Welcome to the Town Hall! Please use this thread to voice any concerns or questions or grievances regarding r/SteamGameSwap. This is the time and place to suggest changes to the subreddit, and to have a civil discussion about its rules; all opinions are welcome. If there is something that you'd rather discuss with us in private, feel free to shoot us a message using this link.

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MODERATOR RECRUITMENT

Please give u/antim00 and u/orijinal a warm welcome for having joined our moderating team. Both of them have years of trading experience, which I hope would prove useful in them becoming valuable assets to this community. Considering the fact that the subreddit user-base is growing steadily, we are seeking well meaning individuals who only prefer the functioning buzz of power instead of being completely drunk on it. Moderating can leave you quite jaded and burn you out, so be warned that the best advice for moderating is to simply not do it.

Previous mod experience is not required, and most of the "skills" can be learnt easily, so don't fret about that. We could use a couple of people with technical skills (programming background, CSS, etc.), who could choose to restrict themselves to the technical side and not have to deal with the day-to-day moderating affairs. The bare minimum expectations from you would be:

1. Knowing and understanding our rules.

2. Agreeing to follow the letter and spirit of our rules, and to lead by example.

3. Having and agreeing to devote your time into our community.

If you're crazy enough to still want the responsibility, fill out the form below. We'll leave the applications open for a while and make a new announcement when we've reached a decision.

• SGS Moderator Application

• For a non-Google application, send us a message.

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RULE CHANGES

After having discussed each and every issue raised in the previous town hall in great detail, we are announcing a few changes in our rules that will go into effect from April 1st.

##Sharking

In its simplest form, sharking is when a trader (the shark) takes advantage of someone's lack of trade experience and makes an extremely unfair trade. A shark often goes to great lengths to make the victim believe that their games are worthless, and that they should be thankful for the offer they're getting.

Sharking is now a bannable offence subjected to moderator discretion. We shall not be actively seeking out defaulters by going through each and every trade, but warnings and bans will be handed out if and when we come across any instance of excessive greed resulting in someone being unfairly taken advantage of. Any and all such discretionary calls will go through review and will have to be approved by at-least one other moderator.

Because of the volatility of the open market (game prices never stay fixed), it has been a challenge for us to figure out where to draw the line. We've thought long and hard about this and have decided that we are not going to go out of our way to help someone who refuses to help themself by not taking the time to assess the value of their items. Apropos, if someone wishes to sell the redemption code of a AAA game bundled with a new GPU for $10 and someone else takes them up on this offer, this will not be deemed sharking. The seller might get a message from us that they could be getting a lot more for their code, but we shall not be penalizing the buyer for accepting an attractive offer that's the result of the seller not doing due diligence.

• ##Example of NOT Sharking

    Seller: [H] Division 2 AMD Code that came with my new GPU [W] $10
  
    Buyer: I can do this trade, message me your PayPal address.
  

• ##Example of Sharking

    Seller: [H] Division 2 AMD Code that came with my new GPU [W] $30
  
    Buyer: It's not worth more than $10 because the game has tons of negative reviews and the market is flooded with these AMD codes.
  
    (proceeds to convince the OP via subterfuge)
  

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Trade Hijacking

We are doing away with the 1-hour condition with respect to trade interference on threads that don't belong to you. You will have no business commenting on someone else's thread unless you're making an offer to OP or OP has already declined an offer that you're interested in.

###Old Rule: If someone has made an offer in OP's thread, you may not accept, reply to, or interfere with that offer until 1 hour has expired, or the OP has declined the offer.

###New Rule: If someone has made an offer in OP's thread, you may not accept, reply to, or interfere with that offer until the OP has explicitly declined the offer. If OP has not responded yet, move on; do not hijack their offers.

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Trade Transparency

The PMing on this sub in particular is getting out of control. Anytime I go to a thread it's just 10 people saying PM and I rarely ever see public offers anymore. I've been trading for a very long time so it's a bit surreal to see how private trading seems to be on SGS nowadays.

Can the offers be made publicly compulsorily to cut down on sharking? Avoid DM for offers. It may cause someone else to see it and DM the person being taken advantage of.

I never accept initial offers via DM so that negotiations are transparent for rep purposes, and I've seen this rule other trading subs have this rule as well.

I think all starting offers should be public. It would make offers a lot less malicious, and cause new traders to be ripped off less since re-sellers would need to offer more than other re-sellers. imo if the seller wants to talk about the offer that was public in private that should be allowed, causes a lot less junk to be in the comment section.

I feel transparency helps ensure a level playing field. The "PM" comments give the advantage to big traders who know the relative value of games better than anyone else - certainly better than "little guys" like me.

Case in point.

All initial offers are now required to be made publicly on OP's thread, and not via PM. This rule also applies to phrases like "added on Steam to discuss" or "message me for prices". If the OP of a thread wishes to switch to PM to discuss the finer details of a trade, that would be fine, but please don't make it their only option. We'd really appreciate it if the negotiations (offers and counter-offers) happen on the thread itself, and PM is used only for the final stage of the trade to exchange sensitive information such as game codes, HB gift links, PayPal addresses, etc.

In addition to helping new users not getting taken advantage of, each trade-thread would serve as an indicator for a game's trade-value at that point in time. Any person who wishes to get a rough idea about the worth of their game(s) need only to search the subreddit for past such trades.

Seeing as how a handful of scammers have been abusing the PM feature of reddit to scam unsuspecting users on a pretty grand scale, we'd be happy to see everyone move away from this "PM culture". We realize that this could expose us to bidding wars, but we are fine with it at this point in time since it would be beneficial to OP in the end. However, we will be keeping a close eye on such situations and fine-tune this rule as necessary (introduce minimum bidding increment - percentage or something of the sort) if it becomes too much of an issue.

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Mentioning your region is compulsory for PayPal & Steam Wallet

Can we implement a rule where if PayPal is involved that the traders region must be specified? Reason being that for example if a user is in UK and wants to trade for PayPal with a AUS user there is a £3.99 fee on top of the usual fee(s). This would save some time and hassle.

For those cashing out their Steam Wallet for PayPal or other means of currency, I think it would be a good idea to require them to state which region they are buying games from. Regional differences can hinder these types of trades due to PayPal fees and because gifting can be restricted depending on the price differences between the two regions. By stating the region in the post, it allows people to know whether or not there will be restrictions beforehand.

Pretty self explanatory. You are now required to list your region in the post if you're offering to buy games with wallet / balance, or if you wish to transact with PayPal.

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Close your old trade-thread before creating a new one

Users are encouraged to make use of the "close thread" button that can be found next to "delete" once a trade is complete. For those of you using redesigned reddit, the option is called "mark as nsfw" and can be found by clicking the three dots in the options. You should ideally have only one active trade-thread at any given time. Please make this a habit to reduce subreddit clutter and to prevent other users from contacting you on such old threads which might contain outdated lists of games / prices. We have been doing this on your behalf until now in order to keep things tidy, but might start calling you out for this faux pas if we're feeling particularly bored or jobless.

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TOP POINTS OF CONCERN FROM THE PREVIOUS TOWN HALL

Have the mods considered requiring sellers to list an asking price if they are going to add PayPal to their [W] section? It would cut down significantly on new users or those unaware of a game's current market value from getting taken advantage of via offers cloaked in PMs.

Or if PayPal is being asked for, have the OP post prices for each game similar to how r/hardwareswap requires prices be listed.

We considered this but decided in the end that such a rule would be too restrictive for the not-so-regular traders, in particular for the new users who have just found the subreddit and have months' worth of bundled games. They'd be required to spend a good amount of time looking up old trade-threads or websites like G2A in order to decide on a buying price for each and every game. We'd be more than happy to hear any suggestions that would help us overcome this issue.

A suggestion for the subreddit owners/ mods from a new guy: There are near identical repeat postings here from 'pro' traders here who make a new post every day or every couple of days. This not only gives them more visibility, and others less, but also makes searching that much more difficult because out of every other 'new' results, one is the same old in a new post. On the whole, this subreddit seems more for regular traders than those who occasionally swap.

It would be nice if mods can increase the cooldown for posting in this sub from 24 hours to 72 hours or more.

This is something that we can take a look at if enough people find the issue an annoyance. It's no secret that reddit's native search leaves much to be desired. Something that could alleviate this issue to a certain extent is hidden in the sidebar under quick links > browse trades. We'll make it a point to publicize this link more prominently once we're done with the CSS overhaul of the subreddit.

its a bit hard to know the price for certain games that belong to humble monthly since its a free market and all, but couldnt there be like a definite price for a current month's game?

is there a listing anywhere to see how much a game from e.g humble is worth? Like, some people put a price in their post, and I understand the humble games are a lot cheaper if you trade them because they were cheaper to acquire. But say I want X game worth 30€, I can‘t just offer everything in my humble library to the dude?

There are a lot of factors that go into determining a game's price. "A game is worth how much ever a buyer wishes to pay for it" would be over-simplifying it, but the fact exists that different people trade for different reasons. A quick way to check a game's rough current market value, in addition to searching trading subreddits like ours, would be to check unauthorized retailer websites like G2A & Kinguin. Please remember though that games bought from such websites may not be traded here and will result in the loss of posting privileges if found guilty.

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BANS AND YOU

Anyone who creates a thread henceforth will automatically be sent a link to this post and shall thus be assumed to have read and understood the above changes in policy. Users who continue to violate the said rules will be temporarily banned for a day or more to drive the point across. As has always been the policy, those who willfully and repeatedly ignore our rules will be penalized for a longer duration. All our rules are in place for a good reason, with most of them having to do with prevention of scams. You may be a good person and would perhaps never scam someone, but helping create an environment that is scammer friendly is unacceptable and is something that we cannot condone.

Allow me to use this opportunity to make something clear. Moderating is not a paid job; we are volunteers who are opting to spend our free time to help out the users of a community that we love. We do not enjoy handing out bans to our users for rule-related infractions. Demonstrating our power over you does not give us any pleasure, but the fact remains that temporary bans are an excellent form of disciplinary measure. In most of the cases, responding to a ban message with an apology or an acknowledgement of the violation would result in the ban being revoked or shortened, because we're reasonable human beings too after all. At the same time, lying / being disrespectful or toxic / forging evidence / displaying any form of dishonesty would only needlessly escalate a situation. Example: If you're guilty of selling a game from G2A and are being questioned for the same, admitting your mistake and apologizing for breaking that rule might lead to you getting away with a warning or a short temporary ban of a few days. However, if you try to bluff, evade, or attempt to cover up your misdeed, you'd only be giving us sufficient grounds to make your ban permanent. Believe me when I say that we do not enjoy permanently banning people here since we firmly believe that perma-bans should be reserved for scammers only.

This community has always been self-governing to an extent and we need your continued cooperation to keep it so. It's not possible for us to check each comment made in every thread for rule violations. If you see any post that breaks our rules, please report it using the report button (completely anonymous) and optionally leave a brief message in the custom text box; we'll take care of it as soon as we can. If you're reporting posts and find that they're not being handled how you believe they should be, do not hesitate to use the "Message the Moderators" link in the sidebar to contact us directly.

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Thoughts / Questions / Concerns

I'd like to now open the floor to discussions including but not limited to the following topics:

• Do you use reddit's redesign while browsing the subreddit? If so, is there anything in the front-page layout that needs changing?

• What can we do to make your trading experience better?

• Have any ideas? Want to see some changes?

• Find any of the rules too restrictive?

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Edits:

G2A and other shady / unauthorized resellers

Something I should've included here but forgot to. Since we're recommending them for price-checks, AutoModerator shall no longer be removing comments that mention G2A and other similar websites from this subreddit. It will however respond with a warning about the relevant rule in place. Linking to and advocating (for buying) such unauthorized retailers is still not allowed. Copy-pasting the following section from the previous town hall thread:

Games/items bought from unauthorized resellers are not allowed here. G2A and Kinguin are two examples of such sources - they have a history of selling keys that get revoked later. One look at the recent posts in the G2A subreddit should tell you everything you need to know about their legitimacy. Here is a detailed post from r/Steam and r/GameDeals on this topic including, but not limited to, a list of authorized sources to buy games from. If someone wishes to try their luck with shady unauthorized websites despite all these warnings, that'd be their call, but know that anyone found selling games and items bought from such unauthorized retailers will be instantly banned here.

We've never been a fan of their unethical business practices, and as long as the majority of the moderating team is in agreement, games and items from G2A and other similar websites will not be allowed here. We'd like to encourage trading between actual people, and would rather this subreddit not become a front for large unauthorized stores to conduct their business through.

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