If he said it specifically on your trade "I'll do this" or something of the like, then he could be punished for trade jacking. But in your situation, it's just too difficult to tell who the guilty party is, if there is one.

As for the suggestion, I'd advise putting it in the Suggestions forum, it will probably get more needed attention there.

While a bit uncourteous I don't see anything really wrong with what happened. If the buyer of the hat had no issues then you were simply unlucky enough not to take an offer in time. It's a free market, speed does matter at times.

Originally posted by FeelZeSchadenfreude:

While a bit uncourteous I don't see anything really wrong with what happened. If the buyer of the hat had no issues then you were simply unlucky enough not to take an offer in time. It's a free market, speed does matter at times.

No, that's wrong I'm afraid. If a person takes an offer directed specifically to another user, without it being extended to them, it's called trade hijacking and is a ban-worthy offense.

Originally posted by Champelliot:

Originally posted by FeelZeSchadenfreude:

While a bit uncourteous I don't see anything really wrong with what happened. If the buyer of the hat had no issues then you were simply unlucky enough not to take an offer in time. It's a free market, speed does matter at times.

No, that's wrong I'm afraid. If a person takes an offer directed specifically to another user, without it being extended to them, it's called trade hijacking and is a ban-worthy offense.

What do you mean by "specifically"? As in the person, in their offer, says that they want to sell to a specific person? If somebody is selling an item, and finds a tempting offer on somebody else's trade selling the same item, and takes it, is there any moral or legal-ish reason to punish this behavior? Are we to punish them for acting in their own best interests? Can arand or I or any other trader really say "Hey, we own that person's offer, don't take it, it's not fair!"? The fact of the matter is that in all likelihood the person offering to buy the moon bombing run didn't care who he got it from, so arand can't claim that he has a special right to his offer other than the fact that it was on his trade.

All the other bannable offenses are against actions such as spamming and scamming and posting one's own offers/trades on somebody else's trade. This basically is saying harassment and theft are illegal. The behavior that arand is bringing into question, since the offender didn't actually put a post on his trade (yes, i looked), does not approach the levels of harrassment or theft. The offender didn't put a post, and arand hadn't explicitly said that he had accepted the offer yet. In fact, I would say that it is no better or worse than the highballing/lowballing that is rampant on outpost. Distasteful, yes. Bannable or worthy of a warning? No. There has to be a distinguishing line between what is unfair and what is illegal.

Arand's proposal of hiding an offer for one's eyes only is a neat way to solve this. However, if you still want to punish users for this behavior, I believe that any attempt at enforcement will fall flat because as you say it is difficult to know who initiated the exchange. Unless you want to go after both.

For all you know though the same offer was made via steam chat and not on TF2OP. If the guy was looking specifically for that hat he probably offered to more than one person, I know I do, and if he was in a hurry then he may have added people who were online to get a quick response.

I'm also curious as to how long the offer was there and weather you responed? Was it within a day or two of the offer or a week or two later? If you are waiting too long to take an offer or respond to an offer people might assume you are not interested.

I really have no idea what you're going on about.

Player X is selling a hat
Player Y offers 5 keys for it
Player Z sees Player Y's offer, and decides to tell Player Y "I'll do this" on Player X's trade.

End result: Player Z gets banned.

This has been in practice long before I became a mod.

He made the offer yesterday at approx. this time, and I added him an hour later. however, although our time zones aren't very different (Canada vs Eastern US) We've just been unable to meet up.

I added him not to rage at him but to just suggest to consider not doing this in the future, and he was very obviously not interested and managed to remove me before I could get two words into the chat, claiming that it was my own problem.

Player Z didn't put a post on arrand's trade. AKA he probably directly added the guy.

To the best of my knowledge it was this trade. http://www.tf2outpost.com/trade/8078005
And the offer in question is at the bottom.

Feel, I repeat:

My friend that I know in real life and therefore I trust over most, owned a cloudy moon bombing at the same time that I did. What I think ended up happening is that my friend to an offer from this person unknowingly. However, the person in question didn't even put up a trade at all for his hat that he so recently traded for, which leads me to suspect that he had traded for my friends hat with the intention of just transferring the item to the person who offered on my trade

arand, that is already the impression that I got from your story. And my position remains that while it's extremely distasteful it isn't ban worthy in my opinion. I'll say that he a greedy and discourteous trader who most definitely did this to flip a profit, but to call this trade hijacking is a bit of a stretch.

Though I am surprise that he managed to ninja your offer within an hour. Either he was lucky or he spends way too much time watching outpost.

I initially made this thread with no intent to get this guy banned at all, hence me not mentioning his name nor posting the trade or profile. I still am not pushing for a ban of any kind. However, I did notice:

Isn't spamming being discourteous as well? And spamming from what I see is most certainly a bannable offense.

This case doesn't show any posts on the site though which makes it one of those cases that I feel that everyone knows what happened but there isn't enough proof to show it.

Since spamming clutters up trades and is a more persistent annoyance I would consider it a more appropriate target for bans. Plus that kind of stuff tends to attract repeat offenders, while it your case it was of a more opportunistic bent.

Originally posted by arand:

He made the offer yesterday at approx. this time, and I added him an hour later. however, although our time zones aren't very different (Canada vs Eastern US) We've just been unable to meet up.

I added him not to rage at him but to just suggest to consider not doing this in the future, and he was very obviously not interested and managed to remove me before I could get two words into the chat, claiming that it was my own problem.

Yeah, then you got kind of screwed. Though I wouldn't blame the guy buying the hat, someone with the hat he was looking for offered to sell it to him at the price he wanted to pay, and he took it. Sure he did have a deal with you, but he hadn't been able to actually contact you to make the trade. While he could have waited, sometimes traders back out maybe he was worried you would sell it to someone else before you were able to make the trade (I'm not saying you would have even if you got a better deal, but I have had people do this to me in the past) so he was just doing what made the most sense for him.

@ The Once and Future King:
I don't condemn the buyer for doing anything wrong in any way. Yes, if he felt it was right he could have held the seller up briefly, but by no means does the buyer have any obligation. I don't feel I implied the buyer did anything wrong from what i said above, so that sort of came out of the blue for me.