Originally posted by norby89:

Anything that negatively affects the user's site experience will not be implemented. This includes Captchas, hiding SteamIDs etc. A solution that doesn't severly cut down the amount of phishers is as good as no solution at all. In no way does that mean that TF2Outpost has given up or won't do anything to combat the issue but until there's a definite solution we're just wasting our time.

Even phishers value their time and money, raising the cost makes a method of scamming ineffective. Sure you can pay for captcha, but at that point it starts to damage the phishing business model. Spam email for instance, if it cost even a nickel per email, it would end, because you can't scam enough people to make it worth sending out that many at that cost.

Most items are not keys. Keys are sold in volume high enough that the price on tf is undeniable. Most other items are not, and then the assumption of "this is the price" becomes questionable by default. So there is always going to be leeway on items other than keys if the demand is soft. This is why most unusuals are quick sold if they aren't super hot and the seller needs to convert it into cash now, or just get rid of it. Say I had a fetti unusual soldiers stash, basically nothing more than a low level effect. Its "list" price is 4.5 buds. Would you buy it even if I knocked 10% off?;) Most just wouldn't have even that level of pure, and even if they did, they wouldn't part with it, so the "price" isn't quite what people think, unless its a super high volume/super high demand item.

In any case the price is whatever the next guy will pay for something, and what the market will bear. Its why a coke at the supermarket is about 20 cents a can, while the same can of coke at the 7/11 is a dollar. Backpack tf by the nature of the type of user who will "volunteer" to gather prices will have prices based on the supermarket, not 7/11. So just be careful in claiming what an item is "worth" when trading. Because pointing to tf can be a bit of circular reasoning. Fact is most trades are not visible to tf at all.

Just think of ebay. The "price" isn't what you claim it is based on some arbitrary source. Its whatever the highest bidder pays. Which is not to say absurd prices are ok, sharks trying to get a bud for a scrap exist but most things aren't like that. And in any case tf is always behind the market, thats why prices change;) Prices aren't preordained from gaben you know.

Always ignore rep on profile pages, it has no value other than to trick the unsuspecting. People buy rep with rep, and -rep is just deleted. Beyond wasting time the only value in rep is to trick the unsuspecting.

But in any case we only have your word against his, so as norby said, you need to report him on steamrep.

For whatever reason outpost has made site design decisions which result in high requirements of moderation man hours. So yea its going to take a while.

Originally posted by ♫ Woifi ZfA ♫:

Yeah instead of being grateful to get 2 years almost for free you just hatin'. But yeah getting 5$ profit out of trading is super easy and I'm pretty sure you can make that alone with op premium so it's a fair price I guess if you trade frequently.

Which is like saying you make your salary at work in part thanks to google and gmail since you use it all the time, therefore they should charge 120 dollars for 2 years.

Sorry this is comcast type monopoly thinking where they see netflix making money and then try to basically hit them up for a cut they have no right to.

Yea if google cost 120 dollars for 2 years, we'd just use bing.

60 dollars a year...no.

Thats 24 keys a year with zero hours spent trading.

I'm pretty sure people would start using bing if google started charging 60 dollars a year. 5 dollars a month for what is effectively 35x16 repeated icons is excessive.

Originally posted by norby89:

Originally posted by Gogrilla-chan CZ:

I totally agree... It's not really that hard to block the phishing accounts and just move on... This affects and slows down the whole trading community and if anyone is stupid enough to click the phishing link even tho he's told not to almost everywhere and all the time. Well.

This is not about you being able to block phishers or not. The only reason phishers spammed so much is because they were successful. There was always somebody who fell for it and had their account stolen. This safety measure is to protect those people, not you. If they have nobody to phish they will stop and move onto other things.

I do agree that the current limit is a bit extreme and should be increased to 10 per hour or something like that however that belongs in Valve's official suggestion forum.

Also can't valve just track the flow of stolen items? Or just track down the IP of the phishing accounts? I know they mostly will be using proxy servers but that gives them an option to block connections from proxys. There were many solutions and this was one of the worst.

It's not as easy as it seems like, otherwise they would have banned them already. If there were so many solutions they wouldn't have chosen this one. It's not elegant but it is effective.

Well its not easy but it can be done, I'm sure phishing behavior is relatively easy to pick out in a closed system, i mean marketers and google and others can id users just based on behavioral patterns i'm sure. We have face recognition now, so this is a far simpler problem to solve than what other companies do. I have a feeling its more neglect, the same way steam servers are constantly broken. Just look at how primitive the search feature of the marketplace is for example, typing in "sticky" instead of "stickybomb" yields you zero results. Its been like that forever, is this a hard problem to solve?

Originally posted by ImHackinBored:

I don't know why everyone even complained about the phishing stuff anyway.. here in just under a month everyone is gonna loose there auto-bumps and these phishers will never find your trades. I don't know a single person on my 100+ friends thats going to pay the 5$ when it expires. :masonfist:

As for trade offers I havent been a fan of it as id say it fails for me 70% of the time and even when it does work it still tells you it failed so it is consistantly wasting my time.

I actually don't mind the invite thing so much since nowadays the only people adding me are to waste my time... after these time wasters waste 5 peoples time they are done. Less people wasting my time. Only people really interested in trading will be able to add me now and I can get down to business finally. The downside is finding reputable people to trade with while staying under the limit.

Valve just needs to add a sound that plays when someone adds you and when someone sends you a trade offer, fix the market search function, and fix the bloody trade offers. :dealwithit:

Yea pretty much, in a month its game over for many at outpost.

5 dollars a month just doesn't make sense, i mean seriously how many trades would you have to do just to cover that charge.

Originally posted by norby89:

Originally posted by MA☝Omgwtfbbqstfu™:

It doesn't work well enough to be a replacement. First of all theres no quick notification of a trade offer, people can go hours if not longer and not notice because you have to manually check, so it wastes peoples time to have to always resort to trade offers when offers should be the last resort. But as you said the trade offer doesn't work sometimes, well., it doesn't work a lot of the time, and when that happens it wastes a lot of your time again. Lots of baby sitting to get things done on the system, and this solution does make it worse.

It's come to the point that sometimes normal trades don't work at all, I can try to do a trade 10 times in a row and it will error each time. Whereas with trade offers I only need to click the accept button 2-3 times at most, no need to reopen the trade and add items all over again. It's real annoying especially when you need to readd 100+ items.

Yes I hate the fact that there's no notification and I've suggested to Valve they add a popup/sound notification but I guess it's too hard for them to add something so easy.

Originally posted by MA☝Omgwtfbbqstfu™:

Though I do like the side effect where people who mass add without reading get slammed, but in the end the negative effects of such simplistic method of dealing with phishing are worse than what it cures.

You can't please everyone, a week ago everybody was complaining that they're leaving Outpost if the phishing problem doesn't stop. Now it stopped and we're hearing complaints yet again.

Takes a lot more than 2-3 times of clicking for offers for me, many times it won't accept it for hours if not a day, I guess leaving it open is an option, but if you don't, you end up having to add your own items, and their items, and even if that succeeds, if the specific metal/keys involved are spent, or accidentally overlap in another trade offer, it goes invalid while you are afk, its just a lot of wasted time and fustration.

I know people complain no matter what but sometimes a bad solution is a bad solution.

Its friday and the volume of trades is probably rather low right now because I'm sure many people just hit their add limits.