Suggestion Question: Festive Gift, 17 refined, Mindacos

[Baloo]

Link to suggestion for Festive Gift increase from 17 refined to 17.44 refined.
 
 
Case:
 
While my recent suggestion was closed by Mindacos for not being a 5% increase, a suggestion for the Festivizer (the item which comes out of the Festive Gift) was increased from 17 refined to 17.33 refined just 3 days ago with even less buyers than mine at the suggested price.
 
I am fully aware of the gray area 5% change rule, however, I was informed multiple times by members of the community it is okay to raise/lower items valued less than a key by either 5% or 1 reclaimed. I would like an explanation as to the official rule because 5% is not always valid.
 
Here are a few recent suggestions which were accepted with roughly the same price range and price change:
Co-Pilot increased from 16.88 refined to 17.33 refined
Gift Wrap increased from 17 refined to 17.33 refined
Genuine AWPer Hand increased from 18.77 to 19.11 refined
 
Even in recent personal experience I have had a similar suggestion accepted increasing the Strange Festive Wrangler from 16.55 refined to 17 refined.
 
What's more aggravating in all of this is the recent suggestion for the Tour of Duty Ticket increased from 12.77 refined to 13 refined which is a 2 scrap increase, and a 1.7% price change. 
 
Claiming every moderator has their own discretion is not acceptable when it comes to a standardized guideline of knowing whether or not suggestion is valid. Its highly annoying to make suggestions for backpack.tf if all its staff members are not operating with the same set of guidelines.

[The Oddball]

The rule is there to prevent spamming of suggestions.

Since there was one recently, the 5% rule applies.

 

Those other examples are "once in a blue moon" updates.

[Baloo]

The rule is there to prevent spamming of suggestions.

Since there was one recently, the 5% rule applies.

 

Those other examples are "once in a blue moon" updates.

 

Invalid counter point, there was an 8 day delay between my suggestion and the previous one. There was a 5 day delay between the most recent accepted Festivizer suggestion and the previous one, both created by the same person.

[The Oddball]

Invalid counter point, there was an 8 day delay between my suggestion and the previous one. There was a 5 day delay between the most recent accepted Festivizer suggestion and the previous one, both created by the same person.

Then mindacos said that 3 is too many, and the 5% applies. That's the reasoning behind it, but the exact details aren't mine to know. It's because of too many suggestions

[Baloo]

Then mindacos said that 3 is too many, and the 5% applies. That's the reasoning behind it, but the exact details aren't mine to know. It's because of too many suggestions

 

Invalid counter point, this is not for the same item. I suggested for the Festive Gift. My counter-argument for your statement was for the Festivizer. Please read fully.

[Salvage]

Mindacos closes suggestions where sellers indicate that a bigger raise is necessary, that's the case here, other mods don't, ToD tickets don't fall under the 5% rule for whatever reason.

[Baloo]

Mindacos closes suggestions where sellers indicate that a bigger raise is necessary, that's the case here, other mods don't

 

This is not the reason stated by Mindacos when closing my trade. In addition, the difference between buyers and sellers is minimal. There's currently an excess of sellers at 18 refined; many of which are currently buying for 17.44 refined. As someone personally involved in the market with recent listings at 18 refined; I can say I had no luck selling for 18 refined, and there is no evidence I can find to support a price higher than the buyers at 17.44 refined.

 

Additionally, why doesn't the amount of buyers for the Gift Wrap suggestion not lead it to be closed for your suggested reason?

 

ToD tickets don't fall under the 5% rule for whatever reason.

 

As a sidenote, Tour of Duty tickets are not the only suggestions for a two scrap drop to be accepted. However, when I tried to raise the Festive Black Box back up those two scrap; it was denied.

[polar]

Putting it here since you made a thread. Just added one additional thing to my last line.

 

There is no absolute rule that covers every situation. Mods use their experience to determine whether a suggestion is both meaningful and represents the price better than the current price.

 

Our guidelines are not hard and fast rules but, as their name suggests, guidelines. I looked at your suggestion and did not feel it was significantly better than the current price given that actual sales were probably happening significantly higher than that.

 

I'm not sure why this is an issue now. There have always been grey areas and in grey areas it has always been at the mods discretion. If you don't want to be in the situation where you force a mod to make a call one way or another then either make better suggestions using sales or avoid making suggestions changing the value by less than 5% using sellers / buyers alone.

[Baloo]

If you don't want to be in the situation where you force a mod to make a call one way or another then either make better suggestions using sales or avoid making suggestions changing the value by less than 5% using sellers / buyers alone.

 

Fine, I'll also copy-paste:

 

Why should I be making a better suggestion with sales when the Festivizer suggestion which was accepted had less active buyers at the price suggested, likely also had higher sales, and had a shorter cool-down time between suggestions which were created by the same person? I wholly believe that another moderator would have accepted my suggestion, and therefore I find it unacceptable to have a rift in moderator discretion to this extent.

[Teeny Tiny Cat]

That's what moderator discretion is. Not everyone will call it the same. If you want to avoid it, make more solid suggestions that don't require judgement calls.

[Mindacos]

Mindacos closes suggestions where sellers indicate that a bigger raise is necessary, that's the case here, other mods don't, ToD tickets don't fall under the 5% rule for whatever reason.

Salvage is correct, that's one of the reasons why I close most suggestions that present a 5% here.

And to answer your questions, reclaimed changes were never exempt from the 5% rule. This was never a thing, although I can understand why most suggestors decided to pick up that mentality(in the past, most reclaimed changes were considered to be significant enough before keys started stepping up to what they are now).

 

If a suggestion falls under the 5% area, I close it under the judgement that either the change is not justified enough(One seller at 12 ref won't do justice to an item worth 12.33, even if it's the whole market), or the fact that such a change would be completely unnecessary(Whole pages of buyers at 25 and tons of sales/sellers at 25.11 for example, even if it's proven that 25.11 is a more common point it's still a really unnecessary price change). Your suggestion fell under that, which is why I decided to close it.

 

If a suggestor has proven that the >5% change is substantial enough(the seller has an actual sale at the price, or the amount of buyers and sellers is too big to ignore) then usually it's okay to accept such suggestions. The Gift Wrap suggestion you mentioned fell under that with there being almost two whole pages of buyers above the current price, although personally I would've preferred that the suggestion was kept up for higher buyers as they are present right now.

Suggestions with sales instead of buyers and sellers are also much more likely to be accepted should the change be substantial enough. This is not always the case though.

There's also very few unique situations that fall under this, such as fixing an inaccurate suggestion(a sale at 20.55 ref was shown, when it actually sold for 20.33), removing or adding a range(this will still require substantial proof for either end), or anything else that could present itself as a possible one-time thing. Those are generally okay.

 

As for the other suggestions you mentioned, I would've personally closed all of them with the exception of the gift wrap for the reasoning provided above, however as I didn't get to them another mod decided that the price change was good enough on their eyes, and decided to accept them as such.

 

This is my own judgement on 5% suggestions, I only speak for myself when I say this.

 

To put it simply here, if you don't want to risk having a suggestion closed, try to not fall below the 5% change discrepancy. Someone might accept it, someone might close it. You'll only have to worry about inconsistency on these kind of suggestions, which is why I highly suggest that you avoid creating them altogether. That is also why the rule presents such a grey area.

[polar]

to this extent.

 

Look, I'm a big picture kind of guy. At the end of the day, all I care about is that prices are updating meaningfully. A suggestion getting accepted or closed over a <5% change is not a huge deal to me. The suggestions that are really important are the ones for marketable items that have huge discrepancies between our listed refined value and their selling refined and SCM dollar value. And suggestions for items that are really outdated and off by >5%. The scrap difference from 17.33 vs 17.44 is not something I'm going to have a conversation with the mod team about.

 

The point of the 5% rule was to reduce the amount of spam on the website. Sometimes if I see a user spamming <5% suggestions, I'll close them all. But I might accept the same suggestion if it's a one time suggestion made by a user as an honest "mistake."

[Baloo]

If a suggestion falls under the 5% area, I close it under the judgement [...] the fact that such a change would be completely unnecessary(Whole pages of buyers at 25 and tons of sales/sellers at 25.11 for example, even if it's proven that 25.11 is a more common point it's still a really unnecessary price change). Your suggestion fell under that, which is why I decided to close it.

While I personally disagree a suggestion raising a price from 17 refined to 17.44 refined with the lowest classifieds listings at 18 refined is justifiably in the same category as your example, I am not going to argue this point.

 

 

To put it simply here, if you don't want to risk having a suggestion closed, try to not fall below the 5% change discrepancy. Someone might accept it, someone might close it. You'll only have to worry about inconsistency on these kind of suggestions, which is why I highly suggest that you avoid creating them altogether. That is also why the rule presents such a grey area.

 

I am more annoyed with this comment. If some moderators choose to follow the guideline of the 5% change while other do not, then why have it in existence. I am aware of its specific applications, and what it aims to prevent, but moderators' interpretations appear to differ a significant amount between each other. I find it lazy to cover this up with the blanket statement of moderator discretion. The current lack of precedent or use thereof is something I feel should be discussed internally.

 

Additionally, I would like to see how more information could have been provided for the suggestion I listed. All the relevant buyers/sellers are bot operations, so comparing data to find sales is tedious and likely to be inaccurate. I have been told by polar that suggestions are sometimes accepted for simply being closer to the likely value than the current one.

[Baloo]

The scrap difference from 17.33 vs 17.44 is not something I'm going to have a conversation with the mod team about.

 

I am not asking you to do this, I am unsure where this statement comes from. The suggestion I made was for the Festive Gift and the similar suggestion for the Festivizer is what I used to display the discrepancy.

 

Sometimes if I see a user spamming <5% suggestions, I'll close them all. But I might accept the same suggestion if it's a one time suggestion made by a user as an honest "mistake."

 

If the goal of backpack.tf is to convey the most accurate reflection of the market value of an item, then this seems to be a fairly petty and hindering approach. The suggestion reputation point system holds no actually value, but is used solely to incentivize suggestors.

[polar]

 

If the goal of backpack.tf is to convey the most accurate reflection of the market value of an item, then this seems to be a fairly petty and hindering approach.

 

I think you're still not getting the point of the 5% "rule." We have it there to prevent spam. As long as it's reducing the amount of spam we get over meaningless changes, it's doing its job. If some of these suggestions go through, it's fine. No big deal. It doesn't help or hurt the community in a big way.

 

The spam not only hinders the mods by giving twice the number of suggestions to have to evaluate but it hinders voters by burying suggestions we really need them to evaluate with meaningless suggestions.

 

EDIT: Woifi put it best. The "rule" says that <5% is meaningless, but if a certain mod sees a reclaimed change as not fully meaningless, I can't really argue with them. Calling something meaningless is subjective and 5% is an arbitrary number. That's exactly what we mean by at the mod's "discretion." Some of us are still stuck in the mindset of keys being 2 refined and a reclaimed having value. And relatively newer traders and maybe some of the newer mods don't with keys approaching 30 refined.

[Zcrab]

Why is there not a cooldown to go along with the 5% rule?

 

If an item has not been updated in months, a change of <5% would be fine, but if it has been updated within the last couple of days, then it could wait.

[Roller]

Strictly speaking, I am in no position of commenting. I don't even do suggestions often anymore and I'm not as familiar to the current TF2 Market as before. However, I do have some opinions that I want to express.

 

I am more annoyed with this comment. If some moderators choose to follow the guideline of the 5% change while other do not, then why have it in existence. I am aware of its specific applications, and what it aims to prevent, but moderators' interpretations appear to differ a significant amount between each other. I find it lazy to cover this up with the blanket statement of moderator discretion. The current lack of precedent or use thereof is something I feel should be discussed internally.

 

Although I don't know how things work for moderators here, but what I believe is that moderators should all work as a team. It is confusing for suggester-s to follow the rules when moderators does different things. I don't mean that moderators should all have the same opinion, follow strictly to the rules and have an argument on every single suggestion in order to agree at the end, but I think it is really unfair to the suggester if only a small amount of moderator holds this opinion strictly but others does not hold that opinion often. 

 

 

EDIT: Woifi put it best. The "rule" says that <5% is meaningless, but if a certain mod sees a reclaimed change as not fully meaningless, I can't really argue with them. Calling something meaningless is subjective and 5% is an arbitrary number. That's exactly what we mean by at the mod's "discretion." Some of us are still stuck in the mindset of keys being 2 refined and a reclaimed having value. And relatively newer traders and maybe some of the newer mods don't with keys approaching 30 refined.

 

In regards to the 5% rule though, I really feel like this rule is driving bots mad trying to exploit this rule and make profit out of, a scrap at least. If the bots are even hunting down profit like this, is 0.33 ref really an arbitrary value? I know it brings more trouble to the moderating team, but is this 5% rule one of the causes to the TF2 Market now?

[AlwaysBorn]

I'm with Roller on this one, some consistency between moderators would be appreciated.

Experienced this myself two weeks ago where half of my suggestions got accepted and the other half got closed although there was no substantial difference between the suggestions. http://imgur.com/a/al4fZ

[Baloo]

Alright, I still have an unanswered question I asked which have not been addressed, so if a moderator could please respond to it, then it would be appreciated.
 
In regards to:
 

If you don't want to be in the situation where you force a mod to make a call one way or another then either make better suggestions using sales [...]

I asked:
 

[...] I would like to see how more information could have been provided for the suggestion I listed. All the relevant buyers/sellers are bot operations, so comparing data to find sales is tedious and likely to be inaccurate. I have been told by polar that suggestions are sometimes accepted for simply being closer to the likely value than the current one.

[Baloo]

Some of us [moderators] are still stuck in the mindset of keys being 2 refined and a reclaimed having value. And relatively newer traders and maybe some of the newer mods don't with keys approaching 30 refined.

Additionally, addressing this quote, I personally feel this type of approach to explaining moderator discretion more shows a lack of adaptation by moderators to a changing Team Fortress 2 economy. When I posted a thread about my thoughts on current suggestions; polar said:

 

Can't compare how suggestions are done now to how they used to be done because trading is very different.

Would I be incorrect to also expect moderators of the most widely used pricing guide to adapt to the changing economy instead of being stuck in the past?