Trading Forum Post

I feel like the quality of the trading forum has gone down drastically with so many "IRC/Forum Pvpers." The entire thing is a shit show. Some of the threads get so messy and convuluted with trash talk that they literally have to be moved to trash talk. Itd be really awesome if we could start handing out incremental trading forum bans or something, 1 day ban for first offence, 2 day ban for 2nd, 4 day ban for 3rd offense, etc etc. This way, if someone messes up, the consequenses aren't that bad, but bad enough to discourage trash talk in the trading forums.


Right now, to my understanding, its either a complete ban from the forums or nothing. If i was a new player, checking out some of these threads, I would just assume the trading forums are unmoderated and would not feel very welcome. As someone whose been around for a couple years, I still think less of the server when i see these wildly unregulated trading forum post. My suggested solution might not be the best, but its the first one that comes to mind. If anyone has a better suggestion, please do tell.


Enough with the "my group" vs "your group" trading forum trash talk and tearing down the community.

Punishments for alt accounts up bidding would solve 99% of this. I will not sit back and let these guys scam people to line their pockets like they've been doing for years. They travel around the forums in packs, defending each other on every post and also attack others to deflect from their intentions.

Solution: Find root cause. Prevent it. Problem solved.

After a few tests, I've reason to believe the "moderator" (singular) is fine with it from certain people and not others thus there is no solution.

@Air You realize that the group you hate so much (IDERP) has probably had about all the people who you hate quit about a year or two ago? There is nothing wrong with two people that roll in the same groups bidding on things. It is literally the only way to run a sucessfull idoc group. Imagine you have a 1 of 1 drop, should no one that plays with that person be allowed to bid on that item? As someone whose friends with alot of them, they play it straight.

Whats not cool though is how you pollute the trade forums. IF what you do is okay, then any of us can browse the forums until we find two people in the same group bidding on an item, and then post that as an example everywhere of shill bidding. Thats toxic behavior. That belongs on a different forum.

You just dont get it and I'm quite tired of trying to explain. Here is the short version, go look at merlin's vesper keep auction and if you cannot figure out what happened there, then you will never get it.

I think there has always been some level of acrimony in the trade forums. Issues related to iDerp and others suggested to have shill bid and all kinds of other beef going back to at least 2014 and probably as long as there has been a trade forum.

I do not believe it is trash talk, which has always been here, that is rotting the trade forums, if indeed they are rotten. I lay that blame on content fatigue, platinum stagnation, the abortion of CuB, and other systemic factors I am too stupid to understand.

Word on the grapevine is you derailed a quitting players sale so much, that he said fuck it, I'm coming back.
Glass houses, man, glass houses.

I had to search for the thread in question, link here for those interested

snap I do believe there's a current fortress thread for sale that also is a potential trainwreck, the OP is behaving like such a child over any non-bid in the post (which really shouldn't matter, free bumps on top of the OPs non-stop bumps) then he goes and creates an attention-seeking trash talk post about his trade forum post. there's something fishy with the bidding in that thread, buyer beware.

ravenmagi i dont believe overmoderation is the answer, when people start feeling unfairly treated or seeing what they perceive as favoritism, they potentially leave completely. i'd rather see an all-out heavily populated wild west on the forums because then at least then everyone's coming back and there's steady activity.

oh please. its ultima plus the internet. if people really think they're going to find a place where the community after this many years is sitting around a campfire singing kumbaya, they're probably looking for an all-trammel server for elderly people.

that was a nice long interesting read...stuff like that is why i didnt use the forums for the first couple months i played. didnt respect it as a wealth of knowledge that it really is.

What i see in there is someone throwing a childish temper tantrum because two people that play together just so happened to do business together on the forums. I see a lack of moderation that is frightening. I see someone attacking someone just because they play with people they don't like, so they assume everything those people do is cheat. I see people that don't know much, assuming alot of things. I would not be waving that thread around like a badge of honor if I was you.

Yep.

@Air I'm gonna prefix this with this, please appreciate this isn't a salty response. I'm not gonna say anything inflammatory here at all because I agree with Raven that the trade forums are a lawless place and I think there is something that needs to be done.

You bring up Merlin's thread at every available opportunity because you believe you uncovered something. But you didn't dude, you really didn't. Just check out my activity on the forums, I'm not a scandalous dude, I'm not a shady guy. I recently hit over 100 million in sales. I didn't hit that number because I'm a piece of shit, I'm not a scammer and I notoriously underprice a lot of stuff. I've talked to you personally, several times, I actually like you. I have no beef with you at all. But there really wasn't anything scandalous going on there at all.

You accused me of using an alternate account.
I proved I wasn't.
Chris confirmed it.
I stopped using my Sheepdog account and started using Earsnot, I posted screenshots that pre dated the auction of a conversation with Chris where I told him that I wasn't going to use my old account.

You accused me of shill bids.
I proved that I had been buying up property around the Keep for 3? 4? Months before Merlin put the keep up for auction.
I had been attempting to purchase Erzas Villa a month or so before Merlin put the keep up for auction and I proved that too.

I put every penny I had into the bids then when I ran out I sold items.

You placed a blocker (good job btw - I respected the moves) which meant I could no longer place the fort I wanted to so I backed out of the auction.

What you saw was me, trying to bid on a keep that I wanted that was owned by a member of my group.

There was nothing else to it.

If you look at the recent bubbling flask auction, a member of the group that was at the idoc where it came from repeatedly outbid someone else. I am not saying that was shill bidding, I've done several trades with abox and he's always been a legit dude. But what I'm saying is that it's no different to Merlin's vesper residence. It's an almost identical situation but you didn't accuse anybody of shill bidding there.

Look at Lokis fort auction, a member of my group bids on it and you immediately accuse the owner & OP of being in iderp and Merlin of shill bidding.

This just shows that you're problem is with us as members of a group as you overlook identical situations in other auctions because they're you're friends or simply not us.

As Raven rightly pointed out, the people that you know to be in iderp and hate, are no longer in iderp. The vast majority of those players don't even play any more. We aren't breaking any rules and we play the elements of the game that we enjoy. Ask yourself what I or Merlin have done to you personally and I'm confident you'll struggle to come up with anything. Ask yourself if we have done anything to your friends and you'll struggle to come up with anything.

I'm totally happy to wipe the slate clean with you bud. Like I said, I have no beef with you whatsoever. You made a mistake, you got something wrong and you've been beating a dead horse and picking at its carcass for months. I know you can probably think of a thousand other things that are more fun to be doing with your day dude. Continually shitting on any auction that me or people you think are in my group is toxic, it's damaging and it's part of the problem if not the problem itself.

If you believe an auction is bogus, don't bid, report it, walk away and don't sweat it. I don't think people appointed you as forum police and I'm confident that the majority of people don't appreciate you muddying the water of auctions belonging to people you don't like or you suspect to be in a group you don't like.

Peace.

@Earsnot I am not one to get caught up in drama but I cannot deny that Merlin's auction came across pretty suspect. What I don't understand is why you would consider buying a plot of land which could hold a fort without actually owning all the pieces of the puzzle. Especially after knowing Erza wouldn't sell you his villa. A rationale person would wait to own everything before securing the last piece of the puzzle (Merlin's keep).

My bad for trying to have an organized auction without a bunch of people trying to derail it and talk shit to each other about random feuds that I guess have been going on a while. I tried making the trash talk post so those people that couldn't follow the simple rules would have a place to shit talk but that didn't even help. Even after staff got involved people still kept making off topic comments. And wtf is fishy about me selling my fort??? Labeler bid 30 mil. Merlin8666 then bid 35. Then Labeler bid 30 plus 1000 plat at 6.5k, then Merlin8666 bid 37 mil. So to me it's been two people bidding and like 10 people just adding crap that doesn't need to be there. If it were a different auction then I wouldn't mind the free bumps but I asked from the beginning to keep it to bids only and very few people cared to listen to me and staff. The random comments people left weren't nice either. They were saying that I was over priced, not who I am, that I shouldn't be trusted and all sorts of random stuff. Where this hate and bullying all came from I'm not sure and why it seems people need to bring their drama into random peoples sales threads is beyond me. I just wanted to have a simple auction and I guess that's not possible on this server. I don't know anyone really or run with any kind of crew and the more I get to see how people really are here the happier I am that I haven't tried.

Ugh the shill bidding drama still going on? I want to see in the rules where someone from the same group can't bid on something. I have bid on things only to be outbid by someone in the poster's group. I just had it happen on a SOF auction for a SST. Starting bid was 1gp so I threw down that sb, only to be outbid by a different SOF. EVEN had a message sent by someone telling me to watch it they are both SOF, still thought it was a fair bid.

This all makes me glad I'm a loner in game

The community is really awesome, there are alot of groups out there that are drama free and fun to play with, some of the most fun ive had in this game is actually with the RP community when it use to be active. The groups i roll in have literally 0 drama and internal fighting, but we very carefully pick membership. Alot of the toxicity on the forums is literally 2 or 3 people starting drama. Short term incremental bans are the best solution i can come up with. To those that think moderation wont work, please tell me a better idea. Its easy to say something wont work, much harder to come up with a constructive idea.

so merlin drags me into an auction, that I was not even aware of (and dont even care about) and I am the bad guy? rofl. II wish I can show you my forum activity so you can see i rarely get on here anymore.

Keep deflecting all you want, the truth is you guys tried to screw @john by making him over pay on that keep. Again, if you cannot understand what happened in that auction then there is no hope that you will ever understand. Earsnot was shill bidding to get merlin more gold on his fort. Again, read every bid and comment in that post, read each of earsnots comments, followed by bids, followed by trash talk to get JohnM to do B/O.

If you don't understand, then you do not have grounds to be mad at people for "ruining threads". If an alt account and someone bidding is "suspect as fuck" that's proof enough for me. Good day sirs.

I didn't know Erza wouldn't sell his villa, it had gone greatly worn 3 times in a row and I'd been leaving books asking to buy it for a while with no response. So I made the thread publicly @ing him multiple times to try and get his attention too.

Everyone had said that the best way to get a fort was to buy all the properties that a spot fits on and place it yourself. So I bought the L Tower and the SST on the plot and was going to save till I could buy Merlin's Keep when it next went to auction.

Unfortunately that's when Merlin decided to take a break from UO, that was real, it was also unexpected. He told us in the morning and an hour or so later the place was up for auction.

So I bid on it. Repeatedly. Every time someone bid, I outbid them. because that keep and 2 x SST's was a piece of (at the time) what I thought was a 6 piece puzzle.

Turns out it was a 7 piece and Air got it!

The way I looked at it if I won that keep and Erza got back to me and stated they wouldn't sell it I would then offer them my 6 spots (for a good price) I wasn't going to lose money on it. It was an investment, either in a fort or a bunch of land with fort blockers.

No matter how many times you try our simple minded Air is bent on the conspiracy . What his detective brain doesnt know is that I bought the damn keep on auction from iderp.