Auctions & offers

Proxy bidding, anti-snipe, offers with escrow, grand auctions and the mailbox that guarantees nothing is lost.

Gavel v1.0.0Paper · Folia supported1.21 – 1.21.x

Timed auctions

/ah auction <starting bid> [buyout] [hours] lists the item in your hand as a timed auction. An optional buyout price ends it instantly for anybody willing to pay it.

Minimum increments

plugins/Gavel/config.yml

bidding:  min-increment-percent: 5.0  min-increment-flat: 1.0

The required raise is the larger of the two. On a 20 item the flat 1 wins; on a 200,000 item the 5% does. This keeps low-value auctions from needing forty bids and high-value ones from being nudged up in meaningless increments.

Proxy bidding

YAML

bidding:  proxy-bidding: true

eBay-style: a bidder sets their maximum, and Gavel raises for them by the minimum increment whenever they are outbid, up to that maximum. Players do not have to sit and watch a timer.

The maximum is what gets escrowed

Gavel holds the full maximum in escrow, not the currently visible bid. Escrowing only the visible amount would let automatic raises fail later against an empty balance — the bidder would silently stop winning without knowing why.

Anti-snipe

YAML

bidding:  anti-snipe:    enabled: true    trigger-window-seconds: 15    extend-seconds: 15    max-extensions: 20

A bid inside the last 15 seconds pushes the end time out by 15 seconds. Sniping — waiting until one second remains so nobody can respond — stops working, and the item goes to whoever actually values it most.

max-extensions is the safety valve: after 20 extensions the auction ends regardless, so a bidding war cannot keep an auction alive indefinitely.

Refunds

YAML

bidding:  refund-on-outbid: true

Losing bidders are refunded the instant they are outbid. The alternative — escrowing nothing and settling at the end — is available but not recommended: it produces auctions whose winner cannot pay because they spent the money elsewhere while the auction ran.

Broadcasts

YAML

bidding:  broadcast-above: 100000

Bids above this are announced server-wide. 0 disables it. This is the setting that makes an auction house feel busy — set it low enough that something is announced a few times an hour, high enough that it is not spam.

Offers

YAML

offers:  enabled: true  min-percent-of-price: 40.0  expire-hours: 24  max-open-per-player: 5  escrow: true

On a buy-it-now listing, a buyer can propose a lower price. The seller accepts or declines from /ah offers.

min-percent-of-price stops lowball spam. 40% is a sensible floor — below that it is not a negotiation, it is noise.
escrow: true holds the money while the offer is open, so an accepted offer always completes.
max-open-per-player (5) prevents one buyer carpet-bombing every listing on the page with offers.

Offers that expire release the escrow automatically.

Grand auctions

YAML

grand-auction:  enabled: true  default-duration-seconds: 120  extend-window-seconds: 10  extend-seconds: 10  min-increment-percent: 5.0  bossbar-color: "YELLOW"  bossbar-style: "SEGMENTED_10"  broadcast-every-nth-bid: 1  announce-title: true

A server-wide live auction on a single item, started by staff:

BASH

/aha grandauction 5000 180

Everyone bids at once — from the menu or with /ah grandbid <amount> — with a bossbar countdown visible to the whole server. It has its own anti-snipe window, and /aha stopauction ends it early with the current leader winning.

Turn down the broadcast on a busy server

broadcast-every-nth-bid: 1 announces every single bid. On a server with 80 players bidding on a mending book, set it to 3 or 5 or chat becomes unreadable.

Grand auctions are the single best event tool in the plugin: a two-minute live auction on something rare pulls people out of their bases and into the same conversation.

The mailbox

YAML

mailbox:  purge-after-days: 0  notify-on-join: true

Everything that could otherwise be lost lands here:

items from listings that expired unsold
items from listings you cancelled
items you won at auction
items an admin sent with /aha give

Nothing is ever deleted silently. purge-after-days: 0 means never purge, and that is the recommended value — the mailbox is the anti-item-loss guarantee, and a purge turns the guarantee into a deadline your players did not agree to.

notify-on-join: true warns a player on login if they have unclaimed mail, which is what keeps the mailbox from quietly filling up in the first place.

Cancelling

YAML

auction:  cancel-fee-percent: 0.0

Cancelling an active listing returns the item to the mailbox. The listing fee is never refunded — that is what makes it a deterrent against spam listing. cancel-fee-percent adds an extra cost on top if you want cancelling to hurt more.

Auctions with active bids cannot be cancelled. Allowing it would let a seller back out the moment bidding went a direction they disliked, which makes bidding pointless.