Weedwhacker said:
I seem to be having trouble getting my mind around this tonight... but actually I still am not all that keen on having the incremental daily increase in the number of dibs. Does the setup allow a host to specify a certain number of dibs daily -- say 5/day -- that just stays constant? Maybe I'm just overthinking the 'possible' ways to abuse the system, but it seems like having such a large number of dibs after just a few days somewhat encourages people to go through the list of available seeds at that point and scoop up everything that's left, which, while fair according to the rules, somehow does not seem right to me. 
I think this would be more of an issue if the people giving the seeds were doing so grudgingly. In my swap and in the beta, we're excited to see our extra seeds go to new homes! We're not going to use them anyway, so it's better they go to people who will.
As for the method of increase in the tickets, it's actually a brilliant design, but the host can go in and change it. The way it works is it starts out small so that not everyone gets everything they want the first night, usually (which keeps things fun and exciting) and it keeps any one user from callings dibs on TONS of items the first night to where others don't get anything they wanted (keeping it fair). The number increases, though, because after the first few nights most people are satisfied they got their top favorites and now is onto their second tier of favorites. If it didn't increase, the swap trading time would have to be SO LONG. It would probably need to be a month long, and people would get impatient, bored, or too busy to continue with it being drawn out so long.
I think the big factor to consider here is there seems to ALWAYS be far more packets of seeds available and far more tickets provided in the end than anyone ever uses. There are always extras. It would be different if there were only a hundred seed packets and twenty members...but that's not the case. That is also why swap hosts can set rules stating minimum numbers of seed contributions or maximum packet requests. It hasn't seemed necessary in the swaps I've been in, though.
The swap host can also change the multiplier mid-swap, too. For instance, I wanted the first night to be 3 dibs, but I upped it to a multiplier of 4 the second night so that members had 8 dibs the second night (I left it at 4 which meant the third night was 12 tickets, fourth night was 16...) If it ever became a problem, the host could theoretically bump the ticket multiplier down. For example, if the host started with a multiplier of 5 and realized on day five that 25 tickets was too many, they could bump the multiplier down to, say, 2 for day six and everyone would only get 12 tickets. With good contributions, though, I don't see this as ever being necessary. It seems the bulk of people are generous and more than compensate for the unlikely greedy person. It seems hard to believe there would be someone 'greedy', but I suppose it could happen anywhere, even on ATP. I haven't seen it yet and no one can be any more greedy than anyone else, really, since everyone gets the same number of tickets and the host can set minimum contributions.
My minimum contribution requirement was set to only 3 packets and everyone blew that out of the water, pretty much.
In my swap we have one person who doesn't have a ton of contributions because their yard is a blank slate and that person felt bad requesting items but everyone in our group was more than happy (excited, even) to be giving their unwanted seeds to help that person fill up their garden.
