Pricing differences causing shady behavior (Page 2 of 2)

renoan wrote:

jassi007 wrote:

Sure, and if I trade for a playset of a card, I doubt anyone will really notice. When a player suddenly trades for say 20 copies of a card, and only the promo version whose price happens to be under market value, tcg/ebay/any market, and doesn't trade for any of the non-promo copies etc. it is more clear what is going on.

I don't know, jassi007, I'm not sure I see anything wrong with that (I'm guessing that's what you're trying to imply with that comment). Buying when there's a good deal (e.g., store sales, stocks during recession, house flipping, etc.) is what we all try to do in various markets. Cards have no centralized pricing database (and rightfully so, otherwise that would be a form of price fixing), and each market is allowed to determine a cards worth on it's own terms. Just because a card is valued lower (even much lower) here than on other markets (TCGmid, for example), doesn't mean it's any more or less valid. I'm positive if you take a quick spin through eBay's latest sold listing for any given card, you'd find plenty examples of people winning bids (or even Buy it Nows) for values much lower than what TCGmid shows. However, that's not considered scamming. Instead, it's praised by other buyers as having "found a good deal." The difference here is that suddenly we all take on the hat of the seller (by way of valuing our cards when trading) and some people aren't emotionally equipped for that. They don't want to be responsible for making valuation decisions and instead want somebody else to protect them.

This can evolve into a greater discussion on how much protection does a person deserve from his or herself, and I think that may be outside of this discussion's scope. However, I'll say that IMO sellers/traders are responsible for determining their own card values and shouldn't look to Deckbox to protect them from people looking for good deals. $100 for Underground Sea is a no-no for one person, and a rent-saver for another. There's no need to be insulted just because someone low-balls them. If they don't like it, they can counter, IMO.

While you can debate the merits of doing that or not, the deckbox admins have banned someone for the exact scenario I have outlined, so on this site it is not cool. You have to understand, they're under pressure to make deckbox generate revenue to be worth their time, which I understand and support. However in the process of doing that, they lost their price data from tcgplayer. Basically TCGP saw them as competition, and no longer allowed them to import price data. So they had to on the fly come up with pricing. The deckbox team said they had been working on this, but they weren't ready. So for a period of time deckbox prices went to hell to be frank. It is my impression that a lot of people took a vacation from deckbox. Deckbox prices got better, but a lot of people just don't have faith in them, and still look up card prices on TCGP.

All that being said is to make this point. When there is a price error on deckbox compared to other sites, it reinforces the "don't rely on deckbox prices" mindset. It is obviously in the deckbox teams best interest to squash this behavior ASAP so people have as  much faith as possible in their prices. It isn't exactly the same as an issue where "a card spiked and the vendor hasn't updated pricing" It sort of is, but the vendor is deckbox, and users want to be able to trust their pricing data is up to date and accurate, so they sort of have to take this stance.

I am not saying whether I agree or disagree, just making the point that I don't see what alternative the deckbox staff has. I do agree that you should be aware of the value of what you have, and not to sell for a price less than you are comfortable with, but if you don't think people essentially pick a market that they trust to price their cards for them, well I'm not sure what to tell you. That is exactly what happens in almost every trade/sale that I am aware of.

9700377 wrote:

The alternative - that I have to manually monitor all my prices or just not list cards because the downside of getting fucked even once can wipe out the return from 10+ sales - is clearly unacceptable.

The prices on this site have been inconsistent since they made the change, it's better, and it will get better, but if you don't check other places then shame on you.

If you want to use deckbox's prices and not check things out on your own, you're just as responsible is all I'm saying.  The easy way is not the always right way.

sebi wrote:

It also has nothing to do with tcgplayer or with trying to monetize the website, i'm not sure how you got to that conclusion.

I'm not sure how you got to yours, either. I wasn't referring to monetizing the website.

sebi wrote:

Like in any kind of partly protected system, we here want to protect our users from abuse. In that case 20 people were just about to lose 10$ each, due to a fluctuation that deckbox prices did not respond to (so a deckbox bug you can say), and a guy who thought he's entitled to steal that value because he noticed the bug. Also he did not bother to tell us about it when he saw it, instead he opened 20 trades with people who did not know the price spiked 2 days before.

The case referenced before is not about marginal arbitrage. The card was mistakenly marked on deckbox as being three times less expensive than 90% of all other websites - ebay, tcgplayer, amazon, star city games, adventureson, all of them, with a 10$ difference on a 5$ card.

I'm not yet sure what the solution to this problem is, or how to phrase a rule that clearly explains what is abuse. But I still stand very decided that arbitrage of that sort on market fluctuations is pretty clearly abuse. Preventing that is of course not an easy problem to solve, but I would still like to prevent it. Until we have a good solution, suspending people who blatantly do it is a temporary one.

Feedback is as always welcome on the topic. I do not want to ignore the problem.

Also interesting points. Let me throw this scenario at you so you can tell me what Deckbox's stance would be in that case:
When I'm interested in a card, I'll often initiate trades with multiple users. The reasons are several, including, but not limited to, a) I want several copies of the card, b) I know many users on Deckbox either ignore trades (maybe they have too many to look through, I don't know) or cancel them (often without a word), c) several trade negotiations will likely break down.

With your above explanation, my understanding is if that card happens to be one experiencing such a glitch and I don't realize it, I'll be tried/judged as a scammer. The conclusions I take from this are:

• the person suggesting a card (I assume both when initiating a trade or during trade negotiations) is responsible for checking other market prices (presumably TCGmid) on the other person's behalf to ensure the price isn't experiencing a price fluctuation

• or, limit the number of trades any given card is in to avoid being accused as a scammer

• the burden of proof/reputation liability lies with whomever suggests a card for trade

Thoughts?

Come on. Yes, for any suspicious usage pattern we could generate a hypothetical where that usage pattern would actually be the result of innocent behavior, like the case where four people ship packages to me and they all coincidentally get lost and it isn't my fault, but patterns are taken as evidence in these cases and even if they can generate false positives.

If the price tag was $2 because I had failed to update for the past month, my bad. If it was $2 because the Deckbox pricing algorithm was off, then yes I would cancel. Selling my wishes for $2 would cause me much more grief than you getting your order canceled.

Can merchants peg their prices to the TCG prices? If one of these prices gets messed up, does TCGPlayer tells the merchants "too bad"? Show me a case of this - I'm genuinely curious.

But even so, one *major* difference here is that TCGPlayer's merchants are much more-likely to be brick and mortar establishments that don't need to reply on a price index like people like me do in order to market a large number of cards. That is, the userbase of Deckbox is qualitatively-different from that of other sites in ways that justifies additional protection for merchants that may not exist elsewhere. Look at the top sellers list of the site - out of the top 25 or so, only one is a certified store!

Patterns are circumstantial evidence. The line of thinking you outline is dangerously close to "guilty until proven innocent."

Sufficiently-strong circumstantial evidence can satisfy any statistically-defined evidentiary burden.

If the price tag was $2 because I had failed to update for the past month, my bad. If it was $2 because the Deckbox pricing algorithm was off, then yes I would cancel. Selling my wishes for $2 would cause me much more grief than you getting your order canceled. But it seems unreasonable to claim this would make you nervous about buying from *anyone* - you should only be nervous about buying under unusual circumstances where the Deckbox price is way off. This is in fact uncommon!

Again, let's zoom back to how this has implicit rule has been actually applied: One case where the user didn't even feign innocence. You simply can't look at the record and say that the risk of false convictions seems too high. Busting out wild thought experiments and hypotheticals is an unproductive exercise given the obvious conservatism with which this rule is being applied.

However in the process of doing that, they lost their price data from tcgplayer. Basically TCGP saw them as competition, and no longer allowed them to import price data.

I see your point in wanting to take an overall look at the issue and wanting to make a "what's best for the community" decision. I simply disagree with you in your assessment that the false conviction rate is low enough to be acceptable. I have no idea how high or low the false conviction rate is at the moment, but what I do know is that any system should strive for a 0 false conviction rate.

renoan wrote:

I see your point in wanting to take an overall look at the issue and wanting to make a "what's best for the community" decision. I simply disagree with you in your assessment that the false conviction rate is low enough to be acceptable. I have no idea how high or low the false conviction rate is at the moment, but what I do know is that any system should strive for a 0 false conviction rate.

It's 0%. 1 person was convincted, and he did not even say he is innocent. Evidence was obvious as well. That's all the convictions in the last 6 years of deckbox