seebs

Does whether it's okay depend on whether the seller knows about the upcoming changes?

There's wording saying that you grant them ownership insofar as that's legally enforceable. Which may be a little, a lot, or not at all. I would not recommend trying it. (Note also the complete lack of clear protections for your own copyrights. And note the rumors that Jim Butcher has a Thugs mastermind named Johnny Marcone.)

I interpreted "entire years" as meaning "any given entire year".

Wait, not skin. Areas that are a pale version of the color you're using. If you have a bright red picked, they look like pinkish skin, but if you change to green, they change with it.

Imperial Dynasty 3 gloves show as locked still.

Oooh. "Imperial Dynasty 1" chest (female/tight) shows skin, but isn't a tops-with-skin, and the skin it shows is Permanently Pink. That's gonna be popular, I bet. Same for bottoms -- the not-with-skin type shows pink skin unconditionally.

Well, I'm used to there being rules against naming, but I'm also used to there being rules against fraud. And it seems to me that you need either both or neither, because otherwise you're simultaneously not defending people from predators and forbidding them from taking steps to defend themselves.

Hmm.

I take it the CoH forums don't have any policy against naming people with whom we've engaged in failed trades, etc.?

Maybe we should just make it a market forum thing: Keep an updated list of people who have been alleged to have done such scams, make a list of people who've been reimbursed, and pretty much reimburse anyone who asks. Because, really, there's no way the pool of victims can keep up with the kind of money generation the marketeers do.

I think the right way to frame it is as a purchase; we're buying the self-respect of the scammers, which is why they end up with more money, we end up with less, and yet they end up with no self-respect and we end up with some. Clearly, we have purchased it.

I actually don't know how often I can afford to do this -- I seriously have no clue whether my net worth in game is over or under 10B, and I've been a bit wary of messing with the market too much between now and when enhancement converters have been in effect for a bit.

Again: If the GMs don't handle this, the community will -- and will do it badly.

I would rather the GMs deal with one scam report than get tied up in half a dozen or more separate harassment reports, which are a lot harder to resolve effectively, since they require a lot more study of history.

And that's the thing -- in some cases, handling the root of an issue takes less work than handling the results of not having handled it. Enforcing a tiny number of real agreements takes very little time; dealing with the aftermath of a community that's learned that GMs won't enforce agreements takes a lot of time, and the main time savings comes from people who left because they couldn't handle the bad community.

Prevention > Cure.

Also, the slippery slope isn't particularly slippery; it's easy for the GMs to set limits on which trade-like things they do or don't enforce, but "agreed to give X in exchange for Y", where both X and Y are objects/money that exist in game and can be traded, is a really easy case.

But mostly, it comes down to the fact that people will deal with stuff like this, because that is what humans are like; they make a much larger deal than is economically directly justified of things like cheating. But in the absence of the enforcement coming from people who have 100% reliable information about what was said and what happened? It will be gossip, rumors, and a huge source of drama, fights in channels, harassing messages, and more.

And that will end up being more work for GMs.

Compare the GM harassment workload in City, where harassing behavior is generally dealt with quickly, to the harassment workload in the games where GMs leave it unless it's really, really, bad. They accept a much narrower set of cases, but they have a ton more of them, because the cases they ignored festered and escalated.

Okay, thinking about this a bit more, I can give a more articulate explanation of why GMs can, and should, get involved.

People will not tolerate a lack of any response to antisocial behavior. They will happily defer it to the GMs if the GMs will do it. But! If the GMs won't, players will.

This creates a problem: There is no way for players to ascertain facts reliably. If someone tells you that he got ripped off of a billion inf by Fulmens, you can probably conclude that this didn't happen, because that would be nonsensical. But what if it's someone you've never heard of, or don't know very well? You have no way to make an informed decision -- but a very strong social instinct telling you that the community relies on a decision being made.

So a lot of people will make decisions, and will make them with incomplete or unreliable information. And that is going to be at least comparably bad to the initial problem.

The only way to avoid this, consistently, is to have the GMs take advantage of the fact that they have perfect information about in-game communications and trades, and make it clear that abuse will not be tolerated.

Interesting point. The only MMOs I'm playing now both have significant non-endgame content and ongoing development of more. Which makes me a lot happier.

Nope! It's just me.

I have a cape.

Couple reasons:
1. Avoid market fees.
2. Don't have listing fee.
3. Want to scam people.

The one thing I use time bomb for:

* Mine corridor.
* Walk into enemy group.
* Drop time bomb.
* Run around corner.
* If something makes it to me, shoot it in the face once to take off the remaining fraction of a health bar.

Opening a fight without any chance for retaliation is surprisingly valuable.