The Scam/Not a Scam debate storyline

[MaximusRex]

Exactly this!!!

 

You go online and order a pizza, they're listed for:

$5.00 and $499...you mistakenly purchase the one for $499 thinking it was $4.99. Sure...stupid mistake, but a mistake no less and one that was set-up with the intention of tricking you...hence a "scam". It's exploiting the UI shortcomings.

 

The price is clear, not reading it is not a scam nor an exploit, it's buyer stupidity.

 

The same UI you claim has shortcomings, also has tools to prevent this, and players are not using them, including filtering items by minimum and maximum price, and sorting items by total and unit prices, and the already existing Purchase Confirmation box. If players are ignoring the existing tools to get "scammed" due to their lack of any math education past the Second Grade, I'm not sure what change you think can be made that will change anything, other than BioWare telling players what prices they are allowed to list items for.

[MillionsKNives]

If they can't tell, if someone is scamming or intentionally pricing their things for millions of credits over the regular price, then they are either blind or don't play their own game. I see this everytime I'm on the market looking for crafting items.

 

Even an ordinary person like me can tell, when some doofus is hoping to part some poor tired or drunk schmuck from all their money by accident. It happens to the best of people, and something should be done to stop it.

 

Typcial answer from the powers that be...just enough to placate people who are upset, but not enough to solve the problem.

 

They should run for politics.

 

While I agree that it's not terribly difficult to tell who is using this type of predatory pricing, if there is any resulting action from the company there is more onus on them to get it right than it would for us to call said person out on it. Attempting to police all of the listing on all of the GTN would be an insurmountable task. And I don't think they should spend the resources attempting it.

[chosonman]

Quoting because it needs repeating.

 

People blaming other people for their own stupidity is getting old.

 

Nobody is blaming anyone. But if you have a system that can be improved (ie. Improved so it's not flooded with scam listing baiting players )to click their listing) Then why not do so? It's obvious just looking at the number of bait listings that some people are making a fortune off other people's mistake. The interface can be improved to eliminate these listing and make it easier for the buyer to navigate through the GTN. I myself lost over 5 million credits which took me weeks to accumulate because of one these listings even though I knew they were there. Is it because I was careless? Maybe, but the fact of the matter is if BIO can do something to eliminate these listings and save people some grief they should do so.

Edited November 10, 2014 by chosonman

[MaximusRex]

If people are leaving the game because they can't read numbers at the Third Grade level, I think the game will be better off for it.

[hadoken]

While I agree that it's not terribly difficult to tell who is using this type of predatory pricing, if there is any resulting action from the company there is more onus on them to get it right than it would for us to call said person out on it. Attempting to police all of the listing on all of the GTN would be an insurmountable task. And I don't think they should spend the resources attempting it.

 

I would think it'd be more complaint driven, than active enforcement. Kind of like how they do chat violations. They don't have someone parked monitoring but they do investigate complaints.

 

Still a large task but not the cop out "oh we have NO idea what you guys are talking about, this isn't even a thing" stance.

Edited November 10, 2014 by hadoken

[Sangrar]

Hey folks,

 

There has been a lot of chatter this weekend in General Discussion around how players are posting on the GTN, specifically around use of decimals/commas, and whether we feel it is an exploit or not. For starters, we definitely don't want to see any players scammed out of their hard earned credits and we will work to stop those situations wherever possible. Unfortunately, this is not one of those scenarios.

 

What someone is doing in this scenario is posting something at a higher value than the market would typically have that item listed for. For us, it would be impossible to tell if a user was posting an item at a higher value to try to "scam" another user, or simply because that is what they want to sell it for.

 

When purchasing items on the GTN, aside from the initial sorting and purchase we also have a secondary window pop-up as confirmation of sale. If you feel you are at risk of buying something off of the GTN at an intended value, take your time! Make sure to read over exactly what they are selling it for and then double check that number when you receive the pop-up. Also, we highly recommend using the sorting functions for both total and unit prices to make sure you are paying what you want.

 

With that in mind, I am going to pass these issues back to the dev team and see if there is anything we can work towards in the future for the GTN to help alleviate these issues. Thanks everyone!

 

-eric

 

THANK YOU!!!

 

finally, someone tells it as it is, this whole time this whole thing was all because people didn't take their time and double check the price of what they were buying! I saved myself 3 times now from that all because I took the time to check. I appreciate the response Eric thank you!

[Silverspar]

Considering the case in question was actually because the company selling the coffee was keeping the coffee at a piping hot 180–190 °F (82–88 °C) and caused 3rd degree burns requiring multiple years of medical treatment, I think it was legitimate. At no point was anyone rewarded for the spilling of coffee

 

Actually the coffee was at the FDA recommended temperature. The case was won on a technicality because there was no warning labels on cups, and the reason you see the frivolous amount of warning labels on everything, because of incompetent people these day.

[Orizuru]

Gotcha...way beyond my understanding because I just don't craft...but I can understand how that's an issue.

 

If it helps, or you would like to read more on the subject, the behavior LordArtemis describes is called Predatory Pricing, also known as Below-Cost Pricing.

 

It's actually a very complex subject because while it is illegal, its is very challenging to prove because its only illegal to sell you goods below you own cost when you are doing so for the sole purpose of forcing a competitor out of the market. A lot of businesses use promotional sales to price goods below their own cost and its perfectly legal.

 

For instance, if it costs me $20 to make a pair of shoes and $5 to make a scarf, I could run a promotional sale and advertise my shoes at a price of $15 for anyone who also buys a $15 scarf. By doing this I make $5 profit on every sale, while selling the shoes well below my own costs. Even if 2 other shoe stores close down because they can't compete with me, I'm free and clear of any wrong-doing because I can claim that I was having a hard time moving a large inventory of scarves because WalMart sells the same ones for $5 and the entire promotion was just a way for me to move more scarves without taking a big loss on them. And now that there are 2 less shoe stores in the community where my store is located, I can now continue to sell the same shoes for $30 and tell my investors that I sold most of my inventory of shoes and scarves while making a small profit and edging 2 of my competitors out of the market on shoes, which means we can expect even greater profits on shoes in the future.

[Suromir]

Yes because BioWare should cater to the dumbest of the dumb.

 

I want to only have to hit ONE button and have the game auto pick the best abilitiy for the situation.....otherwise the mob attacking me is exploiting me..scamming me out of my XP gain.

 

yes BioWare totally should throw the morons a bone. I mean why should you be expected to read anything afterall?

 

I swear you time-out/everyone-get's-a-trophy generation(s) are the bane of our society. You people NEVER take responsibility for your own STUPIDITY and instead expect society to handle it all FOR YOU.

 

pathetic wastes of oxygen.

[DarkSaberMaster]

Eric, thank you for echoing what we sane people have been saying all along. Hopefully this is the end of these pointless threads.

 

Pretty much.

[MillionsKNives]

And it would not be correctly displaying the cost per unit if the fractional decimal places were not there.

 

Ever try selling three items for 1k? It already doesn't correctly display the cost per unit. You'd just be rounding to a different number of places.

[MaximusRex]

Since this is the latest thread about GTN 'scammers' I'll post this here:

 

I wonder if there is a correlation between GTN 'scammers' and gold sellers? This has got to be a faster way for them to acquire credits to resell. If this is the case, then BioWare should have an interest in addressing the shortcoming in their number formatting for the GTN.

 

You mean the world standardized number format for currency that Americans learn in the Third Grade?

[Mariojediwookie]

Not Bioware's problem. I mistakenly put up 10 augments (worth 70k each) for the default price it comes up with when first putting it for sale (like 2200). Of course I didn't know I did that because I was talking with my kids as I put them up on the GTN but someone noticed it and within 5 mins they were sold before I could fix it. Again, my fault and it's not like someone stole them from me. It's the exact thing you are dealing with, some people make mistakes.......we learn from them and move on. I'm sure the person buying them for that super low price knew I didn't mean to put them up at that price but what do you do. If I find 20 dollars on the street, I don't ask every person I see if it belongs to them.....

[LordArtemis]

Boy, you guys have just got a bone and will not let go, will you.

 

I imagine that if Bioware does make any QoL improvements to the GTN, like they did with price per item that many folks involved in this argument on both sides will still be upset.

 

The same arguments were presented against the price per item suggestion when it was presented. The same tired back and forth, buyers wanting protection from making mistakes, sellers wanting to protect their ability to "game" the system.

 

You are not likely going to find the protections you seek. Your arguments are pointless IMO.

 

If the QoL suggestions made have any merit they could become reality, just like price per item. Railing against those changes by making baseless arguments like "they protect buyers" is just as ridiculous as claiming Bioware has a responsibility to protect buyers, and that any of the proposed changes would provide that protection.

 

The only protection is not to participate in the market. The next best protection is to pay attention when you post things for sale and make purchases.

 

And you can NOT protect dishonorable sale practices any more than you could protect dishonorable buying practices. Both are fair game, and both are UNPROTECTED activities.

 

That means at any time a QoL change could make it harder to do so. You will have to learn to accept that.

[LadyVix]

 

What makes it worse is that said "problem" is with DIGITAL CURRENCY.

IT HAS NO VALUE IN THE REAL WORLD! ZOMG!!!

 

 

If I spend $50.00 USD on Cartel Market items to sell for credits, those credits have a real world value of $50.00 USD.

 

If you don't value in-game virtual currency, I'll be happy to take credit donations from you.

[hadoken]

This..seriously. You people are a waste of oxygen.

 

It's always interesting to see how...personal...some posters take these things, in making the implication that someone is literally better off dead for having a different point of view. I wonder how you sleep at night.

[jstankaroslo]

...not a super serious one to be sure, its all part of being a crafter, part of the "game" so to speak. But I do not expect Bioware to protect me from such practices. Instead, I try to band together with fellow crafters to convince them this is a practice that is bad for all of us, and convince folks in game to avoid those sellers at all costs.

 

I've had varying levels of success as you can imagine.

 

Creating a cartel is illegal in western world

That being said, I know what you mean -I myself also "play" the GTN (or used to). This is a fair market, I don't mind the undercutters (although sometimes they make my blood boil) -this is the part of the game.

 

I think in this discussion it is important to differentiate the actual GTN market game from dishonest practices.

 

1. Some people tend to think that putting lets say Conductive Flux above the vendor price is a scam. No it is not. I don't do that as this is a low profit GTN play, but I often buy it higher than the vendor price. Why? Loading times. Don't want to go to fleet and buy from a vendor, when I can get it for slightly higher price om my ship.

 

2. Putting something on the GTN on way higher price than actual market price -it is not a scam. Some people store stacks of valuable materials on GTN . On Progenitor there is a guy who stores many stacks of Mandalorian Iron this way. No one obviously will buy it off, and that guy just saves some space in his own storage. Also trying to set higher price for something might be the case. I know 55 augments should sell around 90-100k on my server. If sometimes they got put on the GTN for 60k, I'll buy them off and put them back at 140k. The "middle" price would be 100k and there you go. This is a market play.

 

3. Putting something on the GTN with a price aimed to look like a lowest price, but is in fact the highest is the topic of this conversation. People who do this are very intelligent, they know what they are doing. They make sure their price is the highest per unit so that one click on the "sort unit price" button may show their listings first. They also make sure their listings resemble, or look alike the lowest price, with use of decimals. They know that some people will fall for that. That way they intent to cheat a buyer into paying their price. This is not the case when someone decides to pay higher price. This is the case when someone is being tricked to pay that price

 

In a real world, this could be the case of a vendor putting the 1000x price on the credit card terminal and asking a customer to confirm. BUT if you pay 18 thousand instead of 18 in your convenient store you can charge back, and get your money back. This is impossible in SWTOR.

I personally like to think that people buying from me are satisfied customers. I would have no problem with kind of charge back, within reasonable period of time. That or removal of decimals seems to be the best options to solve these issues.

[MaximusRex]

/ignore people in the GTN is simple and easy and makes the market safer for everyone specially those who do hundreds of transactions a day

 

Or, you can use the tools already provided to filter out high prices and sort by price.

 

Also, since you do hundreds of transactions a day, mostly buying, it sounds like you are also an exploiter, trying to find players who accidentally listed items at too low a price and then scam them buy buying those obviously incorrect listings.

 

What's sauce for the goose...

[MillionsKNives]

I would think it'd be more complaint driven, than active enforcement. Kind of like how they do chat violations. They don't have someone parked monitoring but they do investigate complaints.

 

Still a large task but not the cop out "oh we have NO idea what you guys are talking about, this isn't even a thing" stance.

 

I don't think that's their stance at all. It seems to me that all they're saying is, "We can't police sales because we'd have to assume what a player is trying to do. Because we can't intervene please take these steps to protect yourselves. However we will discuss if there are changes that could be made to alleviate the problem."

[Heezdedjim]

With that in mind, I am going to pass these issues back to the dev team and see if there is anything we can work towards in the future for the GTN to help alleviate these issues. Thanks everyone!

Please suggest to them, when you pass this along, that they change the DEFAULT sort for all search returns to be by UNIT PRICE and ASCENDING (i.e., lowest unit price is displayed "first" at the "top" of the results). This is the desired behavior and the most sensible default that any buyer would want or expect in almost any imaginable case.

 

The present default is either unsorted or sort descending, which is almost never what anyone who is buying an item wants or needs to see. And because of the wonky behavior of the sort arrows, it takes several clicks to force the list to actually sort ascending by unit price. Often the unit price column doesn't even respond to the first click, and the column to its left has to be clicked, pointlessly, before you even can sort by unit price. And once you do get it to sort, you have to click and click again, because first it sorts DE-scending, and then only sorts ascending when you flip the order with a second click.

 

Sorting out this UI and making a more sensible default for all search returns would go a long way to sorting out this "problem," such as it is. It would improve the behavior for all users, and might possibly save some people from incautious or over-hasty misclicks on items that are priced far above what they reasonably expect to pay, since those results will not be plonked illogically at the start of the results rather than at the end where they belong.

Edited November 10, 2014 by Heezdedjim

[Gomla]

I don't mind the undercutters (although sometimes they make my blood boil)

 

This is what strikes me as odd.

 

People getting annoyed at undercutters.

 

Of course people will undercut, they want to sell their stuff. I undercut all the time and not by one or two credits either. I recently came back and had a few mounts in my inventory i'd had sitting there and put them on the GTN for 100k cheaper than the ones on there.

 

I just use the GTN to get rid of extra stuff I have laying around. I find it odd that people take in game currency so seriously they get annoyed by that.

 

I also think people like that really need to find a new hobby if pixels anger them.

[LadyVix]

Eric, thank you for echoing what we sane people have been saying all along. Hopefully this is the end of these pointless threads.

 

Quite to the contrary, i think that Eric's post will result in more of these threads, because the number of scammers will increase. Worse yet, they'll use this thread as a twisted justification for their predatory practices. In the end, Bioware will be forced to consider a more reasonable solution versus this head-in-the-sand approach.

[LordArtemis]

If it helps, or you would like to read more on the subject, the behavior LordArtemis describes is called Predatory Pricing, also known as Below-Cost Pricing.

 

It's actually a very complex subject because while it is illegal, its is very challenging to prove because its only illegal to sell you goods below you own cost when you are doing so for the sole purpose of forcing a competitor out of the market. A lot of businesses use promotional sales to price goods below their own cost and its perfectly legal.

 

For instance, if it costs me $20 to make a pair of shoes and $5 to make a scarf, I could run a promotional sale and advertise my shoes at a price of $15 for anyone who also buys a $15 scarf. By doing this I make $5 profit on every sale, while selling the shoes well below my own costs. Even if 2 other shoe stores close down because they can't compete with me, I'm free and clear of any wrong-doing because I can claim that I was having a hard time moving a large inventory of scarves because WalMart sells the same ones for $5 and the entire promotion was just a way for me to move more scarves without taking a big loss on them. And now that there are 2 less shoe stores in the community where my store is located, I can now continue to sell the same shoes for $30 and tell my investors that I sold most of my inventory of shoes and scarves while making a small profit and edging 2 of my competitors out of the market on shoes, which means we can expect even greater profits on shoes in the future.

 

I forgot to mention that. Thanks for the clarification.

 

Also, it is important to note that predatory pricing is not against the game rules. As a seller, you can certainly engage in this kind of practice if you wish.

 

The same goes for over-inflated prices. Even if they are designed in a way to try and trick someone into thinking they are getting a deal. This is also not against the rules.

 

However, there is no doubt that most folks would find both practices rather distasteful and unfair...buyers and sellers alike. One of the reasons both are generally illegal in the world.

 

Here is another example of misleading pricing....a store posts an item at a regular price of 399.00. They then choose to have a sale, buy one get one free, and raise the price of the item to 999.00. The customer believes they are getting a deal, but if they were careful they would know that the price is normally much lower, so it is a rip off.

 

There are laws against misleading pricing as well, including laws that protect consumers against "after sale" practices.

[hadoken]

I don't think that's their stance at all. It seems to me that all they're saying is, "We can't police sales because we'd have to assume what a player is trying to do. Because we can't intervene please take these steps to protect yourselves. However we will discuss if there are changes that could be made to alleviate the problem."

 

Effectively it's the same thing, though. They're dancing around the scam issue because they know (on some level) it's wrong but do not want to take the effort to really fight it, and yet do not want to insult the people who know it's wrong. It's very political, something they're quite good at.

 

I wasn't really expecting otherwise, though I do hope they'll at least look into the GTN UI.

[LordArtemis]

This is what strikes me as odd.

 

People getting annoyed at undercutters.

 

Of course people will undercut, they want to sell their stuff. I undercut all the time and not by one or two credits either. I recently came back and had a few mounts in my inventory i'd had sitting there and put them on the GTN for 100k cheaper than the ones on there.

 

I just use the GTN to get rid of extra stuff I have laying around. I find it odd that people take in game currency so seriously they get annoyed by that.

 

I also think people like that really need to find a new hobby if pixels anger them.

 

There is a difference between what you speak of and predatory pricing. You are not attempting to drive out competition or control the market with what you are doing (or at least I assume as much).

 

Predatory pricing, or undercutting below cost on a consistent basis is something completely different. It is a predatory practice to change the market to be more favorable to the person posting the sale.

 

This is not against the rules, but it is generally frowned upon by sellers.