Adding a new rule about guaranteed information

[AsrielDreemurr544]

As you know, there are a lot of arguments going on right now regarding abc's report, and about if he did do unbalanced trades or not. I think that we should be mostly thinking is if we should let new/low bp value users have complete knowledge of the value of what they are trading, and if they acknowledge fully that their could have had sold for higher. Even if cmp sent the backpack links to their items and showing that he is the highest buy order, which is a good point, it does not excuse the fact that most of them barely had knowledge about trading, and, it is my opinion, but I feel like they didn't fully know that these items were/could've been highly valued. Sure we can't price a new unusual item that just came out/having no community value and yes it could be anti-beneficial for traders, but it would be far better than letting some do unbalanced trades on new items on traders having no knowledge about TF2 trading.

I am conscious it can present some flaws and I am more than welcome for any negative or positive suggestion on how to improve it, and I wanna make sure it can reduce the amount of unbalanced trades.
Oh and yeah I know some of these trades considered unbalanced are often losses, abc told me a lot of them already like his sunbeams oni and patriot peak, but these were a small ratio amount compared to how much time he sold an item and make profit.

[Zeus_Junior]

I see where you’re coming from but this is impossible

 

You’re dealing with the fact that item values are subjective, change over time and that nobody will ever directly tell someone else what their hat is worth. Not scammers and not actual traders either

 

The reverse of this: someone offers you 60 on your hat with other sellers at 40, are you gonna tell them they can get it cheaper? No.

Same way nobody will tell someone they can get more for their hat

 

Applying a rule that states “you need to tell the person who’s hat you’re buying what you intend to sell for”, which is essentially what this is, really serves no purpose other than increase the burden on everyone and create confusion about what you as a regular trader need to do to stay “clear”

[hollowka]

not to be a douche or anything but

 

cmp should be banned because of obvious sharking.

 

also if you unbox a valuable item, you play that video game the item is from,  the least you can do is try to price check it, or at least have an effort to do so. 

if you accept the trade of a sharker, it's on you, not on the community's fault. the community is really helpful as is. you don't need to do more for "newbies, new traders or clueless ones"

help yourself and God will help you. 

[Heidecker]

Simply dont load new items to the premium database by default, give people the option to enable/disable them being loaded to the db or hide the account name by default. Connect that to the ability to use backpack for buy/sell orders etc, "if you want to use the site for trading, you need to feed the db with your item/account info"

 

90% of the affected people don't even have their items listed and don't advertise them anywhere, absolutely zero need for them to be loaded besides premium users wanting to buy/shark them.

 

[AsrielDreemurr544]

It kinda all started with abc's situation Zeus, he was "in the rules" despite being banned everywhere, which should be a big red flag. Then, yes I am conscious about what you mean, but that's primarily how low backpack value users clueless to trading learn that it could have been sold for higher. Furthermore, he's using his buy orders to show that he's the highest guy offering on a hat ; buy orders are mainly created and used when someone knows already a value of its item and as of his motivations of how, it can differ from being tired of selling a hat to needing money. However, abc has been using these to show that he's the highest offer to low backpack users that aren't used at all at trading on TF2, that barely know what buy orders and sell orders are, and that's mostly the only reason of why they are mainly accepting the highest offers, thinking it's full value. 

[AsrielDreemurr544]

13 minutes ago, Heidecker said:

Simply dont load new items to the premium database by default, give people the option to enable/disable them being loaded to the db or hide the account name by default. Connect that to the ability to use backpack for buy/sell orders etc, "if you want to use the site for trading, you need to feed the db with your item/account info"

 

90% of the affected people don't even have their items listed and don't advertise them anywhere, absolutely zero need for them to be loaded besides premium users wanting to buy/shark them.

 

That'd be a great feature, I'd be 100% for, my fear would be if someone else makes an alternative of that feature being "ehanced" by, for exemple, being free or loading everyone in a premium search, that'd be a threat for backpack as the premium service is their base "income", so I doubt they would.
Still, that'd be actually super useful

[Littlepudintater]

brah I'd rather have premium search just removed, its a tool that exclusively does way more harm than good lol

[Flaim]

  

3 hours ago, hollowka said:

if you accept the trade of a sharker, it's on you, not on the community's fault. the community is really helpful as is. you don't need to do more for "newbies, new traders or clueless ones"

help yourself and God will help you. 

noobs gonna be noobs. And I genuinely have 0 remorse for people who get sharked. I know that's gonna be an unpopular opinion, but I just don't see why someone who doesn't have the patience to wait, the confidence to ignore, and the intelligence to check deserves the full price for an item. I know there's obviously an argument that they took the financial risk to unlock crates and create that item, but I don't care. I'd rather have items in collectors inventories or floating around traders than stuck on noobs accounts that go inactive

[Heidecker]

3 minutes ago, Littlepudintater said:

brah I'd rather have premium search just removed, its a tool that exclusively does way more harm than good lol

 

Yeah but that sadly won't ever happen, gotta find a compromise.

[Littlepudintater]

Just now, Heidecker said:

 

Yeah but that sadly won't ever happen, gotta find a compromise.

yeah i know im #venting
 

[Scott Bakula]

The problem is that you can idiot-proof something as much as possible, but the universe then just makes a better idiot.

[WinterWhiz]

I think we should adapt a concept known as "Communo-Capitalism" where we every so often kill the top 1% of traders alive and their wealth then gets distributed equally amongst the populace. Now sure: the 1% will probably try to find loopholes around this. But what they have to keep in mind is that the rest of the rich people are also trying to find those same loopholes. So at the end of the day, the top 1% is still getting culled. Nobody will know exactly, how rich everybody else is. Only the state, who's keeping track of it. So the rich will just have to guess, how much money they need to get rid of, in order to get out of the 1%. This will result in rich people donating all their money to charities. And of course, if those charity leaders get too successful, then we'll have to kill them as well. But really, thats a sacrifice they should be willing to make. Year after year will go by, the top 1% will rise, fall and their cash will be redistributed equally. Finally, we get to kill the super rich and have anarcho-capitalism! what is there not to love?

 

And if anyone tries to cheat the system too hard - we'll just kill 'em!

Finally, a perfect system, that will unite all extremes!

Ha-Ha! Why hasn't anyone hired me to write policy yet?

[Colonel Johnson]

50 minutes ago, WinterWhiz - n0ne said:

I think we should adapt a concept known as "Communo-Capitalism" where we every so often kill the top 1% of traders alive and their wealth then gets distributed equally amongst the populace. Now sure: the 1% will probably try to find loopholes around this. But what they have to keep in mind is that the rest of the rich people are also trying to find those same loopholes. So at the end of the day, the top 1% is still getting culled. Nobody will know exactly, how rich everybody else is. Only the state, who's keeping track of it. So the rich will just have to guess, how much money they need to get rid of, in order to get out of the 1%. This will result in rich people donating all their money to charities. And of course, if those charity leaders get too successful, then we'll have to kill them as well. But really, thats a sacrifice they should be willing to make. Year after year will go by, the top 1% will rise, fall and their cash will be redistributed equally. Finally, we get to kill the super rich and have anarcho-capitalism! what is there not to love?

 

And if anyone tries to cheat the system too hard - we'll just kill 'em!

Finally, a perfect system, that will unite all extremes!

Ha-Ha! Why hasn't anyone hired me to write policy yet?

 

Thank God I'm not a trader so I am immune to that.

[Penguineer]

Every time i open classifieds in the midst of an event and see the same 2 or 3 names reselling a hat for triple the price they bought it for i get depressed. Premium has issues but i need it because if it means i can buy a hat to actually use and enjoy before someone uses it for profit then its a necessary evil.

[Sardeenz]

1 hour ago, Heidecker said:

Simply dont load new items to the premium database by default, give people the option to enable/disable them being loaded to the db or hide the account name by default. Connect that to the ability to use backpack for buy/sell orders etc, "if you want to use the site for trading, you need to feed the db with your item/account info"

 

90% of the affected people don't even have their items listed and don't advertise them anywhere, absolutely zero need for them to be loaded besides premium users wanting to buy/shark them.

 

 

This would solve the issue completely, to my understanding in the 10 plus years of tf2 trading, there isn't another website that let's you stalk inventories like bp does. ( I could be wrong though, bp is definitely the most used one)

 

All bp has to do is change how it loads bps to make every bp not auto populate and instead, when you log onto bp for the first time, you get an option to tick that let's bp have the knowledge of your bp. And you can turn it on and off at later dates.

 

Now will that cause scammers/sharkers etc to get away with it since their bp won't update? Yes but they do anyway a lot of the time.

 

But imo in the long run it would stop people adding new traders with new unboxes and offering bad offers. Hell there's people who add old bps who haven't played tf2 in 5 plus years with old halloweens and offer way less than what the items could realistically get in a couple of weeks of being listed in the classifieds.

 

As other people have said a lot of people who unbox do so because they enjoy the game, they spend £25 on a few cases, and someone comes along offering £225, of course they say yes, but in reality that unusual could fetch £500 + etc 

 

But again bp won't change that because they need the money, the other option I guess is to try and update the rules to more punish people who do add new unboxers/old bps and offer more than buyers but way less than what the item is realistically worth.

[STEVE]

12 minutes ago, Sardeenz said:

This would solve the issue completely, to my understanding in the 10 plus years of tf2 trading, there isn't another website that let's you stalk inventories like bp does. ( I could be wrong though, bp is definitely the most used one)

There is indeed other websites that do this

[Littlepudintater]

24 minutes ago, STEVE said:

There is indeed other websites that do this

if ur referring to steam collector that's the most generous thing anyone's ever said about it 

[STEVE]

8 minutes ago, Littlepudintater said:

if ur referring to steam collector that's the most generous thing anyone's ever said about it 

is it that bad LOL its been a bit since I used it

Theres been some other sites too but I cant access them so they may be down/forgotten

[Littlepudintater]

4 minutes ago, STEVE said:

is it that bad LOL its been a bit since I used it

Theres been some other sites too but I cant access them so they may be down/forgotten

Yeah not too sure what happened but accurate can't be used to describe the item search feature. I think it relies on the inventories being loaded through the site itself which is not a natural occuring thing. Historically inaccurate records left and right unfortunately, def could use some touchups. 

[TheTexanTiger]

Considering the price of an unusual and the offers on backpack.tf are literally a google search away...

 

It isn't the responsibility of backpack.tf or the community to actively protect every noob from being sharked.

 

I'm sympathetic to anyone who has lost big to sharks, but at the same time it is 100% the responsibility of the item owner to understand the value and market of their item.

If a noob sells a burning team captain for 50 keys, it clearly wasn't worth more to them in the first place.

[Shelley Duvall]

As someone who took advantage of premium search when I was a teenager, before big ban waves for sharking hit, I fully agree that there is absolutely no reason for premium search to exist. I think the general TF2 population has a little bit better understanding of trading now so it's far less likely for people to get like, a GBH hat in exchange for a Cow Mangler, but it's still far too easy to get lopsided trades, especially if someone has a lot of capital already, since people incorrectly assume that amassed wealth = amassed fairness. I do think that at the end of the day it's more or less impossible to really eliminate unfair trading because in any environment where profit can be made, unfairness is built in to the system. If all trades were totally equitable, nobody would trade at all because there would be no incentive, other than getting items you personally want to own, as there would be no resale value beyond what the item is agreed to be worth. I think the best thing anyone can do now to stop highly unfair trades is to try and tell people who unbox extremely desirable items what a fair price is before someone gives them an unfair one, but that's relying on altruism for a lot of work.

[eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee]

i think all low bp'ers with unusual unboxes should just be assigned a "guard" (very reputable people only) to them

[N.J]

Trying to limit premium access or dictate who can/can't add someone is a worthless discussion. There have been premium type tools pre dating backpack.tf and tf2items and there are still others in use today albeit mostly private. In the past backpack has offered premium bans on the few occasions they take any action against sharks, which are pretty worthless and ineffective. In my opinion backpack should be using its ability to give site wide bans or preferably steamrep bans to people that are willing to lie about item values to their advantage. Given that they have awarded SR bans to people who put unusual effects in the item descriptions of unusuals and listed them on the community market, I think this is fairly reasonable.

[shady_]

4 hours ago, Heidecker said:

Simply dont load new items to the premium database by default, give people the option to enable/disable them being loaded to the db or hide the account name by default. Connect that to the ability to use backpack for buy/sell orders etc, "if you want to use the site for trading, you need to feed the db with your item/account info"

 

90% of the affected people don't even have their items listed and don't advertise them anywhere, absolutely zero need for them to be loaded besides premium users wanting to buy/shark them.

 

Maybe BP could just block items with new effects from being loaded into the premium database until the update concludes?

[OGSemper]

fuck it, blow it all up, steamrep is garbage and isn’t reliable, premium is a scam and extremely abuseable, anyone smart enough with enough connections could just make their own private searching tool anyways, instead of trying to fix a problem with bandaids and temporary solutions we should just remove features entirely and start taking away privileges, history database has been wiped once already, what harm would it do if we just stopped recording inventories in general? dupes don’t matter, first person in history doesn’t matter, owned by so and so, these are just sales pitches to make ape people feel better about their unsellable items.