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I can agree to this to some extent. More effort should be put to ban more users and for longer periods of time, because what we see so far follows the same pattern - user is banned for a couple of days, got told why, but when suspension is lifted they continue to do the same thing. Because "EveRyoNE vAluEs GAmeS dIFferENtlY" . All of them are using this statement, and somehow offers are always in their favor using gg.deals prices, never the other way around, often not by a small margin either.
Also there is excuse of offering unbundled game for bundled ones which they think is such a big deal. No, your Days Gone which is unbundled and got great reviews for my DiRT 5 which is bundled and has mixed reviews plus one or two other games is still not a good offer. But hey, unbundled AAA beats everything, right...
Separate forum topic should be created just for reporting unfair offers which should make things move faster. Or report button would be a welcoming choice too, just like you said yourself.
I don't think the same. Because we don't make offers based on what was back then, rather what the situation is currently. Midnight Suns will be offered for Dark Souls 2 / DS3 / Crash / CoD WWII surely, but you will never see it the other way around.
People should not be incentivized just to act decently. If you tell them not to rob a small local store they should take that advice, and not telling you - hey, those guys are robbing a bank, why are you telling me what to do, they are worse.
There are around 20-30 major offenders / resellers.
Each of them creates and receives on average around 50 offers per day (rough estimate based on the daily stats of the top 10 major offenders). Some more than that, some less, depending on which days they're active, or how much time they have on their hands.
Factor in the occasional user of Enhanced Barter, who spams out 100-200 offers in one go.
Adding all these up, it's rather easy to see that the majority of all offers on the site are unbalanced (resellers will want at least x2-x3 the value offered and often much more than that, Enhanced Barter offers aren't checked and are usually "anything I have in my tradables for anything I have on my wishlist, regardless of rarity / bundle count / value").
With the majority of offers being reseller offers or unbalanced offers, there's literally very little space for people to use other evaluation methods than GG.deals pricing. Resellers always hide behind the excuse of "everyone has a different valuing system", but they obviously NEVER use an evaluation system other than grey market pricing. Hence, whether they like it or not, in order to protect themselves from lowball offers, regular users also have to adopt this evaluation system.
On the other hand, GG.deals pricing has already proven to be the most solid evaluation system, even in a fictional world in which resellers don't exist.
Retail price / bundle count is not a good choice for a metric, as you can't compare a $20 game that was bundled 7 times with a $20 game that is new-to-bundle.
H:W or Tradable:Library ratios are also not a good choice for a base metric. You can't say that a trash DIG key with 5 tradables is "rarer" (= more valuable?) than a Choice headliner with 400 tradables.
The GG.deals pricing metric is actually a metric of the global interest that gamers have in a game. It essentially incorporates all these other aspects (bundle count / value, retail price, rarity). It naturally adjusts itself with every new bundle and with every fluctuation in ownership / tradable counts. It also naturally adjusts itself on games becoming a rarity after they get delisted / disabled.
This leads us to the conclusion that the best thing one can do when evaluating an incoming offer is to use the GG.deals pricing as the base system, and refine it based on all other secondary factors (bundle counts, ratios etc), together with their own interest in the game offered and willingness to overpay for it.
So if the GG.deals metric reigns supreme, why not make it mandatory on Barter?
The policy you mentioned in the OP reflects the ways that this platform *was* and *is* meant to be used. Should the policy be changed just because those 20-30 individuals (and their alts) continuously misuse it? Isn't it better to deal with the issue at hand instead and return the platform to its original form, which will then allow users to freely choose between applying GG.deals pricing or other metrics to evaluate their offers? Like you said, not everyone likes to math out every offer, and while this is currently needed for personal protection, with a more balanced offer distribution this will become optional once again.
This is the goal that we're currently working on, and enforcing GG.deals policy is not something we want to do long-term. We strongly recommend using it in the current stage and for now we're trying to make users aware of the current situation by leaving short comments on their offers until we find a better way to convey this message.
a) and b) are definitely our top goals.
c) is not something that can ever be achieved, but we're aiming towards closing down the value gap between the two parties. It's not wrong to overpay a bit for a game that you can't get from bundles (by using your older bundle keys), but it's wrong to demand several times its value or often several dozens of USD / EUR price difference. There's a limit to how greedy one should be allowed to be.
This topic has been in discussion for years.
While integrating gg.deals into the site would probably make things easier in evaluating offers, there are several problems with it.
1) Our direct association to grey market sites, which is something we would like to avoid. Unfortunately it's not that easy when the site is overrun by resellers, but explicitly adding links to GG would create a public association between the two platforms. It's different when you have it officially integrated on Barter, and when you have a userscipt that does it for you (Enhanced Barter). The userscript makes it optional and a personal user choice.
2a) The lack of an API that can provide accurate GG.deals information. As you probably know, GG doesn't make any difference between platforms or whether the item is a Steam key or a Steam gift. The price returned is the minimum of these all.
2b) The unexplored legality of taking aggregated grey market pricing from these websites
3) Lacking the resources (time, manpower) to code such an indexer.
4) GG.deals / allkeyshop both heavily make use of reflinks, which admittedly ITAD also does. However, the reflinks on GG.deals / allkeyshop are intentionally hidden under other URLs, while ITAD clearly shows them by placing a heart symbol next to the link.
In regards to reporting users, this might not be such a bad idea, although so far the admin tried as much as possible to avoid pointing fingers at anyone. For example, a lot of users asked us to add a visible flag next to those 20-30 profiles so that the receiving parties would be instantly warned, but the admin is currently opposed to doing that.
This is what we initially tried to do. However this resulted in:
- resellers cancelling the offers we commented on, and re-creating them to have a "clean" comments section.
- if they didn't cancel the offers, they made sure to add some troll comment on top of ours, like an emoji symbol or "lol", to make our comment less visible
- in other cases, they added comments along the lines of "Bart-ee is an idiot, don't listen to someone who has 6 completed offers on Barter, listen to me instead, as I have 2000 completed offers and obviously more experience!"
This taught us that declining offers is pretty much the only thing that we can do because:
- this proves that Bart-ee's comment should be taken from the perspective of a mediator / moderator, and not from some random user who happens to chime in on your offer
- it's the only way to keep an offer history (cancelled offers "disappear" from the visible list and unless you have the offer id stored somewhere, you can't access them any more).
Ultimately declining offers is not a big deal, as no one stops the receiving party to re-send a declined offer if they want to do the exchange, but on the other hand this has the advantage of protecting the user for potentially accepting an offer that they would otherwise might regret accepting. We received a lot of "I wish I'd seen your comment before sending out my keys" feedback.
These stats are already visible on each profile, they're one click away... but do people ever access / consider them, I wonder?
Throttling offers might seem like a good idea, but in practice, resellers will just complete fake trades between mains and alts so that they can send more and more offers, or just use an army of alts to achieve the amount of offers that are currently sent out from a single profile. Resellers already commonly use several profiles in parallel.
Plus, Enhanced Barter users will heavily complain that they are restricted to sending only 10 offers instead their usual 100. In some ways this would be a big benefit for us, as these Enhanced Barter matches (especially for big profiles) are extremely heavy on the database resources, often slowing down the site for everyone else.
it's not our first instinct, but mere warnings or other polite exchanges didn't prove effective so far. Asking users to change their offers and make them more balanced resulted in either our request being ignored, or us being showered in a set of very colorful insults.
We would like to reward positive behavior, but we're failing to find any positive behavior in those 20-30 profiles when all offers are sent with the clear intention of sharking. In the very rare cases in which those users make an effort to correct their behavior, we are surely much more lenient if they happen to send an unfair offer again.
To answer one of the most questions asked around here "why was my offer cancelled and not X's?": we're aware that not everyone receives the same treatment, but that's just a matter of time. Right now, we can't possibly go through 2000 offers per day (just like you clearly observed). We're looking only at a fraction of them, and X's offer might not have been cancelled because it was not caught in the current filters that we use, or we didn't get to process it before it was accepted. However, if a profile constantly sends unfair offers, they will be dealt with, sooner or later.
But even then: is every humble choice game to be priced at bundle cost divided by quantity? This is usually 8 titles at around 8 to 9 pounds. It's obvious that you get 1 or 2 headliner games / a few medium level / then something fairly average.
Even if the grey-market didn't exist, and users were enforcing their own values without gg deals, you'd have to be intellectually deficient to think they would be "fair".
Bigger RRP? First time bundled? The game isn't crap and lots of people want it? It would be daft to think that most users (not just resellers) won't bloat its value, even when offered something that literally cost the same to buy (however the heck you figure out the cost in the first place)
As much as I'd like to think barter could be better without the need for strong-arming people, in practice it will still be a sh*t-show because that's how people make it. There's group buys if you want fair practices that are actually enforced, but then it's hard to find the games that you want, because everybody always takes those.
What's your take on the ever-present users, that literally offer every game on everyone's wishlist?
They seem to profit most of barter.vg but for the most part might be in line with your evaluation of a fair/balanced trade. (Altough their trades usually favor themselves, it might not be excessive, like multiples of their own value etc.) Are they just gaming the site's mechanics / policies right?
Regarding reporting unfair traders / trade offers, you said as much (Makki before you suggested a thread for this purpose):
IMO this should not be about reporting users (or even add a stigma to their profile), but about reporting unfair offers. If you're scanning for unbalanced trades regularly, you might as well tap into the swarm intelligence of all users to support you and to make this process more efficient.
Excellent post. We keep getting told that there are obviois resellers, but nothing ever gets done about them. Such a strange, ineffective system.
Sorry, but *nothing ever gets done about them* is an exaggerated statement, considering that several moderators spend a few hours per day checking offers. Also, just by looking at the comments on Bart-ee's Steam profile and on this forum, it's sure easy to see that several of these people are complaining about being given *unfair* (they say) suspensions?
This announcement might also throw some light on our current and future work.
Results show, just by using the site, that resellers are rampant (so nothing seems to be happening to them), and people who just want to trade and play games are being pushed off of Barter to do that.
Have you read the announcement, especially the part starting from 01 Feb?
Please stop with your unfounded accusations.
“We know you’re an exploitative reseller, so here’s 25 chances at a time.”
“Unfounded”? Have you not noticed what every single thread here is about? At what point does it move from “unfounded” to accountability?
The 25 chances was designed for people like you and not for resellers, to give a lot of leeway to regular users. If we scale that down to 5, you'd be 20% on your way to a suspension, and you certainly don't deserve to be that far towards one.
On the other hand, resellers that have a traffic of ~50 offers per day would reach that threshold in a matter of hours...
And it's not 25 completed offers, but 25 sent-out offers in which we have to intervene (which are probably most of the ones that they send out, if they keep making offers the same way they did until now).
Perhaps it was not clear enough from the announcement, but we are currently still working on ways for people to choose whether they accept their incoming offers to be mediator-declined for their own protection, commented on, or no intervention at all. After most of the users will have made a choice, we will rethink those values for suspensions.
House flipper: 3,48
Magenta horizon: 3,66
House Flipper ~3,48€
vs:
Degrees of Separation ~7,27€
Magenta Horizon ~4,17€
Who's Your Daddy?! ~6,82€
2/3 games that the user could have picked are basically twice the value you offered, yet you don't mention them because it would make you look bad.
Makes total sense.
Also worth mentioning that Magenta Horizon is on the users wishlist as well as in their tradedables, so the game that is supposed to make this offer 'fair' was the least likely to be picked anyway.
Sending an unfair offer is not the problem in this case in my eyes. It is coming here to lie and say it was a fair one just to make mods look like they are abusing users on the site
RIght, that's why i came here and posted the link. To not make myself 'look bad'
1 to 1 for Magenta Horizon would have been fair, no? I added those options i would rather have those and if they wanted to get rid of them more for some reason they could have accepted it for one of those. Win win situation if you ask me.
'Lying'
He declined an offer where i gave the user a fair option. Sure there were 2 unfair options, which the user could have simply ignored.
What happens if the user has a 10% chance of accepting a "fair" offer (1 game of similar value, 9 of considerably higher value)? Does it still make the offer fair?
At what percentage are we allowed to start calling an offer "unfair"?