I've been selling Black Symurghs lately cheap in the pet trades. By cheap I mean 10 silver starting bid with a 100 silver buyout. Anyone can afford this and that is the point. The point of the project, which I have called "Project Overpopulate," is to make these Symurghs available to all. However, there's been a problem with this. There have been a number of inconsiderate users who have come along each day and bought every single Symurgh I've had up in trades. Yesterday I incuded a message along these lines, and here was the message I included in every sale today::

ATTENTION BUYERS
The Black Symurghs I am selling are a part of my Project Overpopulate and are meant to be sold cheap so they are made available for all users. I would like to ask that users limit themselves to buying one a day; it isn't fair for them to be first come, first served. If people continue to snatch them all up I will have to cancel my project.

Do you think it's fair for these users to be doing this? I could make a thread in the pet sales and sell the Symurghs out that way, it's true, but I honestly don't want to do that. It's more work than this project should be and people should know better than to do this when there is something explicitly saying not to. I even have the large bolded letters to help draw attention to the message.

Yeah, there are quite a few people like that, if the pet is cheap, then they'll just buy them up, and either resell, or use for their own purposes; you can't really change a person's nature. (It's kind of like how there are quite a few players that 'hog' 2+ spots in the weekly charts, for battle, even if they may be well off, gold-wise.)

There are quite a few counters, but the best I can think of is raise the price (players can easily enough afford 1500 silver a day, because of voting).

Also, there are that many players that don't read them notices, from what I can tell (myself included), since all they have to do is scroll down / press the 'End' key, then press buy out, when they see a pet that's cheap / they like.

I shouldn't have to do anything to counter it though, and it annoys me that I might have to if I wish to continue the project. I know it's a good deal but if people continue to abuse and take advantage of my project in this way then there is no point in me continuing with it, since the project would be a failure. I wanted to be able to sell these pets cheap, dirt cheap, to help get them out there. The pairs I'm breeding have pretty decent genes, and GP, so these Symurghs aren't low quality; they just aren't researched since I wouldn't be able to afford that with how many I am breeding.

An even more effective counter, I think, would be for me to simply change the 100 buyout to the starting bid and increase the buyout to, say, 10k. 10k is low enough to be affordable if someone wants to buy the put out but I think it would be enough to deter anyone out to buy them all.  Even more effective would be for me to just sell through the forums since I could regulate it that way. Even pounding the pets would lead to them going to new homes, for free for the adopter, and I would even make 400 silver more profit off of them than I do now. Although I shouldn't have to do any of these and it isn't about the silver.

Delete please.

I hope I didnt buy any, any with good GP I wouldnt of bought. When I have to get portal fodder from the auctions I get common species with red genes. I hope I didnt buy any.

I have a suggestion that may help you if you don't want to do forum post. Make no buyout, just make it a couple days long at the normal bid price for them. Atleast then the newer players would have a better chance than they would for someone stalking the auctions. Or what Wireath said and make a 1500 buyout which I think would deter people who want super cheap pets. Last ditch effort would be making a forum post for it so that the same person can't buy them all up.

Sylviianel,  let me make it up to  you. Let me send you Jet and some others. This uncomfortable silence has to end.

This does not belong here.... Please keep personal issues in private PM's as this post does not relate to the topic of the original post. Thank you

-Moderator Message

Personally, I like the idea of a 100 starting bid, 10k buyout best, because a 1500 buyout is still relatively low, low enough for one person to still buy up a bunch at once. And having no buyout would mean the symurgh goes to whoever has the most time to stalk the pet trades, which would exclude many players who just don't have that kind of time. Though the forum selling would probably be the best way of regulating sales and keeping prices low, it would also definitely be the most work.

Of course, as someone who still has no black symurgh and would love to obtain one somehow, I'm pretty biased.

As Sumatra_Echo supported and you originally proposed, Sylvaniiel, a 10k buyout should deter the mass-buyers.

As a side note, I got lucky enough to pick up a black female Symurgh with Fertility from the pound, and wouldn't mind helping out with your project (although she already had a few breedings when I picked her up...).  Let me know if you would like my assistance!

 Sylvii, this may not make a difference, but I just checked your list of bred symurghs, and they seem to be pretty evenly distributed. Of the roughly ten or twelve other users to possess your symurghs, only two possess more than one, and only one possesses three. Of these three outlier users, two are newbies who started in June. 

...I hope it's not creepy that I looked that up. I just thought I'd check it out to see how rampant the problem was. 

Edit: I just realized how late this is compared to the original post. Please disregard if the situation has changed.