Originally posted by norby89:

That's ridiculous. What if I'm searching through Outpost for items for my collection and find a bunch of people I want to add? Another brilliant move by Valve.

Ask them to add you, or use trade offers. You might get a lot of errors but it does work, sometimes even better than normal trades.

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.

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.

Originally posted by HappyStix™:

It is much better then being bambarded with phishers. This is the problem, when Valve does something to help it is never good enough for certain people. Atleast 50 threads were made within the past weeks about people wanting the problem fixed. There. Done.

Its about standards. Look at how broken trade offers are now, half the time you can't send or accept them. The trade system fails maybe 25% of the time. Same with marketplace. And market place has a "search" which is so unsophisticated that if you type in sticky instead of stickybomb, it will fail to yield a result...

How often does google fail to load up?

How many days a year does your electricity go out?

If your utility company was as reliable as valve is, you'd go entire months a year without power.

This isn't a new problem hitting a fledgling company we would have to give some consideration for. These problems have existed for years.

Originally posted by solaris32:

Originally posted by norby89:

IIRC it's 5 adds per couple hours or something like that.

That's ridiculous. What if I'm searching through Outpost for items for my collection and find a bunch of people I want to add? Another brilliant move by Valve.

Recognizing patterns of behavior within a closed system isn't hard, let something as repetitive as phishing, but I guess valve took the lazy way out and basically punished everyone instead. They really have to sink more resources into their network which is constantly over loaded and stuff like this phishing stuff... instead of nonsense like their steam machine.

Other companies are able to recognize faces now, and valve can't even recognize a phisher....

Originally posted by Currier Bell:

We understand that we're not able to provide what Google can, but Google is a multibillion dollar corporation with millions of users on a daily basis. It'd be hard for anyone to make a counterargument to anything when compared to them, especially when we're not in competition with them. We allow our users to determine the worth of a premium service and if it does not hold the value that they wish, they can choose to not purchase on and continue to use the site free of charge.

To answer the first question, we only have the Paypal and debit/credit card processing through Bluepay options available. Due to legal issues, we could no longer accept items and was a big reason the system had to be changed from a donation to a subscription service in the first place.

The problems google solves are on a scale of a different order yes, which also gives them cash on a different order, but thats the point. They still run on advertising, not asking 5 dollars a month for maintaining a database of 35 very simple trade pages.

Of course people will be able to choose for themselves, but I'm just saying that its very hard to see how the rate is justified when most web services out there are free or when premium provide much more in terms of value.

Originally posted by Bakgrund:

Originally posted by MA☝Omgwtfbbqstfu™:

Does it matter? At 5 dollars a month its pretty steep, wipe out the "profit" from a good number of trades just on that fee alone.

I disagree, 5 dollars is actually pretty much for a service that once was "lifetime" with the same price, now you only get one month. 3-4 usd would be better, yeah one usd isn't much but if you regularely buy premium, 5 dollar every month becomes much money after a while.

5 dollars is excessive for what outpost provides.
Compare what outpost provides to most other websites. Gmail/google apps provides free cloud hosting/mail/apps for free 24/7. Google maps does the same, processing mind blowing amounts of data to provide us with real time 3d maps and even streetview. Youtube lets user upload and download stupid amounts of data..for free, we're talking petabytes of data. Amazon prime provides free shipping and a whole slew of other services for just a few bucks more than "outpost premium".

What does outpost do? Manage 16 small image icons which are not unique in 35 trades trades per premum user. Its a trivially small database problem compared to what other websites have to handle, so 5 dollars per month is disproportionate compared to any other service out there.

Does it matter? At 5 dollars a month its pretty steep, wipe out the "profit" from a good number of trades just on that fee alone.

Originally posted by ☢TNRC commander trytoaim1☢:

Originally posted by Currier Bell:

We here at Outpost do not feel that we are in the position to dictate what people can ask/offer on items and that punishing users because of this would be next to impossible. There is no true prices to items and they can sell for what people want to sell them for, or offer how much they want.

So besides punishing users that are clearly making troll offers, there isn't much that can or will be changed.

What do you mean by: "There is no true prices to items?" We have Backpack.tf for that!

Tf can only see a small portion of sales, and they are gathered by self selected people of various motivations. Plus if tf were right prices would never change right?

The only thing tf is good for is a basic range. In other words don't sell your unusual for a scrap. But when people consider it the bible, and start throwing it down in outpost spam posts demanding a price, thats where it goes wrong, then it becomes a rather circular argument, you want me to sell you X item at tf's price so tf will be right:P

Anyways there are no "true" prices, just what the market will bear.

Whats "not enough" profit to op is not "fair prices" to another person, so you just have to leave it up to people to make their own decisions on what is right for them.

People have more than one backpack for a start, they could have lent it out as well, just because an item isn't in that persons backpack, doesn't mean the trade is invalid. Only thing that matters is that the items not been actually sold yet.

Furthermore if you sell an item on the marketplace, it will be removed from your backpack even if its not sold yet, just listed.

People used to get extra backpacks when expanders used to cost 5 dollars. Now its not as necessary but people used to have over flow accounts.

Originally posted by swerve:

Originally posted by Skaboomatude:

its not that they dont understand its that they dont care and are lazy. I post dont random add me with a link to trade offers, I get tons of random adds. I post that I am not selling items not listed, I get offers for items not listed. Plain and Simple, people are lasy and dont care to read no matter how short and simple it is. I finally had to post several times in caps on each trade to not be added and for trade offers to be used before people actually got it :(

Once again, you are not catching my drift. I know there are tonnes of people who don't bother reading, however, the main problem is that they don't understand which side of the trade is the selling/buying side.

Yep failing a low bar intelligence test :P There are even arrows on the page...


Many times people add and just leave you on there adds after they get what they want from someone else too, then they fail to answer chat... because like I said before, like the person who doesn't flush in public rest rooms, when they are done, they no longer care about anything.

Originally posted by norby89:

Originally posted by MA☝Omgwtfbbqstfu™:

Sometimes people even ask to buy things that are blanked out, already sold..its like..you can't see that the icons grey?

There's a minor bug that allows already greyed out items to be shown in trade results. It only happens with old trades (ones that were created before the update with toggleable items was released) and it's fixed once you undelete and delete the item. It can be confusing for some to see an item in the search results that's already been sold.

Fair enough, so guess its time to toggle a few trades.