For me the two biggest factors are the lack of guarantee that you'll get what you pay for, and the price.

As someone already stated, if you donated more than $X in the past, Outpost gave you Premium status for life. Since they essentially lied to everyone who donated, there's no reason to assume that they'll keep your premium status intact, or that it wont drop or raise in price, or whatever else they feel like doing.

The other factor is price. It's currently priced at $60/year. To put that in perspective, I pay $80 per year for "unlimited" hosting for 40+ domain names with unlimited bandwidth, storage space and a ton of features from a reliable mainstream source. Hell, even services like Netflix are only marginally more expensive, and they use hundreds upon hundreds of times more bandwidth and spend thousands of times more on their staff and services. In short, I've paid a lot less for a lot more on much more valuable websites.

At the end of the day though, you should consider whether paying for premium benefits you more than the cost, if so then it's a fair buy, but personally it's hard to consider $60 for a green name and 25 extra trades good value.

Bitcoins are by far the safest, most profitable, most secure and most universal payment method, but the user-base is very low.

Google Wallet is also very safe and costs a lot less. Bank Transfer, WMZ, Kiwibank, Moneybookers etc are all used as well. If you're complaining about lack of alternatives, you haven't looked very hard.

Paypal is popular because it's been around for a while and is used by virtually anyone who trades for cash.

Like any system with chargebacks, you need to know what you're doing before you accept payment, and avoid risk.

Reports are a useful tool for cutting down the spam and potential scams on tf2op but since you are getting thousands of reports per day it's no surprise that they often go unnoticed or unchecked.

It would make sense to make it cost 1 "love" to report someone (I.e. it would reduce your Share The Love quota by 1 every time you report someone). If/when the post/person is removed by a mod you get your 1 love back with 1 interest. If not, you lose your 1 love.

This promotes careful and correct reporting and limits the amount of false/ridiculous reports. It also pretty much stops people from reporting more than a few times per day.

The only down sides I can see are:

1. New profiles can't report anyone.
2. Potentially you could get free love and be considered trustworthy without trading.

To solve both of these you could make report karma their own counter next to love. There'd still be an incentive but no potential for abuse.



Not a big deal but it'd probably make things easier for mods while also benefiting the traders.

With the launch of the Steam Trading Cards Beta there thousands of new trades offering/asking for Trading Cards, Emotes and Backgrounds. Wouldn't it make sense to give these items their own section in the drop down menu? That way I don't have to wait for all the Steam games to load each time I want to search for a new trading card or emote.

Chiming in here, I'm another person who's simply blown away by the decision to rule out Bitcoins. When you consider that payments and funds are much much more secure with Bitcoins than Paypal, when you consider that transactions are made public and thus any scamming stories can simply be verified or discredited by an admin or even automatically via a bot, and that it also allows people from anywhere in the world to trade safely, it's simply staggering as to why the choice to rule against it was made.

I can only assume it's because it's a relatively new currency and people still make the incorrect conclusion that it's unsafe. It's a shame, because many reputable trading sites have already implemented bitcoin but they're all limited in numbers, and thus variety. I can't help but feel if tf2op adopted bitcoin they'd increase their userbase and decrease scam potential for new users.