Stung- A vent.

For about a decade I've been trading on SteamTrades. Had always had a great experience. Much bigger success rate of getting a trade than on Barter. Only got scammed by a fake profile add once- lost a few decent titles and learned my lesson. Almost never dealt with a rude person. Got some great titles out of it over the years.

Until two weeks ago. Agreed to a trade with a guy for a game so cheap I should've just bought it. Had been dying to get it on Steam but now am soured on it after this negative experience. First, after getting added by him, I couldn't get a response from him for 8 days, even though he was online and in-game. Always DOTA 2. That should've been a red flag right there.

I was giving him two keys, the first worked, the second showed a region lock for him. There was no indication on my end, and HB usually alerts to this next to the key reveal button. Turns out he was from a severely restricted region- and he knew it, because the game's page in his region makes this explicit. I wonder now if he was trying to scam me into buying him the title directly through gifts.

Over the years there have been issues with keys for me and also in receiving- it happens, we forget to take titles off our lists and they've already been claimed etc. Always I and others have been cool and taken something else from the list. I offered him any other key from my list, in addition to the key I gave him that wouldn't work for him that he could just trade. He refused, and got very abusive. Negative reps were posted.

The vote ended for me at 59/100. One short. It was in the 80's in the beginning, had been fluctuation between 58/60 for days. I wouldn't be surprised if he had his online buddies take it down to that. After ten years of trading, of avoiding users who had negative rep, it finally happened to me. It's soured me on a practice that in truth has less reward in recent years- not sure if anyone else agrees, but it's not as good a use of time anymore, trades are harder to come by.

It may seem ridiculous that one bad experience has me considering to close down my whole SteamTrades account, but that red ding is not who I am as a trader, and I was happy to be all green after all of these years. If I do delete my account, would my negative review leave his reps? Is there a better platform for trading these days? Barter mostly sucks for me, it seems to be resellers looking for profits for the most part. SteamTrades has also slowed down a lot. What platform do people like most these days?

Good on ya if you read all that, sorry for the vent.