flippers. But there would be relatively few products that would set off that reaction.