re-posting from Customer Service thread (GTN unit pricing ruse)

[mpdugas]

At Nightblazer's suggestion, I am re-posting this here, after having searched this forum for similar threads (which I did not find):

 

"Please right-align all credit price columns in the GTN, so that the decimal aligns vertically; this will eliminate the trick-practice of posting unit prices that "appear" to be lower than normal.

 

All NPC vendors in-game already do it this way. Only the GTN does it otherwise.

 

In the GTN alone, the credit price column is aligned by the currency marker column, i.e. left-aligned.

 

The problem is simple: a player is used to seeing currency columns right-aligned everywhere else in the game, and so it is easy to mistake the fundamentally different GTN alignment as being the same as all SWTOR vendors elsewhere in the game.

 

However, Bioware alone is responsible for sustaining the conflicting states of currency listing alignments, and Bioware contributes to this deception because it created and sustains this discrepancy, so it is disingenuous of Bioware to suggest that these mistakes come from player error or carelessness.

 

It is not enough to say that the use of the "unit price sort" or reading the confirmation dialogue is the cure.

 

That simply adds another burden to the whole player-base to avoid a scheme that is deliberately designed (the taking advantage of the left alignment to create the optical illusion of falsely-lower unit prices) to cheat people.

 

Bioware's main defense is untenable: as Eric Musco says:

 

"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.no one is asking them to flag or asses whether a listing has unusually high unit prices, nor to make any such decisions."

 

This is entirely unnecessary. Correct currency alignment eliminates the scam entirely. No further Bioware action is needed.

 

To say otherwise, to say that caveat emptor is enough, does not address the fact that this is a Bioware-created problem.

 

This was probably a programming error introduced from the beginning of the game and should be painfully easy to implement."

[Muljo_Stpho]

Good luck with this.

 

The suggestion seems like a simple enough little change and I hope that they can sneak this into a patch at some point if there's any chance that it will really help to keep this subject from flaring up again and again every few months as another moron stumbles into this (and surprises some lucky jerk with that big payoff they've been hoping for against all odds, causing the moron to come to the forums ranting about how these "evil scammers" are out to get us).

 

I can't say that I see or agree with your reasoning. I do not see this "optical illusion" you speak of, and there's just no way that anybody in their right mind can rely on this as a guaranteed way to make easy money anyway. And somebody somewhere out there will eventually find a way to out-idiot any and all forms of idiot-proofing that are in place anyway.

 

But there certainly wouldn't be any harm in them pushing out a tweak or two to help minimize the problems and lengthen the amount of time between the forums seeing these meltdowns from people who failed to pay attention. So the suggestion deserves some support just for that. I'm pretty sure a lot of us are sick of seeing this subject come up.

[Raansu]

I don't understand how people are falling for this. Its so damn obvious when people are doing that scam.