Already works that way, read the bottom text box on the donation page. 1 key gets you donator status, 4 will get you rank two, and 7 will get you rank three.

Going to agree with the above post about being cautious. A level 100 Vintage Vintage Merryweather is indeed worth quite a lot, especially to the right collector, but finding those people is very hard and most others will not consider paying anywhere close to a bud for it.

Most people would, services are not allowed, and never have been. Rule #5 of TF2outpost is simple: "No trades that are not trades".

I have never seen any mod agree that a service is not a rule violation, and you've already had a trade closed because of it, take that as a definite sign that it is not allowed.

Services are not allowed because even if someone makes a legitimate one, somebody out there will create one with the intention to scam another person. The process to report people who scam would take too much time and effort to sort out, including the guidelines of the service, what the person was making/doing for the service and what the customer was paying. This just leads to too many places for different stories about what happened in a dispute without extensive snapshoot proof.

If no real conclusion about who was scamming who in that situation could be made, then these forums would be flooded by people yelling "HE SCAMMED ME HE SCAMMED ME" by more people than we already do and nothing could or would be done about it

It's just better in every way to disallow anything that isn't a direct trade to avoid the entire situation.

The number next to the key I assume you're referring to is not for quantity, but number of uses that a tool has left. Many items now have that number, like paints and noisemakers.

I'm sorry, but I'm done if you're going to insist on using these real world analogies. This is not a real life simulation, it is a computer game.

Letting people know they have 3 strikes until a ban just let's them know they can break the rules twice before they need to stop, plain and simple. Trying to work around this with an argument like "well certain things would be more severe" or "this is how real world courts work" just complicates things and puts more work on the moderation staff.

The moderators can do as they please and if they were wanting to permaban for even the slightest infraction to make their lives easier, I'd be all for it since they offer a good site for free and I'm not dumb enough to break the simple rules they've placed. If i may quote:

Uranium235 lähetti viestin:

I would actually like to know what is allowed and what is not.

Pretendeer MCT lähetti viestin:

There is no need for a discussion on someone's price. They can sell it for whatever they want. Prices are very opinionated as well.

Simple as that, don't post comments trying to discuss a person's prices.

The shoe store analogy has been brought up a few times, that was a general thing and not directed at you alone.

Uranium235 lähetti viestin:

And giving trade owners more control over their own trade, like really deleting posts and banning ppl from their trades, would make life so much more easier for admins / mods.

I totally agree with you that users should be able to delete posts on their trades and not have them viewable in any way. However, this is in total contradiction to your first post being favor of being able to go to a shoe store and having them accommodate you, and that you suspect sharks are the ones wanting price discussion discouraged.

The warning system argument you made is flawed, it isn't that that I said that a warning system would make more people put in complaints, it's that there are so many complaints happening already that just letting people off with a warning will not work, those who do not learn their lesson will continue until they actually do get banned. Just banning people from the start stops this and acts as a preemptive warning to everyone to not break the rules.

Uranium235 lähetti viestin:

I would actually like to know what is allowed and what is not.

The line has been made and is simply "Do not comment on the prices of others". The shoe store analogies and any form of real world concept does not apply here. The vast majority of price comments on people's trades are nonconstructive or simply parroting spreadsheets which are known to be bad. Comments on other people's prices are one of the biggest sources of drama around.

There are simply not enough moderators to babysit everyone and make sure they play nice. A warning system does not work when the number of infractions coming in quickly piles up on such a small team. The easy way to solve this is simply prohibiting anyone from commenting on prices and ban those that do without warnings. It is your place as a user to know and abide by the rules, and the moderators job to remove those who do not.

Mesmire lähetti viestin:

The point that I'm trying to make is that it is terribly inefficient for the market to have to wait for sellers to lower their price, assuming they do at all, and not the buyers having to raise their initial price. Any inefficiency in the market almost directly translates to increased prices in general and lower purchasing power for buyers, and well as stagnant growth in terms of new buyers/sellers entering the market.

The economy is and always been inefficient and what you're doing is saying that since buyers aren't willing to pay the prices that will make trades happen that we should screw over sellers and pressure them into selling for less than they want. This will not happen, and any site that does attempt this will fail and not be used by anyone. Making trades happen faster for the sake of it does nothing constructive and will never happen.

Mesmire lähetti viestin:

Like I've mentioned before, there is a reason that the world's largest economies all are (or are transitioning into) a competition-based market.

You're playing TF2, a computer game. This is not a real world economy. You yourself were trying to boil this entire thing into supply and demand, when any sane person knows there is more to an economy than just that

I'd have to disagree with you on a few points. Just for one aspect of the economy, not too far in the distant past, the unusual market was thriving and they were sought after because of how valuable they were to many people. It was only until the quickselling trend took over that people could wait out and score unusuals for the equivalent of a bills hat in some cases. The "cancer" terms were thrown around because of people commenting on trades about prices until anything less than an energy unusual became a hard sell unless you give in to the competition and undersell it because of market perception of poor value.

This lead to the promotional items becoming the top choice for value stability, while the rest of the market has fallen flat. The best way to reverse this would to allow the prices on items to rise and break the demand on earbuds as being one of the few items actually worth anything.

If all unusuals were valuable again, people wouldn't be afraid to purchase them, we wouldn't see these QUICKSELLSQUICKSELLSQUICKSELLS trades and people would have options and could work up through a myriad of options rather than through the very narrow window of items that people think are worth anything.

Competition does not work here simply because we are dealing with identical items for the most part. Just undercutting other people for the simple fact of a fast sell just makes the next people looking for that item say "that person sold cheaper, so should you". Letting price discussion happen would be a poor choice because nobody would ever say "you need to sell for more", it would always be the other way and cheapen items that aren't earbuds even further, allowing those who already have them just get richer.

And that is just one part of it, the same has happened all over the economy (craft hats, out of season items, etc.). Price discussion needs to be disallowed on individual trades because it only pulls down prices and continues the spiral. The rich get richer, and the barrier of entry just gets higher. Also, on the bandwidth case, I can't really comment on that since trading is a slow process and it is a necessary evil.