1. There is no such thing as a "pending" ban or Steam admin. Anyone threatening your account is a scammer trying to scare you. Read more.

Shows your Knife and a Diamond. Considers only Knife

Discussion in 'SteamRep General Discussion' started by Goddess Noire, Sep 24, 2016.

  1. PepperKick

    PepperKick New User

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    Sorry for my comment....

    Here is my take, may not be good...
    Anyways I seriously do not see any concrete evidence here. First of all facebook is a 3rd party site and evidence from 3rd party sites should not considered as anything can be said (my opinion). 2nd there is only a guy in facebook saying that he scammed but there is no proof it. Again anything can be said but dose not mean it is true.

    Next point is Sharking...
    First Steamrep dose not promote sharking but will not deal with it either which is perfectly fine. Sharking is also completely not one party's fault the victim party is also at fault for not doing proper research.

    Anyway my opinion on this.
  2. Lava

    Lava Public Relations SteamRep Admin

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    Please be respectful. If you post in this thread to derail or antagonize people, I may end up removing your comments and issuing warnings or temporary bans.

    First off, I want to clear up an apparent misconception. We are not law enforcement. We are not vigilante justice seekers. We are not avengers. However much getting marked sucks for the scammer, tags are not meant as punishment. Our job is to warn the community of people who are dangerous or risky to deal with, and we do that with a high burden of proof. This means that some scammers, even if we know they're scammers, will inevitably get off free. That's a lesser evil than tagging innocent people, don't you think? Wouldn't you be worried if someone could doctor a bunch of pictures, email those pictures to their friend, and have you marked (not saying that's what you're doing)? That high burden of proof is the very reason so much of the community places so much trust in our judgement; the admins at partner websites like Outpost know firsthand the level of proof required to issue a tag, which is why in 99.99% of cases they don't even bother questioning anyone's tags (which they are still welcome to do) and simply automatically ban on sight.

    What exactly do you mean "left"? 2+ admins promptly replied to your thread. In the middle of the night for them, even. They are not under any kind of service level agreement to immediately and repeatedly reply to your complaints.

    Nobody said sharking is ok except you, and in fact you even said you plan on doing it. Do you really, honestly believe that anything we don't tag for is A-OK? We have a limited scope of investigation, and I'll try to touch on why below, although I suspect you really don't care. I suppose it's a natural reaction, after spending so much time piecing your report together hoping for sweet revenge or vigilante justice, but I'll remind you again that's not what we're here for.

    Just because we don't tag for something doesn't make it ok. We don't tag for phishing either, and it's not because we're encouraging people to hijack accounts. Believe it or not, there are things we simply cannot police without causing serious collateral damage.

    The topic of sharking has been discussed and debated ad nauseum. Many communities independently ban for it, and we don't intervene in such bans. The biggest problem with enforcing a rule on sharking is it would put us in a position to influence the economy or dictate prices (one of the reasons we repealed the trade-with-scammers rule). If someone makes an uneven trade, that's their choice, and we can't act as training wheels for them all the time. In order for a healthy economy to thrive, there have to be winners and losers. That's how prices - which are really arbitrary estimates based on supply and demand - change over time. If everyone agreed never to trade outside a set price list, then the economy would be grid locked and making any kind of profit would be impossible. Instead, items in Steam are worth whatever someone is willing to pay for them. This stuff also tends to get (and I'll talk a little about why) very subjective and it would become extremely difficult to draw the line if we tried to police it.

    Several partner communities have tried to police sharking, and they usually end up backing out because even with decent rules and criteria the community fails or refuses to understand and simply goes back to looking for uneven trades. That, in turn, overwhelmed said communities, flooding them with "ZOMG this guy made PROFIT! EVIL! BAN HIM!!!" reports. I used to staff at Mann Co Trading (MCT, also known as Pink Taco's unusual trade server) before I joined SteamRep, one of those communities who took sharking reports, and just for reference, here's their policy before they gave up. Not perfect, but it's the best implementation of a hypothetical sharking rule I've seen.
    1. The shark must go into the deal with intent to deceive and profit. If the accused had plausible deniability about the discrepancy (e.g. didn't know what an unusual was, but thought the purple border was peculiar), or wasn't systematic, it's not a shark. More importantly, if the accused did not mislead or lie about what something is worth, it's not a shark.
    2. The victim must be new to the game. This is usually defined by less than 300 hours in game, but doesn't really have a firm cutoff. The point of investigating sharks is not to enforce prices, but to tackle deceit.
    3. The deal must cause unreasonable injury to the victim. If a victim has only 1 item of value (like a genuine, or a single Earbuds) with otherwise only junk, and they end up with an effectively worthless backpack afterwards, that's "unreasonable", but if you trade a craft hat for 20 keys from someone who has 100 keys net worth, that's not "unreasonable" no matter how uneven the trade.
    4. The victim must not have known, acknowledged, or had any way of knowing the deal was uneven. If at any point the victim acknowledges that they know, or have a way of knowing, that they're getting a bad deal (e.g. trading an unusual for a game that was on sale for $5 because they really want it) then it's not a shark.
    At MCT, if any of the above did not apply, then it was considered buyer's remorse and not sharking. Some other sites have tried to enforce it with their own policies, but it usually turns into a mess all the same. Even those who should know better, gloss over these terms and flood partners with reports consisting of links to item histories and backpack.tf snapshots, proving at best uneven trades. The people who do report "sharks" tend to be the most determined and stubborn we ever see. Sometimes soapboxing on Reddit, backpack.tf forums, or our general discussion forum (hmm...). They demand their report be given immediate attention, hijack other people's reports, spam their nonsense anyplace they can, and generally try to monopolize community admins' time, 99/100 times for what amounts to buyer's remorse. Less than 1% of the sharking reports partners received met this criteria, much less had any actual proof of it. Often it's like the backpack.tf crowd who reported for trades with scammers; they pick someone they don't like, look through trade history for anything incriminating, and then brigade reports of "uneven" trades while refusing to honor standards of evidence.
    I know soapboxing on Reddit is the popular thing to do when you disagree with an admin's decision, and I have no doubt you intend on using that "bad PR button" to leverage a favorable outcome. I guess I'll see you there, but I'll tell you now, that even as gullible as r/tf2 is, and as much as they hate SteamRep, they don't like sharks. You expressing intent to shark will probably cost you karma, and even though SteamRep doesn't tag for sharking, as you continue spreading this propaganda other community admins who aren't staff here may take notice and, outside our control, ban you from their respective communities. I've seen it happen with other people, and just in case they're running a background check I'll drop your ID here for searchability purposes, to make their jobs easier:
    Hidden Content:
    **Hidden Content: Content of this hidden block can only be seen by members of (usergroups: Administrative, Moderating, SteamRep Friend Members, SteamRep Partner Members, SteamRep Partner SCAs, SteamRep Tagged Admin (Automatic)).**
    I have it on good authority other websites such as Outpost and Backpack.tf have their own policies on sharking, and since we don't police their bans you can see for yourself how well they take your "SteamRep condones sharking" excuse. You can even link them to this thread, it won't get deleted.

    As for your report... the admin handled it correctly. There were several problems with it:
    1. We require the victim of a scam to be the one coming forward with a report, not someone acting on their behalf. If you weren't directly involved with the scam, you have no place posting in the report. This is for accountability purposes; you are responsible for your own reports, meaning if you fabricate evidence, you will end up with a BANNED tag yourself, and a link back to your fake screenshots. We're also increasingly enforcing this rule because people acting as intermediary - well-intentioned or otherwise - are making such reports nearly impossible to investigate. If a scam truly took place, there is very little reason the victim cannot be the one to make their own report, and more than likely we'd need to talk with the victim to collect additional evidence anyway. Intermediaries only get in the way. Nevermind that you have a clear vendetta and are simply trying anything you can do to hurt someone's reputation because you dislike them, because you are not the victim, it's already slated to get marked "invalid" and closed.
    2. Sharking. See above explanation on why we don't investigate that.
    3. Putting aside #2 for a moment, and assuming we did investigate sharking, you said yourself
      No chat means no tag. See above hypothetical sharking requirements; if we can't prove/disprove there was willful deception, then we can't prove/disprove it was simply buyer's remorse.
    4. 3rd-party screenshots, and cropped. Facebook chat and pictures don't provably link back to a Steam account. If we accepted it, then the accused could simply claim "it wasn't me" in an appeal. They could claim it was an impersonator, or someone using the same name, or someone else's Facebook account. And since we couldn't disprove that, we'd have to grant the appeal. Hell, looking at your own group chat, he says "a mutual friend" scammed it, and since we don't trade for scammers we'd have nothing on him just because of that.
    5. Ex post facto (after-the-fact) conversations like you provided are not evidence. They're speculation, and it looks to me like you're trying to twist his arm into a confession in a group chat.
    Any single one of these reasons on its own is grounds to close your report. I'm not going to waste time looking any further into your report for other reasons it's invalid, this is plenty. With the backlog we have now, just imagine if we spent this amount of time explaining why every other report got closed. For reference, I started typing this 1 hour and 14 minutes ago, while you were complaining the admins "left".
  3. Goddess Noire

    Goddess Noire New User

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    Okay? So.
    Like I said, Close the post.
    Couldnt really care less.
  4. Goddess Noire

    Goddess Noire New User

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    Like I said before and say now. DONT BAN HIM.
    But you know court laws or something. They like, give a temp ban or something or even a caution warning? Wont you consider doing any of those? Really? Nothing?
  5. Lava

    Lava Public Relations SteamRep Admin

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    Tags aren't punishment, and they aren't temporary either. If there's enough evidence to tag someone and warn others to stay away now, and the admin is doing their job, there will still be enough evidence to warn others to stay away 5 years from now.

    We are not a justice system, court of law, or law enforcement agency.
  6. Goddess Noire

    Goddess Noire New User

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    So basically? You wont do anything right?
  7. Lava

    Lava Public Relations SteamRep Admin

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  8. Goddess Noire

    Goddess Noire New User

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    Yea. So its a no basically.

    And @Lava
    Umm, About respect. I m answering everything in a normal manner. Just once, check your admin The Chosen One or whatever his name, Profile Comments, thing, about respect to people who are new and asking for help by being so kind to them.

    Well. You can close the post now. You got your sights and ideas, I got mine.
    I m not stronger then you cause I dont have post of your power which you got.
    But, I m happy being this then not being helpful at all.
    Thanks for your time.
    Roudydogg1 likes this.
  9. Lava

    Lava Public Relations SteamRep Admin

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    The "respect" comment was primarily directed primarily at posters of 2 replies I removed, which were inciting a flame war in your thread. I didn't remove any of your posts or issue a warning to you because, contrary to popular belief, we don't remove things just because they're critical/disrespectful towards us. I removed the other posts because they served no purpose other than trolling in someone else's thread.

    But please tell me, what about You Are The One's reply to you was disrespectful? If anything, you were disrespectful to him:
    and for reference, his comment you replied to was:
    You may not like him, but you can't really say he's being the disrespectful one here, can you? You asked a question, and he gave you a straightforward answer.
    Roudydogg1 and Enstage like this.
  10. Goddess Noire

    Goddess Noire New User

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    @Lava Princess

    When I was on my post writing, I saw You are the one being online. And I was thinking he could at least be helpful. I went and checked his profile....Not a pretty sight.
    And Lava, friendship is something, isnt it? I mean. What am I here? A community member. To you? Im a stranger. But obvious.
    Now him. What is here? Adminstrator. To you? A friend. See the difference
    You tell me then. Why I m going in word to the Spy Admin and not this guy. Yea. Any difference? You cant see.

    Please. Considerate one thing.
    My position, is a community Member. Like a normal being, walking around the streets and stuff. Doing work and helping others.
    Your position, is a Administrator. Well know by everyone. People be away from you.

    You are in the shiny light so much, you are bit blinded (I m not calling you blind in real, its a phrase)
    So until you come down, to my level or a community level. We wont discuss this anymore. You do as you feel. Close the topic and shut it down. Delete everything.
    I will do as I feel as a single unknow member of this community.
    Feels fair? Yes

    Like, I showed this post to my friends, and all agreed to my words. Not yours
    And you agree to his words, not mine.

    To be honest. I find it quite waste of time to continue this chat. You aren't helping out anyway. "its a kid who agreed. So its not sharking." Sure
  11. Lava

    Lava Public Relations SteamRep Admin

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    I'm afraid I can't understand most of what you're saying; it looks like English isn't your first language, and your translator didn't work too well. I'll try my best to reply anyway, as best as I can understand your comments.

    I can't understand what you're getting at with the personal questions, but I'm not an actual princess, that's just for roleplaying. Read up on the TV show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic for context if you're confused. It has no bearing in my decisions on SteamRep matters, but since you asked about "friendship", it would be a conflict of interests for me to judge on any case involving someone I consider a friend, or anyone I have a predisposition towards (positive or negative). As such, I have no intention of being your friend or enemy.
    You Are The One is an appeals admin. He is pretty much the final person to tell a scammer "no" when refusing to overturn their tag, at which point all their options are exhausted and they are 100% guaranteed to never have their tag lifted from their account for any reason whatsoever. Regardless of his demeanor, it's pretty natural for some people to be upset with the appeals admin just by the nature of that job. You don't go into this line of work without making enemies.

    Your friend is not a SteamRep admin, and is not qualified to make that kind of decision. If he were an admin here, it would be inappropriate for him to weigh in on your report as that's a conflict of interests; you can't just accept reports for your buddies because that's unfair. All reports are expected to be handled by someone with absolutely no vested interest in any particular outcome.

    I tried to respectfully explain the reasoning behind not investigating shark attempts. I'm sorry you don't understand or agree with it, but if we accepted shark reports as a policy then we'd end up wasting time, wrecking the economy, and hurting innocent people in the crossfire. On top of that, your report, which you're so upset about, didn't have enough evidence to properly address even if we did investigate sharking. I have spent hours trying to respectfully explain this to you - not to argue or assert my authority, but to try and educate you about why things work this way so you don't feel so shafted - but unfortunately, like many single-minded children before you who drove partners away from filling that void, it seems all you care about is your own vendetta and you aren't willing to listen to reason.
    Roudydogg1 likes this.
  12. Goddess Noire

    Goddess Noire New User

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    Difference is clear. Admin with powers over many website vs Normal human.
    Like Politicians vs Commoner.
    You made my point clear.
    So no use of talking anymore. Just close the topic.
  13. Dragoon™ ♛ | TRADING

    Dragoon™ ♛ | TRADING Banned on SteamRep

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    How is this even relevant. I've seen people with 5 year old accounts, level 100+, with many games/hours and badges scam people. Just because someone has a fresh account does not make them a scammer.
  14. PepperKick

    PepperKick New User

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    @Lava didn't mean to start a flame war... I just wanted to watch what happens to the accused profile here as the profile was a friend of my report's accused profile, anyway it was still my bad and apologize about it.

    @Goddess Noire I don't get one thing... why are you so hooked to this? If the scammed victim is your why isn't he or she coming forward?

    How did admin powers vs normal people question even came here? He simply said that your friends are not qualified to make a kind of decision here which is completely valid. Your friends should not counted as evidence for the report, even if your friend was an admin here in steamrep he or she still would not have any statement over this report. So where dose "admin vs normal people" even come in?

    I am really curious here to know why are you not trying to understand sharking, its like explained multiple times here by different people. Honestly you are just wasting Steamrep's time with this. (Maybe)
  15. Goddess Noire

    Goddess Noire New User

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    Is this really going on? Steam API is down so I cant just play TF2
    @Dragoon™ ♛ | TRADING
    Read the post please. I m calling an older account, scamming a newer account.

    @PepperKick
    Okay. Let me give an example. A normal person who is random. And a commissioner who everyone knows him by the name. Who would you like give importance. Well of course. The person's whose name you know. And if you had to rob? Well the unknown person of course. Its logic, not law.

    Well I m fine with it. I did say. Couldnt care less about Steam Rep decision even a bit.
    "It has to be steam chats, we dont ban sharking, etc etc."
    Cool. Be like that. Dont care. But your actions does tell me. Although you say we dont promote sharking, unless you take an action against sharkers, this is nothing but free helpful promotion for sharkers.
    So instead of speaking, do some action work against sharkers like I did by bringing as proof of sharkers.
    I dont need your words and paras of this law, I worked here and this and that. And what not.

    We too have worked here and there. I just dont find it important to tell you my story.
  16. Dragoon™ ♛ | TRADING

    Dragoon™ ♛ | TRADING Banned on SteamRep

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    If you don't care about their decision, then why do you keep ranting? You just don't want to accept the fact that SteamRep does not handle reports which are based on 3rd party websites.
    If you feel like you do have valid proof, just make a Report in the valid board. Don't come to general discussion.
    Roudydogg1 likes this.
  17. Goddess Noire

    Goddess Noire New User

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    The door is there, You may leave.
  18. Goddess Noire

    Goddess Noire New User

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    And I already told many times, to close this topic. Its people like you, who dont have another work. To come on my post and begin to talk on it more.
  19. SilentReaper(SR)

    SilentReaper(SR) Retired Staff

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    Topics like this are not just closed for various reasons. We do our best to respond to people's issues here and discussions are allowed to form. Closing such a topic would be seen as contrary to the open discussion nature we want to promote here on SR.