As raffles are still pretty new it's probably a bit early to be posting this, but I can't imagine I'm the only one getting a little frustrated with this situation.

With only one exception, every raffle my friend and I have entered has been cancelled after a couple days. Granted we get our entry fees back, but we could have been using that stuff on other raffles where we maybe could have actually won something. It seems many players are using raffles more like auctions, able to wait until they feel it's profitable to end 'bidding' and cancelling the whole thing if they don't feel it's profitable enough. I mean, that's understandable and all, but that's now how raffles work. A raffle item is donated and the winner gets it, even if only one person entered. It's a gamble on both ends.

People already run raffles and auctions in the forum where they're free to cancel the whole thing (and oddly canceling seems to happen less often there). And they have their branch or trades if they have a 'minimum buyout', which is what they seem to be going after with raffles.

I'd suggest considering making system-run raffles more... eh, what's the word... official? Concrete? In that players only have 24 hours after creation to modify or cancel a given raffle (in case a mistake was made). This would go excellently with the auto-ending after a chosen time frame planned in the future (I believe it said that was planned in the news). Both prizes and fees go into some kind of escrow until the auction ends and prizes are distributed. If no one enters of course the items go back their owner, or there could be a minimum number of, say, 5 entries/tickets.

Alternatively there could be some sort of 'punishment' for cancelling a raffle, like you can't make a new one for a week or something if you cancel one, or you're charged some fee. Again I understand both sides here but from the contestant side so far it's been more frustrating than fun. Or have we just had spectacularly bad luck at picking auctions? Would be interesting to see the actual numbers of created vs cancelled.

All that said, I think the raffle thing as a whole is a great addition. Just maybe needs a few tweaks here and there.

Interested to hear what others think!