After so many honest trades...

I kinda have to stand with the GM's on this one. It's their job to fix problems with the game. Fixing human nature... well, that's a little bit of scope creep, don't you think?

Why are people personally selling these things for 2 Billion, when you can put them on the market and get 2 Billion, or, if you put out a bid for 2 Billion, you wind up getting that bid filled?

I can see if they want to sell something for *more* than 2 Billion, then they are forced to go outside the Market; but since the Market deals with these 2 Billion sales rather well... why not just use the Market?

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

You know what's sad? This thread will only accomplish one thing: It will tell the jerkwads that it's OK to rip people off because the GMs won't do anything about it. :/

I'm sorry you got ripped off, should happen in this community.
I know some people said it and if they could i have no doubt most of them will, but i'm going to do what imo is the right thing to do.

I have a Glad Arm proc, level 10, was saving it for one of my alts.
Pick a number, any number, and i'll sell it to ya for that price.
Send me a tell @Dark Energon, or meet me in game in Pocket D. I'll prob be on most of the day.

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.

In almost all cases [including, as it happens, this one] the only reason for not trading through Wents is to save the 10% fee. This sets up a clear risk/reward ratio: you're risking 50% or 100% of your inf (or stuff) for a 10% savings.

I would add to Zombie Man's list "You may be trading things that are not, in fact, tradable at Wents or through the normal trading mechanism" (level 51++ HO's, maybe? If those get over a billion inf they require multitrades.)

I want to see as much inf as possible go down the Wentworth's rabbit hole. However, that is not my primary reason for coming down on the "GMs are not trade insurance" side of this argument. (I'll take "obscure sentence structure" for 500, Alex...)

1) The more things GM's are responsible for, the higher their workload.
2) If GM's are in charge of enforcing agreements between players, there will be an ever increasing tendency to call in the GM's over ... beef byproducts. Scamming over trades? Call a GM. Scamming over PLs? Call a GM. Getting PL'd by someone incompetent? GM. Someone you were PL'ing got a purple and you think you deserve it because you did all the work? GM. Don't like the hairstyle you got at the tailor? GM. It's gonna be the first response to a tantrum.

I want to be able to get a GM when I have an actual problem, like a bugged Synapse. If all the GM's are busy handling the problems of people acting like 4-year-olds, that becomes MY problem.

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.

I'm very disappointed that the gms aren't doing something about this. It absolutely is within their power. If the chat logs clearly show what trade was intended then there is no excuse for allowing this. It's pure griefing. A player who behaves that way is a plague on the game. One jerk like that can drive a dozen good players out of Paragon City entirely. Banning someone like that isn't just the right thing to do, it's also good business. I never would have guessed that the gms would be so callous. It really squelches my willingness to engage in trading with my fellow players.

EDIT: And Fulmens, to the best of my knowledge the GMs do respond consistenly in response to a wide variety of player actions. They can't allow griefing to go on unchecked because if they did then the game would soon become an unplayable sewer. I admit this particular case is more narrow than repeatedly teleporting teammates into spaces they can't get out of, but it's still griefing, and I still want the GMs to do something about it, and in particular to do something *to* the person responsible. Someone who will steal a billion inf and think it's both fair and funny is the same kind of person who will screw up someone's badge run on a TF just for kicks, or even ruin an entire trial if they're clever enough and annoying enough. The sooner a person like that is banned from the game, the better off we'll all be.

OP: ask for an escalation to a more senior GM. The first and even second line of GMs don't always know what can or should be done to fix a problem.

I got a 72hour ban couple years ago for STOLEN INFLUENCE, it was 100mill INF I do believe. Their reason why I got banned? Well it said "someone" went on this person's account and impersonated that person and gave me the INF - I did not know about it at the time. Next day, I get banned. I did nothing to recieve the ban besides getting INF from a person that claimed to be that person at the time. Tried to appeal it, but no reply. Its now behind me, but this brought up that moment.

If this guy doesn't get banned for stolen Influence, I'll be quite ticked off. For I've done nothing to recieve the 72hour suspension.

in the future you dont click "accept" button i think untill you see your trade that you want post in the trade window----thats how i always do it

this guy tryed to do the same today selling high price IO
and every1 was sayin scammer and posted this post and he soon shut up LOL

maybe I missed it but was just curious what server did this take place on?