Auctions, bids, and prices

Here at Virtual Manager, we put a lot of effort into ensuring that everyone can play the game in a cheat-free environment. Recently we have spent a great deal of time improving the tools that our crew of Cheat Hunters use, which means that, today, the average response time on cheat reports has been reduce to 1-3 days.

However, we sometimes see examples of clubs who are sanctioned with fines or bannings because they gave in to temptation and accepted a bid for a player which was far above market value. Many clubs forget about the [url=/about/rules]rule against trading players at prices far above their market value[/url] when they see a really high bid one of their players.

The last thing we want is to ban clubs who don't really intend to cheat, so we have recently made some improvements to the auction system, which will reduce the risk of inadvertently breaking the rules:

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If a player is on the transfer list, then the first bid on the player cannot exceed the transfer list price (previously, you could bid far more than the transfer list price, which only makes sense if you're trying to cheat). Of course, you can still set your [b]auto bid[/b] as high as you want.
Your initial bid on a player who is currently on auction, cannot exceed the current auction price + 1 credit. Of course, you can still set your [b]auto bid[/b] as high as you want.
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While these changes won't eliminate overpriced player sales, they will help honest clubs avoid breaking the rules inadvertently.

The net result will be that fewer clubs will be banned for cheating, when they didn't really intend to. For honest clubs who are looking to buy a new player for their team, the consequences will be negligible, since buyers are obviously not interested in buying players a prices far above market values, anyway.