What? Didn't understand anything... Is this moderator abusing his power and how? He's discarding open trade offers when he think the ask is low balling?(That's a problem with the site not with the specific person... As there will be always someone who will abuse that kind of system...)
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Yes he is. It's clearly a moderator abusing since every complaint about that moderator system I saw in the forums is about that specific guy.
I first made a preset offer with my own value system based on ITAD (prices from official resellers, for the past year).
He cancelled/declined the offer.
When finally I got the explanation, he based his decision on gg.deals only and ask me to change a few things on my initial offer.
I clearly said I disagree with his way of thinking but proceeded. Same result.
Barter worked fine before this moderator system. It was a good idea, but poor implementation. This guy is ruining the whole thing.
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Sorry, not familiar with trading on barter, but the mod just straight up deletes your outgoing offer because he deems it unfair? This sure sounds like overreach. I'm no libertarian or free market proponent but i'm sure there are other ways to protect gullible traders. So what was his excuse for deleting your amended offer?
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outbound offers being stopped are based on recipient settings, people can opt out of it.
you can choose(shortening this to what it effectively is), leave offers to me alone, just advise me, or stop bad offers to me.
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If you could see who is using it, you could choose to not deal with people using moderation and avoid all of this mess.
At first, I choose to accept advice. They didn't give any advice, just deleted my offers. So now I'm on "No moderation" mode.
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None, he basically said he has better things to do...
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So what's the pros of sticking with barter? I use Steamtrades and there's none of this strikes and mods sticking their nose into my trades nonsense
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I never used steamtrades so I can't tell what barter does better, but all my doubles are classified, it's quite easy to manage, add copies from bundles...
I'll seriously dig into steamtrades, but I've got no time and energy for the moment, my grandpa got an emergency brain surgery and got diagnosed with an intestinal cancer, family first
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I switched to barter mostly because it auto finds matches and updates trade lists after completed trades making the whole process pretty smoot hand easy. Really sucks that Im gonna have to find something else because Barter seems to be going in the toilet.
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Barter is just faster to trade if you can obey some simple rules. (Basically matching gg.deals) You can find what you want and people who want what you have more easily
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Yes I have same problem. I offer trade to someone, moderator broke and stopped my trade and leave message. And someone blocked me without good reason :/ ... really strange. Trade are free, if someone accepted or not that is fine.
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When I still used barter, I'd often block users who sent very one-sided/unbalanced offers. No idea if that is what happened here, but yeah. Deciding you want to have nothing to do with another user and blocking them is also free.
And actually, even before I stopped trading altogether, I had stopped using barter due to all the b.s. offers and curator resellers that were rampant on there. If anything, it seems like the new moderator system is cleaning up at least one part of that.
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tell him to shove his opinions somewhere, that will help the situation and he will understand your point of view
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I wish I could. But I try to stay polite 😉
I contacted who I think is the creator of barter. It would be such a shame to see his work destroyed by such an I'll stay polite 😂
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Who did you contact? Id also like to give them a peace of my mind because I think this heavy handed moderation is going to kill the site. I'm certainly planning on looking somewhere else. If I cared about the dollar values of the games, then I would jsut buy and sell them using money, so what's the point of a "trade" site?
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I don't know if I'm allowed to put names here. Just look at the steam group, he's the first member.
But he never answers.
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Lol. Can I speak with the manager xD. Fyi the creator is basically left barter because IRL life takes too much time. If you check, he hasn't played a game since 2020.
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Made the changes he asked, even if I don't agree with his value system. Got declined again. So what's next?
I'd assume it was because of Falcon Age, although the mod hadn't mentioned it in your discussion (https://steamcommunity.com/groups/bartervg/discussions/0/4513255198928362860/), linking that would make understanding your posting here easier btw.
GG.deals isn't necessarily grey market, default setting should be without key sellers and you can always configure that.
If you mean overpriced regarding delisting games: yes, of course, because those are public offers. For trades you would have to skim through Steamtrades, barter trades, trades in RemGC forum or game specific forum. ITAD doesn't help in regard of delisted games.
Regarding alternatives: SteamTrades, LesTrades, but both are flawed compared to barter.
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Sorry if I was not clear enough. I should have indeed.
I know gg.deals is not grey market only but it kinda promotes it by showing those prices, unlike ITAD.
Problem here is this moderator gauge games by grey market prices.
As for the overpriced games, of course for delisted it can be usefull. But not everyone agree with what grey market dictate.
Let's mention Scratches. It has been delisted because it doesn't seem to work on modern OS. It has gone public domain as you could download it for free on the creator's site. Would I pay 125€ to have it in my steam library? No way!
Still, someone offered me for a game of "normal" value, because he wanted to discard his old keys for games he wanted to play. Alass, key was duplicated so I'm still looking for a key occasionnaly. And if someone wants to offer me the game for less value, why interfere?
Because that's the other problem with this guy. He declined trades you make because you don't ask enough in return!
So yes, maybe he declined again because of Falcon age, although he didn't mention it first time. But maybe it was because ofHeavenly Bodies or Rain on your parade. I would send my 5€ game for those 1-2€ game and he doesn't like that. And again, no explanation, he didn't mention this in his answer, I had to search forums to discover that he acts like that.
Thanks for your thoughts about this. It's a pleasure to discuss. And thanks for the alternatives, I'll check what I can do 😉👍
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I don't like ITAD, because for example in this case, there is an active bundle for 5 euros, but it doesnt show it in the current low or the historical low or even anywhere on the games main page. It only shows it if you click the bundle itself. When i want to take a quick look at a games price, i dont wanna juggle through all the bundles it might or might have been in.
Edit - Altough as for current prices, i might be wrong, because its sold out and can't be bought currently.
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I agree with you. That's why for recent bundles I also take account of the bundle price/tier.
Same for giveaway. I won't accept my paid games for recent giveaway, unless it was long ago and the game price is back to normal.
Like I tried to explain to the problematic moderator, we each have our own way to value games. And that's ok as long as we stay polite and don't spam offers to someone.
Nowhere in barter there's a rule for pricing. This guy just want to impose his vision.
If gg.deals is now mandatory, let barter clearly say it... and maybe add systematic tiers to help people.
If that's the rule of the site, I'm ok to follow it or go elsewhere if I don't. That's not the case here. Just an abusive guy, taking his "precious time" like he said to bully others (and probably get rid of competition)
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This is how I understand it.
Once you decide to trade a key, you literally become part of the gray market. You're not an official store, and you're violating the terms of service of the site you got the bundle from. So, the keys you are offering are gray market keys. So, you should use gray market prices.
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you should always include key resellers for gg.deals for evaluating a keys approximate trade value, its to help balance the resellers not making a massive profit off of people... and because that is closer to the true worth of the key(only really accurate if their is a supply in the aftermarket, once a bundles keys are so old that there are only a handful left... its terribly inaccurate(90->100% MSRP for keys is just sad).
just including official prices will never give you a good idea.
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I know and I do it that way, but OP wrote that they don't want to look at grey market.
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If gg.deals prices are the official standard, then it should be part of the official rules. I agree that resellers / scammers are bad and should be stopped from trading for a profit on the platform. If that means using only one source of value to evaluate trades, then fine. But it needs to be made official for everyone to know and decide if they want to continue using Barter of move on elsewhere.
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Okay so for me it was even more ridiculous. The games had similar price. My game was older so the H/W demand was like equal. The game i wanted was bundled for the first time (quite cheap bundle) so the HAVE were pretty low, it was wishlisted very often. My offer was declined cuz of the H/W ratio! Like wtf? who cares about this ratios in the barter bubble? Its quite obvious that if a game is bundled for the first time not many people own it compared to older games (which might be still better / more valuable etc). After this happend i stopped using Barter for trades, cuz i dont want to waste my time to make offers and then it just get randomly declined from some mods. It was already months ago and you know what? I dont miss barter at all!
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Is it a problem because of the percentage system there? Lowering your completed trade percentage. Something like that?
Because if it's a problem with you offering unbalanced trades, that does seem like something mods would want to intervene.
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Seems like nobody cares about percentage.
It's more about strikes that leads to ban because of their personnal preference. The mod even admit that for him most of my trades are well-balanced. But I might value games differently. Or sometimes agree on a trade that favors me or that favors the other guy.
Nobody asked advice. Even less an action from them.
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That's probably why they use ggdeals as a way to determine average current lowest pricing/value. Because it literally takes into account every way in which a person might buy a game and how much they would currently be paying for it at its current lowest price. I used it for that reason when I was still trading as well. It's more consistent and takes into account more factors than ITAD and it updates more regularly than ITAD as well based on my experience with both.
What I'm not clear on is how this equates to bullying. More likely, you wanted to trade with somebody who has their account settings set up to trigger some sort of review before a trade can be completed.
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I simply refuse to buy on grey market. That's my choice, I can understand yours.
I mostly don't contact people directly anymore. Because not everybody answers quickly, or aswers at all, it can consume a lot of time before finding someone wanting to trade (or I have to make that highly defavors me).
So I make preset offer with many games I agree to trade my game for, or many games I own for the game I want. So if someone is ok with one of the game, he just have to accept it.
So yes, the risk of dealing with someone with the mod ON is higher, although I never encountered any problem before.
Yet, I make such preset offer once every week with the same value system (ITAD, recently bundled, etc, that's my own recipe and I'm happy with it) and the moderator system never acted against me.
Why am I calling it bullying? Because how they treat people who don't agree with them as sharks, robbers.
When I finally got an explanation of why my offers were deleted, I followed their instructions but told them I strongly disagree with their behavior. They still deleted my new offers.
They wanted to make a point. That's bullying.
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It's not a question of whether you want to buy from the grey market or not. It's a simple matter if what people are willing to pay based on what's available. Looking at the lowest price on ggdeals doesn't mean you are buying or selling on the grey market. It just means you will be better informed as to how people will evaluate the value of your trade proposals.
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You could always just give things away instead of trading. Something about this forum made me think of that......
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Read my first message ;)
I make GA. But I don't win a lot of GA. So if I want one specific game, I might need to trade for it.
Don't forget steamgifts is not perfect neither. Bots, massive assets flip GA...
At least, mods are great here 💖
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Basically barter admins got fed up with some resellers and other folks sharking less knowledgeable users and implemented a system to keep trades fair. And they use grey market prices (gg.deals) as benchmark to judge trades because resellers offload their keys there.
Problem is that they have overdone it a bit, I think. They seem to operate under the assumption that grey market value = value on barter. Which is false. There is correlation but in reality a key's value on barter is much lower. There's an entry barrier to selling on the grey market. I can't just go and list my keys there. I'd need to register a business, pay fees, taxes and dedicate a lot more time to it. But when I sell an unwanted key to a reseller at 50-70% of its grey market value they think I'm being exploited and seem to be quite adamant to try to save me from myself.
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Like someone said earlier : great idea, poor implementation.
Barter should not give such powers to thinskinned, abusive guys. Or is it just resellers keeping away competition?
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friend, do you see this girl's profile below in deals? well she is the barter admin.
They do not force you to use ggdeals, you can choose the non-intervention option in volunteer preferences, the problem comes when you send an unfavorable offer to a user who has voluntary help activated (mediation action on) or this user has not established anything, then they act.
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But since their favorable/unfavorable verdict is based on ggdeals grey market only, they force you to do so.
I'll just have to stop preset for now, hoping the guy I contact is not using moderation...
Or use something else, I definitely don't agree with this bullying methods.
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I agree with you but it's their site and they make their rules.
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Sure, it's just common sense.
But put it clearly on the site then. Don't treat your community like sh*t and be consistant with how you apply those rules.
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she is only one of them. Bartee is more than one ppl. just saying
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I jsut got a 30 day ban for offering a game that has been on humble monthly within the last year for another game that has been on HM within the last year because the "values" are different on some third party site I couldn't care less about. How is it a lowball when I know for a fact they were purchased for the same price? And even if it is, so fucking what? If people don't want to trade, they can cancel, and if they dont want repeated trade offers they can block me. This absurd moderation has ruined the site.
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The mediation system is there to prevent resellers from taking advantage of people who are new to the site or don't understand they're being used to make mad profits. If this isn't super obvious to you from the very beginning, I don't know what to tell you. Are you a reseller?
Using grey market prices is necessary to determine whether a trade is genuine or a reseller, because most trades on barter are to/from resllers, since they hold all of the unbundled, coveted games. I think it's reasonable to assume that everyone that sends a trade offer is a reseller, because there is no way of knowing if you're looking for a trade that just happens to net you $5 in profit to play yourself, or to sell. That way if the trade is fair, nothing will happen and the mods will not intervene.
Like said before, you can turn off the mediation for your offers, but as soon as you sent it to someone who does have mediation turned on, it can be acted to. And most people who will have it turned off are the resellers, because they don't want the mods to interfere with their profits.
I saw some of your recent trades, you're sending a game worth ~$4.3 and want $7 in return. It isn't outrageous, but it's not far from the kind of trade resellers will send out to new accounts, because "H/W is more important" or whatever. You may not like that gg.deals is the unofficial currency, but it's necessary to gauge fairness.
As for your "receiving lowball offers from resellers", I've been on barter.vg for a while and I used to receive more low-balls than I do now. Although I don't have many games to trade, maybe that's part of it. Point is, the new laws against resellers don't make them send out more low-balls.
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Yes I fully understand the goal. And I liked it.
I'm not a reseller at all. My games are from doubles I got from different bundles (Fanatical, Humble for the most part). I doubt I have an unbundled game in my list. All games are activated on my account. I make no profit. I just refuse grey market.
So yes ggdeals might tell you I make sometimes a profit. And sometimes I "lose" the trade.
But I try to make fair offers based on ITAD, recently bundled, or Want (if that's a game nobody wants, like a lot of VR games)
Thus, of course, I don't get the same result. And nobody complained about it till now. Because most people see clearly that I'm not a reseller and are happy to trade their leftovers for mine.
I can receive fair offer from resellers from time to time. But I get a lot of offers with freebies or asset flips from bot accounts.
I agree, new laws against resellers can be usefull. But I'm not a reseller, and they blindly prevent me from using the site.
I don't think it was created for this.
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Unfortunately I don't think it's possible for the mods, or anyone, to determine whether a user is a reseller or not.
I'm not sure why you only started being acted on now. The mediation system has been in place since late 2023 I think, that's when I noticed the more lazy resellers whining in the Steam group discussions.
I don't use grey markets either, but will use gg.deals to look for genuine keys since I like the layout more than isthereanydeal.com. But when I make a trade, I always go by the grey market prices. Not because they're important to me, but that's the most "unbiased" value system there is. That way I don't have to think "hmm will this user really want the game I offer?" or "what if he thinks it's trash even though it's worth $20 on gg.deals?". It eliminates a lot of the unknown IMO.
I agree that you are free to have your own value system based on ITAD or how much you want a game. That's why you have the option to disable mediation on your offers. However, if someone has mediation enabled I think it's fair to assume their value system is based on gg.deals prices, and when you send an offer to them, you should be making the trade offer with their value in mind.
The only problem here is that you can't know whether someone has mediation enabled or not, but I think it's a part of trading on barter (I don't think so anyway). I've sent many trades before mediation was introduced that were declined even though I thought they were fair, and based on gg.deals. But I didn't think the system was broken because my trades were being rejected, they simply weren't acceptable to the other user.
Or in other words, imagine there was a system where "if I lose >30% value in the trade, automatically decline offer". That's kind of what happens when mediation is enabled.
By the way, is there a downside to having your offer cancelled by the mods? Or does it just increase the declined offers statistic?
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Yes, 2 huge downsides, that's why I'm so angry.
First, I can't trade with people with the same value system as me. Or elsewhere. And barter was a top place to do it.
Second and most important, you get a strike for each cancel. After 25, you get banned for months.
I checked and you can see on the profile of the user if he is using moderation or not. But it takes time, and what if the user activates moderation during your offer?
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Wow. This is a super nice well-rounded post. Just one thing:
- You can know if mediation is on or off. There is a well-lighted line to tell you that meditation is on. Or you can check the other one profile. If they have an "unset" option, well that's a problem. There is no warning that meditation is on in this case, but Bartees can act fully.
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Where is this well-lit line?
I believe that the problem is in the multi-offers and that more than 80 percent of users have not established volunteer preferences, many do not even know that this option is available.
Bartee interprets as mediator action on in any case those who have not established preferences
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https://pasteboard.co/4zxOXAiVBre7.png
My bad. It is not lit, just bolded.
"I believe that the problem is in the multi-offers"
Yes, sadly, they started mediating that more actively recently. They have been in a little bit of a grey zone since the mediation started and they started closing this backdoor recently. But I think this works like one of the Bartee sees the multi-offer on her personal account and closes it instead of actively searching for them
"Bartee interprets as mediator action on in any case those who have not established preferences"
To be frank, in most cases it doesn't really matter if you always went for gg.deals anyway. The problem starts when you have beta keys or curator copies to trade.
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Ggdeals why?
Im looking flr the game of life 2,its available in one bundle from fanatical (1.66). Ggdeals show 5 euros this game.
If i want this game i need to pay 3 tf2 keys or trade for kingdome deliverance? Really?
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it shows the availability of a key. Common less wanted keys are cheaper. KDC is pretty common and has been bundled 9 times already (counting the special bundles too). For GoL2, it is its 3rd time and the last bundle was 1.5 years ago. Furthermore, on barter, only 18 traders have it (and at least 10 of them will not trade it easily). After the bundle ends, GoL2 will increase its value, so finding somebody who is willing to trade a 2tf2-worth game for a 3tf2-worth game is a slim chance. But as always it is personal what a game is worth for somebody. No one is forcing anybody to take a deal.
But open bundle cases always are a little bit different for me at least. I never trade games from a bundle that just started because the price will drop significantly in the first 2 weeks.
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it shows the availability of a key.
Availability of keys does not always determine value. There are games for which keys are rare (and thus have an inflated grey market value) but which go on deep sale on Steam regularly. My trading partner for example got burned by moderator action when I sold them games for 3 TF2 each which regularly go on sale for 2.5 to 3.5 EUR on Steam itself. Even though I could buy these games 'back' at the next Steam sale and have a hefty profit left over on top moderators still considered it an unfair trade based on gg.deals value. (Which was around 6-7 EUR.)
Another example is Supreme Commander and SC: Forged Alliance which were on sale on IG as a key for months for 2.5 EUR and yet mods valued it at 3.5+ EUR at the time. I don't understand why the IG price didn't count, only the grey market ones.
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You're absolutely right. And I hate this scenario. For me, this is COD:WW2. The game goes on sale every month on Steam for 20€, but the keyshops offer it for 40€ So I cannot make an offer that worth 20€ because of this system. 40€, that 20 tf2, that if I sell it on Steam and I will get around 35€ for it. So I just gave up. So yeah the gg.deals system on barter is not perfect, but at least easy to follow. I sometimes just ask the other if he is willing to set moderation off when I want to make or accept a riskier offer.
FTR steam sales don't count according to mods so resellers can't get keys for cheaper than usually available
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I turned both moderation and moderator comments off months ago. Later that day a reseller I traded with got a strike / decline for a trade I found absolutely fair even though we both had moderation off.
And a few weeks ago one of my trades with a reseller got a snarky mod comment too, but at least no decline or other action that time.
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Resellers are different topics and have stricter rules. They are more audited too. The whole strong mediaton is because of them mostly.
I checked, and at the "a few weeks ago" deal, the reseller has the unset option, that weirdly works like full mediation. If one of the parties has unset or turned on, the other party's option doesn't matter.
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Huh, I hadn't heard of such things happening on barter until now. That said, I don't think it makes sense to police trades by game prices unless those prices are also listed on barter itself (which they're not). But even then, at most a notice should be posted on such trades automatically, not a force cancellation of said trades.
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From what I can see from your offers(https://barter.vg/u/3606/o/), your preset offers are getting declined. Those offers appear to everyone, both resellers and new users, so you are effectively making offers to new users.
You offer Ascent: Cyber Edition from the last fanatical rpg bundle (https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/X9Fym/fanatical-build-your-own-rpg-bundle-bundle-bash-edition), so you couldve bought that game for ~1€.
You ask for Songs of conquest which, looking at isthereanydeal, the lowest is 10€. If we go by bundles, it has only been in one (https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/E6h3Y/humble-bundle-take-your-turn-tactics-rpgs) at the 18€ tier.
So it makes sense that the gg.deals value of Ascent is way lower than Songs of conquest, thats why its widely used, because it accounts for bundle frequency, how many people wants that game and in which tier it has been.
If we ignore gg.deals you are still trying to get a 10€ game for a 1€ game.
So I understand why your offers are getting declined.
In your last offer you are still offering a 1€ for Arzette, which is 13€ (!) at the lowest in isthereanydeal, and it was in only 1 bundle at the 14€ tier. Im guessing that offer is not getting declined because in this case gg.deals prices actually helps you (4€ from Ascent and 4,5€ from Arzette)
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For Ascent: Cyber Edition, lowest for the past 12 months is 7,50€. Be aware that it ran out of keys.
But when I can, I try to match type of bundles too. Since I buy a lot of bundles, there's few unbundled games I can trade for. So I frequently request lower value games for mine, sometimes higher.
As far as I know, it can be the basis for an offer that suits better the other user. In fact, that happens a lot. And I think it's cool.
That's mostly why I added Song of Conquest.
If I wanted profit, why add to the choices less valuable games like Heavenly Bodies or Rain on Your Parade?
They're less than 2€ on ggdeals!
I just don't calculate value the same way you do. I don't agree with Ascent being a 1€ game and of course you have the right to think different, no problem with me 😉👍
As for my last offer, well I had to use ggdeals. What do you want me to do? Get permabanned?
And with ggdeals Ascent is still 5€ and Arzette 4,5€ (Oh my, I'm losing 0.5€!)
And I'm pretty sure I won't have a trade, because most people I trade with don't use ggdeals
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Sure, it ran out of keys(this is most likely why the gg.deals value is higher), but you have it tagged as getting it from that bundle, which makes it in the 1-3€ range. You putting other games in the offer isnt really an issue, but you also want Songs of Conquest which as Ive explained has way better value than your game. As Bart-ee said in the steam discussion, the only way anyone will trade it is if they dont know its value.
"I just don't calculate value the same way you do. I don't agree with Ascent being a 1€ game and of course you have the right to think different, no problem with me"
Its not that I disagree with you, I am following your reasoning for valuing games, and it ends up being way in your favor
"And with ggdeals Ascent is still 5€ and Arzette 4,5€ (Oh my, I'm losing 0.5€!) "
The Ascent in gg.deals is 3,8€, where are you getting 5€?
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I already answered those questions, feel free to read them. As I said, I'm very busy with my grandpa's health, I already spent to much time on the topic 😅
Conclusion is : if it became barter's official policy, I will follow the rules. Or use something else that match better my values.
PS: When I checked a few days ago it was 5, it must fluctuate everyday I guess
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I havent ask much more than the price of Ascent, not sure what you are reading from my response.
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No problem, I was referring to Song of Conquest.
I just checked The Ascent today and it's now 3.5€, so yes it fluctuates a lot. I would not be surprised if a trade is considered fair one day, but not after 2 days. Might be another problem with moderation.
Anyways, news from my grandpa's doctor are bad, I enjoyed discussing with all of you on this topic, sharing our different vision on trading, moderating, and ggdeals but I won't be able to discuss it anymore. Feel free to entertain the debate or just let it die.
Peace to all of you 🤍
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I know that not everyone uses grey market to judge value but the whole reason for the moderation system was because resellers were taking advantage of other users to sell on grey market. I noticed with your recent offers you're trying to trade The Ascent: Cyber Edition and you comment you're willing to accept Scratches: Director's Cut or Songs of Conquest. Is it just a coincidence Songs of Conquest is worth like 7x the amount The Ascent is and Scratches is no longer available for purchase on steam and goes for $140 on grey market?
You say you don't care about grey market. If you suddenly found out you had a game that was worth $140 on there would you start caring? How would you feel if you were a new user and someone traded you a cheap game for a game you thought was also low value but turned out to be worth $140?
I don't care about jewelry but if someone told me I had a rare gem that was worth millions I would definitely start caring. That's kind of how this grey market thing is.
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Just a last story because I got family problems to care.
Do you sometimes go to a pawnshop or a retroshop and see things with a huge pricetag and it's there for years because nobody wants/ care about it? Sure it has high value, but there is no buyer.
My father had a medieval ring. It was awfull. Nobody would wear it. Nobody would buy it its real price. What did he do? He offered the ring to a friend who was crazy about medieval things. He didn't get his money. But he made his friend happy.
Since everybody is talking about Scratches, Scratches has been made public domain by his dev (because it crashes on modern OSes) and is available to download for free. I've got it for years. So what happened?
I added in the past Scratches to my preset offers so people know I'll gladly add it to my steam library. And one of my trade partners saw it and told me he got an old key. We settled on a game he wanted and let me test his key. It was duplicated.
But why did he do that? Because, like me, he didn't care about those ridiculous grey market prices. He wanted to give it to a friendly barter user, not a reseller, and get a game he wanted to play.
Did I know it was so pricy? Not at all, I never went on ggdeals before the moderator intervention.
Would I told him if I knew? Of course. Like I remind people when key might be duplicated or region restricted.
Sad thing is moderator just think barter users are sharks, rude people not worth any consideration. At least that's how I was treated, despite my flawless profile.
So, back to jewelry, if I discover I have a pricy gem, what will I do? I'll check official prices, not grey market. I won't sell it to the mafia just because I'll get more profit. And if there's no buyers, I'll lower the price, I'm not interested in keeping it forever.
And if you discover your jewelry has been stolen, what would you do? Because grey market is what it is... grey. There's stolen key, key bought with stolen credit cards, ... How do you feel about it?
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Yes the main issue is trust. Is the trader being honest when they say they're not a reseller? I suppose barter could check all your past completed trades and determine if there's a large number of imbalanced trades but that's tedious and still not solid proof.
I've also been accused by barter of being a reseller (when I'm not). Although I've never made an offer for a game that was anywhere close in potential value as Scratches. I guess barter doesn't want to take any chances because what if the trader is lying?
A game being on a different platform for free or cheap doesn't really matter because steam keys and gifts can become rare collectibles. A steam inventory gift of a game can be worth a lot more than a steam key or a much cheaper key on another platform. Likewise if the game is no longer available for purchase on steam then the price can go up wildly.
I know that grey market key sites have gotten a bad reputation and controversy in the past but I don't think it's fair that this reputation only seems to apply to key sites. Ebay is basically a grey market. They sell used goods, second/third/fourth etc. hand goods, I'm sure stolen goods, and they always have plenty of fraud and scams but nobody labels Ebay as some haven for criminal activity.
One possible solution I see is a mod verifying you activating the games on your account after the trade is accepted. If you don't then you get banned. This could only work on actual personal steam accounts and not dummy ones. And only after the other trader is informed of the potential value of their games and confirms they're ok with trading them. But that's probably more work than the mods want to do.
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Do you know how many credit cards need to be stolen for these many greymarket sites? Lol. That's nonsense. Except for g2a and kinguin, every other site only lets you in as a seller if you have a company with proper taxation. Most keys on these sites come from retail. They buy them in bulk from low-cost countries and sell them in high-cost ones. And this is where steam fck us over with their regional pricing ^^
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In search of a script that will show data from gg.sell next to the game, at the moment prices can only be found by clicking on the icon when creating a trade and adding games. I'm looking for something similar, but so that the prices are immediately displayed on the game page, when creating a trade, immediately in the list of games that I or my opponent exchanges. I don't know where to ask, maybe someone can tell me here
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You could add a PR to the github page of Enhanced Barter, as it was discussed here: https://github.com/Revadike/EnhancedBarter/issues/36.
However, it looks like barter didn't want GG.deals links on more pages (at least in the past): https://github.com/bartervg/barter.vg/issues/247#issuecomment-1159143171.
I'm not aware of any other script for this.
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Thanks for the info. Maybe I'll try to create a script myself
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Enchanced Barter works like this, because it is scraping gg.deals for prices and there are some anti-scrape measures that forbid too much data pull. GG.deals has no API, so this is the best they can do.
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I have it installed. But i can see the prices there only after you have selected the games when creating the trade and clicked the "GG" button. That is, first you need to add games, then click the buttons with GG, and then delete unnecessary games. And I wanted the prices to be immediately highlighted when creating a trade for each game in my lof trade list and opponent list.
And I understand that there is a limit of 10 price checks for a certain period. Then the script shows two brackets instead of prices ( )
Maybe I don't know something...
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I jsut got a 30 day suspension for offering a $30 game for a $20 game. both of them have been in bundles at about $1-2 each within the last year but because of some arbitrary valuation Im not even allowed to make offers? What a shame, this was a pretty great site. Is there a way to complain about this?
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Are you unable to check current values before making a trade offer? It seems like something you'd want to do. Because the logic that at some point, you think they were priced the same doesn't really hold up as a reason for making unbalanced trades. Plenty of games with different retail prices go on sale for the same sales price at some point or another. It does not mean their current values are the same. The same can be said of games that have been in a bundle at some point.
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I don't care about third party prices, thats why Im trading and not buying and selling. If that's something that matters to the other person in the trade they are more than free to look up that information. I dont even have a problem with a mediator adding those values to the trade for more transperency. But why do I deserve to be banned because my "value" system is potentially different from someone else's?
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He got suspended for trying to offer Trover Saves the Universe, and asking for a "Pick 1" multi-offer... with the 3 options being : Death's Stranding Director's Cut, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands: Chaotic Great Edition, and Staxel.
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At this time in barter only the gray market price (ggdeals) counts
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Except it doesn't. Its an entirely different site. If I wanted to BUY games I would go there. But I'm not buying, I'm trading so its entirely irrelevant. if both parties agree that its a good trade. Ironically all this behavior will do is turn all the traders into resellers.
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I looked at your profile, do you use the Enhanced Barter automatic offers? You have 3 recent trades that used that... that feature slows the site down for everyone.
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You can. In barter steam group. But you really should not. You're using the enhanced barter script, you can easily check the prices, so you could avoid the suspension, Don't be lazy. You can still offer whatever you want but only for those who too turn Bartee off. gg.deals comparison is not perfect but it at least helps determine the rarity of a key. When you offer an 8€ game for 1€ one, you fck yourself over.
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Man thanks for the info, i was tired of checking everything manually constantly.
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yw. ^^
One another thing, the script using the last currency that you set in on gg.deals
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I just tried out the enhanced barter script for the first time, but it only seems to show Steam store prices instead of the grey market prices barter mods seem to want trades based on?
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After installing it, I do not see any price anywhere at all.
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It should look like in the screenshot. Depending on the availablility it should show like
() if no prices found at all
(price1) if only official stores offer it (probably also if only key sellers offer it, didn't have an example for that though)
(price1/ price2) current low for official / key sellers
If you can't find anything with both prices displayed, I could imagine that it's considering your setting on gg.deals (show only official stores).
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I was naive when I used barter.vg but learned very quickly that it was not a site for people trying to trade games they wanted to own or play.
I was not interested in the low ball offers people claim were fair, checking price across multiple sources, and all the other stupid shit these people wanted to go through just to screw the unsuspecting user.
I'd rather just give keys away and if I really really wanted a game buy it or catch it on a rerun bundle.
Like most sites I'm sure you're going to run into other unsavory personalities.
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Plenty of normal traders on barter, who just do fair deals based on gray market prices.
What you should do, is start using the Ignore/Skip feature when you encounter bad traders who make bad offers, or are greedy. Eventually you will only see the fair traders.
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So Barter is now basically dead to trade on? We can't make offers and see if the other person says yes or no to the deal we sent them - just some other random person will say yes or no for them?
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You can make offers like normal, but unless both you and the person you're trading with have mediation disabled, you need to consider the grey market prices on gg.deals.
When you make a trade in which you send a game worth $1 for something worth $10, the mediation bot will shut it down. If you send $5 for a game worth $9, it will not be shut down. The bot/mods have a cutoff at which a trade is considered unfair, and it's mostly based on the gg.deals prices.
Without mediation on both sides, an offer will not get shut down by the moderators.
Whether you can actually trade is a toss. In my experience everyone on barter is trying to make a profit, and the traders that have the most wanted games (bundled or not) want to make a lot of profit. If you want to trade for Cyberpunk or Deep Rock Galactic, you can forget it unless you give nearly 2x what the game is worth. At some point it's probably more worthwhile to set up an account on a grey market site and sell the keys yourself.
It was like that before the moderation system though, if not worse. After all the system was introduced to stop these traders from preying on new or inexperienced users so they could make the big $$ selling keys on the grey market. Every now and then a new account would show up with an unbundled AAA game and they would get swarmed with offers giving them one or two $5 games that were bundled 10 times.
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My son trades any games on there for me and has done for many years - so we are used to suing the site but doesn't it stand to reason that the more sort after games will command the higher price
All I have seen this has done is prevent the normal traders doing normal trades - eg: what they have for what they want - I understand and have seen it to us that people low ball you but you are never ever forced to take any offer on the site
If trades are based solely on price now it will kill the site dead with all these suspension for otherwise trusted traders and will most likely stop a lot of people buying bundles if they know trading is now a lot harder
I have that awful please stop me trading button unmarked and hope and wish everyone else would to (although so I hear it doesn't make 100% difference)
They should have left it like it was and made and let people make their own mind up if a deal is ok for them - I can tell you for our side that none of my trades either sent out or accepted from someone else have ever been based on price
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It’s a terribly implemented system. Protecting users is a great idea. Pretending a single third-party site is the only way to determine how fair an offer is is ridiculously short-sighted.
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Hi guys,
I just wanted to talk with you about the new system implemented in barter.vg
I loved this site, for real, it's great. Well, it was. I encountered a lot of lowball offers from resellers, or just people overvaluing their games.
That makes the experience less fun but as long as we stay gentle and agree to disagree, I never saw a real problem.
We all have our way to value games and I though it was also the spirit of the site.
Now we have this new moderator system, which might be great if it can give advice to newcomers.
But what's happening? I've got one moderator who's literrally bullying me.
I mean, I have almost 600 trades. Absolutely no complaints from those who traded with me. And this guy has decided to impose his view to me.
I read that he even ban you for accepting offers !
My value system has always been to watch prices from ITAD. I try to match the prices from the past year. In the past I tried to match the H/W too but then I discovered how flawed it was since resellers "hide" their stocks by not registering it on the site. So "H" is manipulated.
Sometimes, I just follow the value system of the person I want to trade with, not caring about mine, because I want the game he offers.
Am I doing wrong? I don't think so. When 2 people agree on a deal, why someone would interfere and prevent them from getting what both want?
But that's what is now happening in barter. At least with this moderator.
I made a first preset offer. Got manually declined by him without explanation. Had to go on steam forum to have one.
Made the changes he asked, even if I don't agree with his value system. Got declined again. So what's next?
This guy is forcing people to use gg.deals as the only value system.
For me, gg.deals is a big no. It's grey market, I don't support it. It's not accurate, there are games that are overpriced for no reason.
Why is this guy so aggressive about using it? I think he's a reseller and looking to take over barter. He banned other resellers (some I traded with because they were fair to me). And now he systematically discard my offers. Next step is probably a ban, since after 25 discards it's automatic.
I mean, it's destroying the spirit of the site.
BTW, when you search for a game, you get a link to steam, steamdb, ITAD (which I'm using avalue), but no link to gg.deals
That's significant, don't you think?
Have you experienced the same thing? What's you opinion on this?
I repeat, I think this site was the best to trade, I loved it. But it's getting out of hand. Any suggestion/alternatives for trades? (yes trades, I started GA here and I love the system, plus the moderators are very friendly, explaining things when you have questions, but I'm not that lucky and sometimes to get the game I want, I need trades)
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