I would not mind if the abuser in question gets disciplined. Not that I was the target of any verbal abuse, but I got this 'great offer' which is all I needed to know: https://barter.vg/u/14af/o/1746146/

Not that I mind that there are traders who only trade for profits as that has the advantage that it can liquidity (and I did make use of some of them on occasion), but when every reasonable limit is exceeded it becomes quite a waste of time.

I think it's not the first time I'm warning him... (I don't have time to check all of his offers and see if I posted in them already.)
I told him off; if he ever stays I'll just perma-ban him.
I don't like to, and thus would rather not, automatically ban people, but I'd argue that even if he keeps the offer lists lively with his many submissions, he's still freaking sending extreme lowball offers 95% of the time, and thus wasting everyone's time. Lowball is okay since, well, bargaining can be part of the fun, you look at the slightly lowball offer, then if you feel like it, you counter with an offer that's slightly better for you (i.e. balanced), hoping to get an accept. But extreme lowball is just a waste of time for everyone -- mostly for the receiving end!It's not in development, but it's something I'll take in consideration when I get around to redoing the profile options.
As a reminder, there's a 'skip' option to avoid matches with specific people whom you know will always ignore your offers or who asked you to ignore them. I find it more acceptable, although you'd have to tell ReDiR to skip you, and since he's lowballing everyone, this is a situation where it's best to report him to me.Well, there's a report button on forum posts but not on comments indeed... Maybe I should consider that. I mean, as a generic feature for the Wedge forum. I never really bothered, but really, these... insults are great candidates for reporting.
Anyway, all offers are public for now, so it's in everyone's interest to behave properly because they don't want everyone to think they're dicks, do they..?
This guy clearly doesn't care...Absolutely.Then you'd report it to me (by PM or Steam message etc.), I could see the thing and take measures against it.

As a reminder: EVERYONE should feel safe at Lestrade's. This *is* a safe place. A fun place to trade for... fun. If you ever feel someone is bullying you, PLEASE contact me, where publicly or privately, and I'll look into it. This isn't the first time I've taken action against a bully here.I can do temp & perma-bans, I just try not to do it unless the user is clearly not apologizing for their behavior. I've only done temp-ban twice and one of them came back even more obnoxious, so I turned it into a perma-ban.Well, let me worry about that when the site grows, okay? ;) For now it's a role I'm perfectly able to assume by myself.

Thanks for the response!

Not sure if low-ball offers qualify for unwanted behavior (in the sense that it needs a system in place to deter people from doing it). Some people are of course willing to accept deals that would seem low-ball to others - so, who gets to decide what is low ball or not? (Just a thought.)

As for the policing process, as the owner/developer of this site it makes sense that you would be the one handling the process, but in an ideal world I think most people would prefer to use a system that is a bit more formal and decentralized (report buttons/visible behavior tags on profile or something and perhaps a team of community moderators?) to what you're currently suggesting (contacting just you to personally look into it in your spare time).

But hey, we'll take whatever we can get.

Thanks for the hard work put into this site and the continued support!

- There is still time to devise a 'good' (fair) system to deter people from lowball offers. One of the main problems is properly estimating the market value. For 90% of bundled games, ratios are the perfect way to devise a value, but the remaining 10% makes it impossible to automate a 'lowball detector' script. I've been playing around with the idea of importing g2a lowest prices, which are generally good indicators as well, but g2a doesn't have an official API, and while I did 'crack' their internal API long ago and am able to get their game page URLs more accurately than the Chrome extension does (I can't remember the add-on's name, but it's something that adds prices to your Steam game pages), there's still the problem of updating game prices and at what rate. Currently I'm tempted to do something like, 'if a game is currently bundled, then get their g2a price every X hours, if it's not bundled, get it every week or so.' It's still very taxing on g2a's servers, and I'd like to remain good neighbors with them (just like I am with BVG.)
Anyway-- in short, I have things in my head, but I'd like to get it right from the first try.
And no, there's no perfect way to determine if an offer is lowball, because I've seen some terrible lowball offers in my life, that the recipient actually accepted because they didn't care about value and just wanted to get the game. How am I gonna stop extreme lowballing if lowballers KNOW that at some point, someone will accept their shit offers? Just look at ReDiR, he got one accept here, despite being a lowball offer.
So, even if I had a script to detect lowball offers, I couldn't 'prevent' the offer from being sent, I'd just be able to show a warning message on the offer page -- which is, IMHO, good enough to deter both the sender from sending, and the receiver from accepting.

- When I opened the website, I had already warned that I wanted to be the 'developer', and I needed a 'community manager' (or several) to handle offer issues. After over six months, it's safe to say that no such community manager wannabee has stepped up. Nobody wants to do it, so I'm doing it. Basically, most of those who offered their help right before I opened the website, subsequently withdrew it and offered it to BVG instead. So now BVG has many moderators with no purpose, and LT has zero. Again-- I'm doing it and there aren't enough issues to justify looking for moderators. But when LT traffic rises, and it will eventually, this'll need to change.

- Would you rather get a 'report offer' in offer pages, or 'report user' in profile pages..? I don't see myself doing both...

I've started using g2a prices myself for value estimation (I actually find it more intuitive than supply/demand ratios) so that sounds pretty great actually.

Some thoughts:
- instead of a g2a lowest price you should perhaps show an average of the lowest available prices for that item from multiple stores (HK game? Kingwin, etc.) - using only the g2a price would basically mean unfair promotion of their service across the site
- if you're going to show (and store on-site) an "average" marketplace price for any given title, perhaps you could also show (separately) the lowest available store price (isthereanydeal.com) too?
- Once per week pricechecks for a normal game seem more than reasonable
- Being in an active bundle could trigger one pricecheck per day for a given title, until that bundle expires (don't see the point of making it any more frequent than that)
- I wouldn't trigger a "lowball warning" anywhere on-site, since this would artificially influence the market (again, who gets to determine what a lowball offer is exactly, and why should we accept this opinion as law?) - each user is free to make his own choices and should be solely responsible in doing so based on his own interests (especially now since he would have every possible relevant metric available on this site). Plus you'd have an annoying pop-up/notification/warning text that everyone will basically ignore anyway in the interface - at least until the algorithm becomes more precise, that is.

All in all this would be a very useful feature.

From a user design perspective, I think reporting (and badges) should be done (and shown) on profile pages - if you report something, it should be a person's behavior, not the offer itself. (That should only be a reason/proof of the report itself). A "Report offer"rather than "Report user" means having users basically abuse that feature to flag shit offers rather than users.

That being said, the "report user" option should ideally be available from both screens (profile and offer) I think.

I just think that lowballs aren't to be punished site-wide. I can talk to them, anyone can talk to them, to try & make them understand their offers are a waste of time for everyone.
However, insulting other users is a no-no for me, if anything because I want this place to be fun to use, rather than somewhere you can get insulted just because you didn't accept someone's lowball.

Absolutely!
Low ball offers are not a motive for punishment and I hope traders have some patience to understand that. Sometimes I see traders that get very upset for receiving low ball offers. I don't mind as long as it is not a constant SPAM. In that case an ignore button (block offers from that user) can solve many problems. Perhaps then automatically send a message to the blocker every 6 months to review the ignore? In case the person's behaviour has changed.

You'd be surprised to know how little patience people have sometimes. As in, "when you're in my ignore list, I'll ignore you for life, even if you just sent me one lowball offer and it was on your very first day as a trader. You can die for all I know."

The problem with lowball offers is that as long as it works *sometimes*, it encourages users to get even lowballer (is that even a word?), just in case it also works. This is where we need to step in.

I suppose that is a good mentality. The focus should indeed be on verbal abuse with an option to make amends first before any temporary / permanent measures are taken. I suppose nobody likes lowballs, but I never put anyone on ignore (except for a badly programmed bot once).