One gamer's bundle leftovers are another's wishlist games

New Changes on Barter.vg: Offer Interventions & Rules

For the longest period of time, Barter.vg was a place where no explicitly codified trading rules were enforced. On the one hand, this allowed everyone to create their own value system and to trade according to it. On the other hand, a certain set of users interpreted the lack of rules as an opportunity to take advantage of those who don't trade based on a grey-market value system (especially inexperienced users) by sending them low-value games in exchange for their more valuable ones, that they then resell on the grey market for a considerable profit.

For some this became a real business, sending out dozens of abusive offers on a daily basis, fishing for every last valuable key that any other trader owns and competing against each other to snatch them first.

During the past year, these ill-intended users multiplied exponentially together with their unfair offers, but so did the complaints from the community, asking us to do something about it. As such, a new mediation system had to be created, where mediators obtained the right to intervene and decline unfair offers. The intention of these actions was to protect users from getting taken advantage of, together with increasing user awareness. Fewer unfair offers sent to you means a better chance of getting more balanced offers for your tradables. In milder cases, comments can be left on an offer instead of outright declining them, to inform you of grey market valuation.

For instance, during the month of December 2023, 1026 such offers were proactively declined by a mediator in the pending stage, with some users even reaching 50-100 mediator-declined offers. This already is a rather high number of offers, considering that in the same month, only 7005 offers were completed (the ratio between mediator-declined offers and completed offers being almost 1:7). Abusive offers that were not caught in time are not included in this count, and even though many community members help out by pointing out questionable offers on the Discord, we understandably also do not have the manpower or time to look at every last offer.

We initially focused our efforts on offers sent to new users and users with low trade count, and as we received plenty of positive feedback from those users, we will continue applying and extending this system.

In addition to that, starting February 1 2024, a few new restrictions (rules) will be added. We designed these rules to help protect users from abusive offers. As conditions change, we may update these rules in response.

• Temporary suspensions will be given to users who repeatedly send abusive offers, especially in cases of substantial value difference (lowballing), unreasonable profit, or exploiting the freebie of the week.
  
• Every 25 cases of mediator-declined outgoing offers will result in a temporary suspension of 5 days.
  
• Repeated offenses will increase the suspension period to 10 days, 15 days, 21 days, 30 days and eventually a permanent suspension.
  
• Automatic offers and multi-user offers will also be subjected to these guidelines. Users who send out offers using Enhanced Barter have the responsibility of checking that these automatic offers are fair / reasonable.
  
• Evaluating curator activations with their corresponding gg.deals / allkeyshop prices does not imply that the offer is fair even if the requested games have a similar grey market price. These curator copies are not meant to be traded away, they are received for free from developers for review purposes and not for obtaining some profit off them.
  
• Re-sending a mediator-declined offer can also be considered an intentional offense or harassment of the recipient. If the recipient wants to complete the declined trade, they can recreate it from their end.
  
• If you are suspended, that means you have a timeout, not that you should switch to the next alt account and pretend you do not. No form of ban evasion is permitted.
  
• The offer comments, forum, Discord and private chat with trade partners were all not invented for users to practice slurs. Like anywhere else, the unwillingness to stay civil can lead to expulsion.

• Regular users: you might see some of your incoming offers as "Declined (mediator action)". This means the offer was determined to be substantially unfair to you and accordingly had to be declined. If you really wish to do that trade anyway, no one stops you from sending the same offer back to the sender.
  
• Resellers: try to send out fairer offers and be less greedy. Expect offers for 2-3 times the value to be declined.
  
• Curator traders: evaluate your games more fairly – you received your copy for free, trade it for a couple of dollars at most, don't expect dozens of dollars of profit out of it.

Simply go to https://barter.vg/u/my/#offer and choose whatever degree of mediator-intervention you desire from the available choices under “Offer Interventions”.

• Malicious users will try to circumvent this system in various ways. For example, they could push you into accepting a deal before mediators have a chance to see it, or even attempt to propose deals to you outside of Barter so that mediators and other site users do not see them at all. We have also encountered users that claim only they know how to evaluate games fairly, or who repeat that “everybody has a different value system” while themselves clearly trading for profit judged by grey market pricing. From review copy traders, we have encountered claims that they “have the developers’ consent to do whatever they wish with their games”, or that curator activations are “superior” to keys because they cannot be revoked (and thus should be seen as very valuable).
  
• You might be told that the other party requires an extra key for "a friend" – this is very rarely the case, as that "friend" is usually the grey market. Be especially wary of users asking for gift links, even if they claim those to be for giveaways or charitable causes. Accounts that don’t own (m)any games, don’t have game activity outside of card farming, have just been freshly created, or have entirely private profiles are very unlikely to redeem your keys themselves.
  
• Make a habit of checking if the other party has your games already listed in their "tradable" / "wishlist (extra)" collections, while also having them in their library; these are most often signs that the other trader is a reseller. "wishlist (custom)" means the game was manually wishlisted on Barter, which might or might not imply retrading / reselling.
  
• Curator copies are only available to officers of the curator group, thus trading for such a copy will require you to join the group and temporarily be promoted to the officer status so you can have access to the admin panel. These games do not “+1” your profile game count and do not drop Steam Trading Cards. While trading curator copies is not forbidden on Barter.vg (we can't order you to find this practice morally wrong), it is still strongly discouraged. Tagging tradeables as curator is in the interest of accuracy and transparency. Some traders like to claim that we condone these trades – that is simply false. For more information on our stance, see the Barter disclaimer about trading curator copies[barter.vg].
  
• How is it possible to judge fairness? This guide[github.com] might help you.