The 7 Sins of Trading on Ephinea

Thanatossa

Thanatossa

Member
Especially due to "recent events" id like to share my thoughts on trading and the big nonos regarding trading on the Forums, the Discord or even ingame:

1) The cardinal sin of ripping off new players. If you take advantage of the lack of knowledge of a new player just to make a few more PDs or even worse, buy an item off of them way below current market value you actively hurt this Community in general. How would you feel, if you get gaslit into selling a PoM, a Plat Badge or a Nei's Claw for around 1 hoard worth of stuff? I would quit for good once I find out.
2) Hyper-aggressive item flipping. We all know, reselling stuff is common practice, but if you straightup resell everything with a margin of like 20% on items way over 100 PDs of value while gaslighting them, that the price is fair according to the mostly outdated price guide regarding high value stuff, I have words for you that would give me several warings.
3) Sale sniping. Once a deal is made, especially for staples like units and mats, just dont snipe it. Dont be a dick and take advantage of room settings made in a hurry.
4) On Discord: aggresive reposting of tradelists. If you repost your 10 selected B> or S> listings like twice a day, thats good enough. The search function on discord is a powerful enough for people to find your highlights. Staples are mostly sold via B> requests anyway so maybe only list them, if they are at a discount. While we are at it, please try to disclose the price on sale for high value stuff to help on future updates to the price guide.
5) Renegotiating prices. Once you meet up in a room and try to renegociate the price... come on man. Im not talking about "do you take (insert other currency here) too?" here. If you agreed on buying like a v101 for 20 and then try to renegotiate to 18, that's a big nono.
6) Trolling. Nobody gives a shit about your attempts on being funny in #trading. Nobody will B> your dignity for more than 5 meseta.
7) Blaming others for being taken advantage of. Yes, most of these issues can be prevented by checking the price guide or discussing meetups in dms but that doesnt' make it less scummy of you, if you take advantage of that.
 
1), full agree here. People shouldn't be ripped off, new or old players. Ephinea has had a very stable market compared to other servers I played on and that's due to the community keeping the prices stable. Ripping off other players will unbalance this unnaturally. It does occur naturally when there's a surplus of specific items. Economics 1.01 if you ask me.
2), while I'm not pro-flipping, I'm not very against it either. Even though this market is pretty stable, it does fluctuate, so (unintentional) flipping can occur. If someone is willing to let go of a V101 for 15 PDs and you can sell it for 25 PDs the next day, there's nothing wrong with that. In the end it's two adults talking shop and if both parties agree, that's perfectly fine. Maybe people just want those 15 PDs quickly so they're lowering their price. Of course this implies point 1) being taken into account and people aren't ripped off, which should go without saying.
3), this should be reprimandable (I consider this stealing), though difficult to enforce. "I'm sorry, I didn't see the Discord post and saw the room was open so I just went in" is a valid excuse, 'cause that could very much be the case. Best way to prevent this is to set up a room with a password and don't share that publicly (even though I just traded after putting the password out in public, it was clear who it was meant to, so if anyone sniped it, it would be easy to trace. Prevention is just so far better).
4), I'm okay with people actively trying to sell their wares. To some people this adds to the appeal of the game and putting a strict limit on that might turn some players away. Sure, the search function does what it does well, but selling can work on a impulse very well. As a retail worker irl I've had some minor training in this and it's very much a thing. Not a bad thing by default either, we all do it (we've all bought a much too expensive chocolate bar at a gas station on a whim). The other side is, there's a whole construct to something like Ikea and how they're pretty much ensuring consumers to, well, consume. In any case, plenty of people aren't really looking for anything specific until they see it pop up on their Discord feed and that shouldn't be too restricted imo. Maybe a restriction is needed, but whenever I saw people posting a lot in #trading the community said something about it and it got sorted afaik.
5), I'm aware that's the case in some cultures that's perfectly fine, but in most of the Western world it isn't really a thing. An agreed upon price is, agreed upon. Can't really back down from that. As I said in my point 2), we're all adults here. That means we can make our own prices, but also means we take responsibility. Agreeing to a price only to haggle some more for whatever reason isn't part of that in my books (and once again, cultures aside).
6), I feel the community takes care of that by themselves rather well. Just a few days ago I saw someone being told that #trading isn't for general chitchat and that was the end of it. No drama, no nothing. Must be because we're all adults here. ;)
7), blaming others for being taken advantage of is a natural thing in the process of dealing with being taken advantage of. But people can do that in private and appeal their inhibition. I have great faith in this community taking care of things if something like this where to occur en public. And if the need arises, Ephinea has plenty of moderators. Take it up with them if needed.

And I'd like to add it's a price guide. It's not set in stone, it's a free market that the community does it's best to keep in check. And seeing I've been playing here on and off for the past decade and not really notice anything ridiculous like SchtServ or Ultima had, they've been doing that very well. It's great to highlight some sales-etiquette, but deep down we all know not to take advantage of one another and keep our agreements.

This has been my TEDx talk, sales worth making.
 
I think I have to clarify 2 things, since i may have worded them poorly (not my first language).
2) If you resell way above current market price, it doesnt really matter if its a high value item, like i proposed earlier. Your example of a v101 being sold for 25 is as outragous to me as a PWand being sold for around 250 when you can easly get one for way cheaper. But this blends in withthe other sins.
7) I worded that one poorly. Im talking about victim blaming here. "You should have checked the price guide" "you should have asked for a second opinion" "your loss if you are dumb enough to floor trade"... you get the idea. Like in general: most of these things boil down to "just dont be a dick".
 
English isn't mine either, don't worry.

2), people in need are going to be willing to pay more, so maybe someone wants to buy a V101 for 25 PDs to ensure they get them quickly. By your logic that's a sin. I strongly disagree with that. People should be allowed to do so. And the other way around, if sellers are going to keep listing them at 25 PDs, nobody will take them if the price is set to 18-20 PDs. But most of all, markets will fluctuate. I've bought and sold them at 25 PDs before (but quite some time ago). Same goes for Pwand. I sold mine for 250 about 2 years ago, but due to the event and people hunting them, there's more sellers than buyers and that does bring it's value down. I'm positive prices will go up some time after the event, since that's pretty much always been the case. It's just how markets work. That's why the price guide is a guide, not fully set in stone.
7), victim blaming will always be a thing, unfortunately. Being ripped off is bad enough, being blamed for it is another and shouldn't happen. Doesn't mean that it won't. People seem to have forgotten that it's okay to be silent rather than put their judgement out in the open all of the time.

Thank you for elaborating.
 
This is why I was hesitant in putting up a trade list in the first place, when it comes to the Online part I'm not very experienced. This is why I thought to put up a note to say let me know if I'm doing something wrong because although I did some research, I'm worried about other people hating me.
 
Agreed. A lot of those practices are commonplace in larger mmos where you're competing vs thousands of other players on your server for sales but Ephinea is very small comparatively.
 
Personally I feel like some of these community callouts to share receipts de-value the effort to understand the economy and the price point fluctuations outside of the price guide. Shouldn't someone who trawls the trade channels and forums to understand the worth of a less frequently traded item, or one with a wide range of price on the guide, be rewarded with whatever margins they can make on their homework? Asking for a PC> when you're the seller always seems to yield a good baseline if you don't want to spend time looking at past sales yourself.

That being said yeah, maybe setting a standard for what to do to close an auction could help (setting thread to "DONE" is not as useful for future price research as leaving the item sold and final price in the title)

This obviously isn't the case when someone is new to the market, I think being as helpful as possible in that situation is the right thing to do, e.g you mentioned the awful deals we've seen go down when new players are taken advantage of.

Slow mode to #trading has been proposed a few times by different players - maybe that could help clean up when you want to do market research on recent prices (so you don't get the same user reposting their item N times as the first few pages of search results on discord)
 
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taking advantage of new players should almost be a suspension/bannable offense when found guilty of doing it numerous times...i always try to give free things to new players (nothing gamebreaking, like a 50 hit charge vulcan or H/battle unit or something, shit like that).

Its not like this server has 1000s of players on it, whenever a new player decides to dip their feet in the proverbial game pool, we should be doing all we can to keep them in the long haul, instead of shady practices.
 
I'm a little curious about what brought this on to be honest.
It's an interesting post with some pretty valid points and criticisms.
 
agree with all the points.

However, I would say that not having an accurate/updated price guide is actively hurting the community as well. If we know its outdated and not being maintained, it should be taken down instead of leaving it around to mislead players, especially when a new player uses it, goes to trade discord and gets told "price guide outdated" and is given a way lower valuation than what is on the guide.

Essentially new players trying to do trades or at least learn trade values are having to fight a war on two fronts. One from the Trolling and Mispricing by those in the Trade discord hoping for a quick profit and the misinformation given by the price guide.
 
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Onikesshi said:
agree with all the points.

However, I would say that not having an accurate/updated price guide is actively hurting the community as well. If we know its outdated and not being maintained, it should be taken down instead of leaving it around to mislead players, especially when a new player uses it, goes to trade discord and gets told "price guide outdated" and is given a way lower valuation than what is on the guide.

Essentially new players trying to do trades or at least learn trade values are having to fight a war on two fronts. One from the Trolling and Mispricing by those in the Trade discord hoping for a quick profit and the misinformation given by the price guide.
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I dont think it should be taken down because about 30% of the prices are out of date when the other 70% is still fine and accurate.
 
Varista said:
I dont think it should be taken down because about 30% of the prices are out of date when the other 70% is still fine and accurate.
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If there is no way to quickly identify which of the prices are "out of date" then the whole thing is useless, regardless of the validity of some of the prices. saying 1/3 prices are bad, but the rest are good doesn't mean much if a user (new or veteran) cant determine which prices are accurate at a glance. it defeats the whole purpose of a price guide.
 
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