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I'll note that using the deprecated promo label will still price the card at the normal price. Someone tried to buy some of my promos and I cancelled the order because of this - it was probably a mistake to even put them up for sale at all (I did specify in my profile beforehand that if the prices deviated from the price on other markets I would cancel the order, but I expect the buyer will still be unhappy.)

Right now this is a problem - as it was with the KTK prerelease - because people are clearly going around hoping to pick up cheap prerelease promos because there isn't an entry and using the promo label does not influence the price. imo this needs to be fixed immediately (not for my sake but for others) but going forward sebi may want to consider making it so that cards with various labels won't be priced at all via automatic pricing - it's better than having to deal with a possibly-messy dispute when either a mislabeled card or a card that isn't in the system yet ends up selling for way less than it should.

Okay. To start, I made some suggested edits to the Trading Rules document and uploaded it here.

Major changes:

- Including a section (1.3) on taking advantage of price anomalies like the Polukranos dude did. The language is fairly strong ("major" anomalies only) because I don't want people to become concerned that treating a shockland like it's $7 when TCGmid says it's $8 will get them banned or whatever.

- Added a section (4.5) outlining that new rules may be implemented as necessary.

- Added a section (4.6) outlining that these rules may be overridden if a user has a suspicious trading history (eg. tons of packages go missing when sent to him, etc.)

- Edited section 2.2 to make it clear that showing a tracked package arrived at the destination is sufficient for a trader to have covered his side of a trade (if a delivery dispute exists.) In light of that one guy who was recently arguing that the "proof of delivery" requirement meant that tracking isn't enough.

If you like these edits you can use them in whole or in part. The next thing I'd look at if you like this stuff is the guidelines for filing a trade dispute in the stickied thread, outlining some stuff about how to handle the dispute resolution process that would be good to mention beforehand (don't act like the other party is a scammer in a he-said she-said case, don't imply that because you have X karma that the mods should favor you, etc.) but probably aren't worth putting in the trade rules page.

A lot of the motivation here is just thinking of the cases that have arisen in recent months that weren't really clearly covered by the rules and lead to new decisions, but... these decisions were never written back into the rules, which at best opens the possibility for more messy cases and at worst makes the process seem arbitrary. I think it's just important to keep the rules updated to reflect the BTR decisions that are being made.

Yep. Like, one thing - there's been a lot of messy trade disputes recently that call for some sort of further codification/clarification of the trading rules. There's no reason why someone else can't do this - obviously there are a couple helpers already, but I don't think Sebi should have to be involved with this at all if he's confident in his team. His comparative advantage is in site development, not community management/adjudication. I'd happily volunteer to revise some of the rules to clarify them in light of some of the recent disputes if wanted (subject to Sebi's approval, of course.) Stuff like that can go a long way towards making the site less of a headache for its developer(s)..

You can already basically do this, actually. A buyer can make a proposed order and then ask for a discount to make it "competitive", and the seller can apply that discount. Maybe some people don't know about this feature, though.

What you suggest touches on one idea that I found cool before, though... that users should be able to specify buy prices for cards on their wishlist similar to how you can have sell prices for cards on your tradelist, and then sellers would be able to reach out to buyers directly.

You can't guess why most deckbox marketplace sellers don't want to spend tons of time scraping pricing data from other sites in order to set their own prices?

I'll note that better pricing algorithms and analytics would be a perfect example of a useful premium feature.

The auto trade is apparently something about automatically adding cards to your trade list, not... automatically trading your cards.

But yeah, the more I personally think about it the more I think a Kickstarter would've been the right way to do this: Outline a lot of premium features you want to add and crowdfund their development. People can buy into these features through the crowdfunding (they don't need to be available initially), and those that don't can subscribe normally. It'd raise immediate revenue and also give people an idea of what they should expect to see in the future. Like, I think it'd be interesting to have a discussion on well-targeted premium features: Stuff like access to special analytics, access to special tagging features (when tagging is implemented), hosted space to add card pictures, etc.

That perhaps touches on what's most-frustrating about this: That Sebi is accessible and appears to listen and there's lots of users sympathetic with the basic needs to monetize the site, but instead of making even a rough development timetable and trying to encourage donations he kinda just goes into the tank and rolls out new features in a way that's difficult to understand. The marketplace worked fine but I'm pretty sure this approach to adding premium features is suboptimal. It's an odd problem to have, but I think he needs to be more-willing to let his community help him out.

My interpretation of the issue is that it seems like it would have been useful to have some sort of conversation on this stuff beforehand, to help generate ideas and feedback on how a premium service should be implemented. I don't see how springing it on users is a good thing, even if you think such a discussion would generate zero useful ideas for you (which would be surprising..)

I have to agree with whoever mentioned a Kickstarter or some other sort of crowdfunding. Promise a bunch of features on a timetable and raise donations to implement them. You probably would've gotten a lot of good-will contributions.

I don't begrudge the Deckbox team for using some sort of premium membership to try to raise revenue, but I agree that premium as is has a few issues. Right now most of the features don't seem very important, and there is a legit fear going forward that useful site upgrades will now be locked behind a paywall. For example, the #1 feature I would like to see from the site is an ability to manage a separate "for sale" list apart from my tradelist, and I've been to understand that this would become possible at some point when the tagging system gets implemented... but now, who knows? I don't know if any guidelines can be issued regarding what future features will be or won't be premium-only, but if there are I feel like it would help for that clarification to be given.

Another problem with the current featurelist is that I'm not sure exactly who it's aimed at. Presumably you have to use the site fairly-often to be willing to pay $5-7/month. So the features this service should provide should be things that don't feel like they should be basic functionality but also are highly-valuable to heavy users. Like, Pucatrade offers analytics to its gold users that aren't available otherwise - the same thing (tracking trade/sale volume for given cards and only giving that info to paying users) could be done here, I'd imagine, although it'd require more work.

I live in Northern Virginia, which might be out of the way for you... but I spend time at Victory Comics in Falls Church and find it pretty nice.

I've also heard good things about Labyrinth Games in D.C., although I've never actually been there.

Would insurance actually cover a case where the package is marked as delivered but the recipient claims never actually arrived?

I've sent something like over 80 trades and have yet to have a package simply lost in a way that only insurance would clearly deal with. Thus I don't really miss it. Maybe I'm naive.