__________________
your ubb survivor 10 champion!!
Also the recipient of the invisibility and morality awards.
100% win ration in ubb mafia
wotc marketplace council member, 2 terms and counting

"Because a banned person is most likely untrustworthy, so why should their reference be a good thing?"

Most of the people who get banned may have low refs but when they are listed as a bad trader you may only get one or two people listing them as a bad trader. That doesn't always mean they are a bad trader. Maybe the post office lost their mail, maybe they had a family emergency and can't respond to the posts online fast enough. There are many reasons that are out of the traders control. There have been traders banned with significant amounts of references. Those players I'm sure other people would agree, are good traders who just had a deal go wrong or something out of their controll happened. The trades they did previously must have gone well to warrant a reference from other people. Those people should not lose their references. An example would be: I've traded with a guy who was just banned on Friday: Cebu1984. I've traded with him twice and the mail from him was somewhat slow but it was coming from another country. My mail to him was just as slow. His trade he got banned from he was banned because he did not respond after a certain period of time to the posts on the BTA. Does this mean he was a bad trader and that all the other trades he had were garbage? No. Instead of being banned for one trade gone wrong, why can't there be a negative reference left. That way other people do not lose their references and people that may want to trade with the person will see that they have a negative reference and they can then decide whether or not to trade with them. If someone with low refs gets a bad trade it would show people that they have a high percentage of getting a bad trade from that person and then they can make the necessary precautions such as, delivery confirmation, insurance, 3rd party. Many times people get listed for stupid things such as confirming a trade and they are supposed to send out first, but they don't. Maybe they forgot, maybe something came up. Do they deserve to be banned? No. No trader will have a perfect record. If you want a real assessment of how well a trader is then instead of the current ref system, why don't you come up with a trade form. When someone wants to do a trade with someone they fill out the trade form.The other person in return fills out one for the person they are trading with. Then MOTL will have a record of all trades. As soon as the trade is completed wheter or not it went well or fell through both people could then fill out a reference for the other person. This would allow people to fill out refs for people that trades got screwed up with instead of someone doing a trade that went bad and then never sending out a ref checker. MOTL has more than 37,000 members but so many members trade on other websites due to the fact of being banned for stupid reasons. I would guess that out of the 37,000 people on here 99% of them are good traders. Cebu1984 is listed on the Bad Traders thread with an address from someone else in a different country. Maybe the person he did the trade with got his information mixed up and sent cards to the wrong person. Why did he get banned when the other person did not send their cards and they did not get banned? I'v traded with both of them and while the mail can be slow I received all the times I traded. I still do not feel that we should be penalized when someone else's trade goes wrong and someone gets banned.

__________________
Mort was already aware that love made you feel hot and cold and cruel and weak, but he hadn't realized that it could make you stupid.

Report rules violations.

quote:

---

Originally posted by nderdog:
Unless you have like 5 refs, and a couple get banned, does it honestly make a real difference? There's simply not a noticable difference between 287 and 317. My banned refs don't bother me in the least. I'd much rather have them not count on my list than have low-ref members benefit from shady deals of faked refs and such that people who get banned tend to be much more likely to do.

---

I agree. I have 139 with 6 banned. I should have 145.
If someone with 140 refs (one more than me) ever ask me to send first, I will laugh at him.

Yes, I made a trade with those 6 banned ex-motl members...so what? Now they're banned and I suppose each of them were banned for a good reason.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Akarius:
I agree. I have 139 with 6 banned. I should have 145.
If someone with 140 refs (one more than me) ever ask me to send first, I will laugh at him.

Yes, I made a trade with those 6 banned ex-motl members...so what? Now they're banned and I suppose each of them were banned for a good reason.

---

what about those of us without 140 refs, not me in particular but there are others. its fine for you but it does affect some people more than others. sure they were banned(again people dont only get banned for trading isues) so a good trader should suffer for this aswell eventhough there experience with the banned person may have been their best trade on the site.

__________________
your ubb survivor 10 champion!!
Also the recipient of the invisibility and morality awards.
100% win ration in ubb mafia
wotc marketplace council member, 2 terms and counting

Just my half a cent.

__________________
Mess with the best, die like the rest.

Banned members disappearing off of lists is going to affect everyone more or less at the same ratio. Sure, there will be some variance, but overall, it's just not enough to really matter.

__________________
Mort was already aware that love made you feel hot and cold and cruel and weak, but he hadn't realized that it could make you stupid.

Report rules violations.

quote:

---

Originally posted by LandDestroyer:
It's very annoying...but I do agree with banned ones not counting (and I've got about 10% of my refs not counting b/c of it) b/c of the trustworthy issue. On the same token (to me) I don't think non-motl refs should count in the total ref count. motl refs we usually have a bit of info to go on the person that gave the ref (at the very least, how many refs does that person have and are they in good standing or banned). with non-motl refs we don't have that, so i don't think they should count like banned motlers refs don't count. that's my two cents.

---

I think Non MOTL refs should count because like me I'm sure many other people trade cards on more than one website. Why should we have to have seperate refs on all the sites we trade on. Those refs can be checked just as easily as MOTL refs. Just e-mail the person and ask them where the trade took place and the details of the trade.

quote:

---

Originally posted by crypticfreak1:

I think Non MOTL refs should count because like me I'm sure many other people trade cards on more than one website. Why should we have to have seperate refs on all the sites we trade on. Those refs can be checked just as easily as MOTL refs. Just e-mail the person and ask them where the trade took place and the details of the trade.

---

__________________
Mort was already aware that love made you feel hot and cold and cruel and weak, but he hadn't realized that it could make you stupid.

Report rules violations.

quote:

---

Originally posted by bigbob585:
personally. while the person may have been banned. they were not untrustworthy when you did the trade. they should count. I had over 30 refs at one point in the beginning of the summer and by the end I had lost 8 of them

---

IMO, some banned refs are fine, others are useless. I'd rather lose a few okay ones than let bad refs remain.

__________________
Mort was already aware that love made you feel hot and cold and cruel and weak, but he hadn't realized that it could make you stupid.

Report rules violations.

i don't see any ref as a "bad ref" except those that were faked or otherwise have no reason being there because no trade was done between the people.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Bagbokk:
personally, my view of a reference is that it says i held up my end of the trade, and whether that person gets banned or not doesn't change the fact that we made a deal, i sent, and he received.

i don't see any ref as a "bad ref" except those that were faked or otherwise have no reason being there because no trade was done between the people.

---

I've seen enough people offer fake refs, or stupid trades for refs and the like that I wouldn't trust a ref from a banned member at all anyway.

__________________
Mort was already aware that love made you feel hot and cold and cruel and weak, but he hadn't realized that it could make you stupid.

Report rules violations.

quote:

---

Originally posted by bigbob585:
this isn't a job application.. lets be realistic here... this is a trade reference. look at ebay.. it doesn't matter who the reference is and who gets banned.. all it says was you sent and they recieved.. or vice versa

---

Yeah, and Ebay references often aren't worth crap. Any knucklehead can spend a few bucks on 1-cent items and get a bunch of references. It's the details that matter, and the details are where the unreliability of a banned member comes into play.

My point is that there is no way to know if a trade with a banned member was an honest good trade, or if there were shenanigans involved. There's just no good reason to take the risk. As I've said over and over, it affects everyone about the same, so why does it really matter?

__________________
Mort was already aware that love made you feel hot and cold and cruel and weak, but he hadn't realized that it could make you stupid.

Report rules violations.

quote:

---

Originally posted by bigbob585:
they were not untrustworthy when you did the trade.

---

You don't know that. Perhaps the person sent first to you just so they could work up their own references quickly to seem trustworthy.

A trader who let's $100 worth of cards slide in trades just to up their refs (ie, over 33 quick trades they lose an average of $3.03 a trade) is nothing compared to when the rip 10~30 people at once for $1000~$2000 worth of cards from people with less than the 33 quick refs they've worked up.

Motive here is huge. Just because your deal with them was "good" doesn't mean that it wasn't playing into their game plan. And for all we (the rest of the community) know, plays into your game plan as well.

Obviously for someone like crypticfreak1, 287 refs goes a long way to ensuring you're legit, but for someone with only 30 refs, 40 refs? If you really wanted to you could work that up in a couple of months. This (hopefully) makes it harder for groups of con-artists/rippers working together to pull off larger rips. They would now have all pull their ripping-sprees at the same time, I would hope that if there were a ring of rippers and they all had pull off their rips at the same time it would make law enforcements job easier to catch them (and should make the charges more).

287 < 317, sure. They're still the same order of magnitude. I happen to not have any refs from banned people. Will I be annoyed when one of my former refs gets him/herself banned? Definitely. Will I think the rule needs to change when that happens? No. On eBay how many people actually go through and read all the feedback a seller has? How many of you even go to look at any of the feedback instead of just seeing 99.8% positive and 300+? Would you ever buy anything from a seller that had 200 feedback that was 99.9% positive, but when you looked at the portion that came from that seller's buyers was all from banned eBay accounts? Hell no.

If you have to convince yourself that the rules are there to protect stupid people who don't double check the refs, then do so. Including the banned refs will only result in more people getting ripped. As a community, that's a bad thing. I think you can take the short run hit of having 30 less refs not maybe having to live with the small anxiety of sending first to someone with 300 refs, in order to profit long run by having a growing and healthy community which will result in better trades and more people sending first to you later so you don't have to worry in the long run.

EDIT:

@cryptic, it sounds more like you have an issue with how easily certain members get banned as opposed to just the refs issue... perhaps you should dissect your thoughts a little more into multiple threads for each thing you see a problem with.

EDIT #2:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Bagbokk:
personally, my view of a reference is that it says i held up my end of the trade, and whether that person gets banned or not doesn't change the fact that we made a deal, i sent, and he received.

i don't see any ref as a "bad ref" except those that were faked or otherwise have no reason being there because no trade was done between the people.

---

The problem is that faked refs are hard to "sniff" out. If I get my friends who moved to other states to trade/buy stuff from me so I can get positive feedback/refs, you as a person checking my feedback have no way of knowing that the feedback is faked. If someone is willing to take part in scamming by upping the scammers feedback, chances are they're one step away from becoming a scammer themselves and asking the scammer before they get "caught" to give them some feedback/refs to...

If however you see their feedback looks like:

Person C
Person D (Banned/This user's account no longer exists)
Person E
Person F (Banned/This user's account no longer exists)
Person G (Banned/This user's account no longer exists)
Person H (Banned/This user's account no longer exists)
Person I (Banned/This user's account no longer exists)
Person J (Banned/This user's account no longer exists)
Person K

You're going to stay away from that deal. Why take a risk as a community to open the doors for even 1 more rip to take place if it could be prevented? Making it harder to do is really the only deterant that the mods have any control over, the rest is up to law enforcement.

__________________
H/W List

quote:

---

The problem is that faked refs are hard to "sniff" out. If I get my friends who moved to other states to trade/buy stuff from me so I can get positive feedback/refs, you as a person checking my feedback have no way of knowing that the feedback is faked. If someone is willing to take part in scamming by upping the scammers feedback, chances are they're one step away from becoming a scammer themselves and asking the scammer before they get "caught" to give them some feedback/refs to...

---

My point was that faked refs are the only "bad" refs as far as I'm concerned. Not whether they can be sniffed out or not.

The problem with your example is that they only have 9 references to begin with. 9 vs. 3 isn't really much of a big deal. He's unlikely to convince anyone with more than 20 refs to send first. Maybe if he had 30-40 references and 25-30 of them are banned, but how many of those accounts actually exist? Probably none.

Edit: Bad wording up there originally. I meant that if you're new to MoTL and have 0 refs, you're going to be sending first or at BEST getting a simul-send off of anyone, even other new members, here, and you're just as likely to get ripped from a simul-send as you are sending first.

If someone really wants to rip people off before they get BTA'd and banned, they will. I really doubt even 1 rip was likely prevented simply because banned members are no longer part of someone's ref list.

quote:

---

My point was that faked refs are the only "bad" refs as far as I'm concerned.

---

So why give them a chance of existing?

quote:

---

The problem with your example is that they only have 9 references to begin with.

---

You can add L, M, N, O, P... X, Y, Z, AA, BB, CC, DD, EE ... XX, YY, ZZ... if you like.

How many accounts exists like that? I'll admit, mostly likely none currently. But they very well could exist on eBay until that person rips several people in a row to cash in on their "feedback" before people realize it's fraudulent. The point is less so that they exist currently, and that they existed in the past, or have the potential to exist in the future. Time doesn't sit still, just because things are fine now doesn't mean they were fine at all points in the past and will be fine at all points in the future.

quote:

---

I meant that if you're new to MoTL and have 0 refs, you're going to be sending first or at BEST getting a simul-send off of anyone, even other new members, here, and you're just as likely to get ripped from a simul-send as you are sending first.

---

As previously stated, working up 30ish refs seems pretty easy. Personally I'd have to believe a ripper would have to laugh when they get ripped sending first. Seriously though if you're a ripper, don't you think you'd deal with the established community members first to work your refs up quickly and then leverage your new pile of refs against people who don't trade as often and get 10~20 people at once. In my opinion, it doesn't matter that your trade with that ripper "went smoothly." What matters is that someone got ripped off and the motives behind the trade you completed with that person. Since we can't tell what the motives are from behind a computer screen, we have to account for the possibility of that motive being bad and not take chances and just say the ref gets tossed out, whether it was a good ref or a bad ref.

quote:

---

If someone really wants to rip people off before they get BTA'd and banned, they will. I really doubt even 1 rip was likely prevented simply because banned members are no longer part of someone's ref list.

---

I think you're naive then.

quote:

---

To me it doesn't "matter" so much - I can live with them not counting towards my ref list, but it's still pretty lame when I work hard for my trades and have them not count somewhere down the line not due to my doing but because someone else was stupid enough to get themselves banned. I still hold that my references are a reflection of my own trustworthiness and what others do doesn't change that.

---

But if you've traded with a shady person, you wind up being slightly guilty by association. One has to question, "How many more refs of his are from people about to get themselves banned?" Essentially, this means that although you've worked hard for your refs, you now have to work hard to replace your refs, to prove that you're not "in" with the rippers. If you're an honest trader, I don't think you'll have any problem with proving yourself again. If you somehow keep losing a large portion of your refs to people getting banned and it's a freak occurance, I would completely understand being aggrivated, but I still wouldn't say "Make an exception for this one honest and trustworthy person and in doing so potentially open a door for people who aren't honest and trustworthy." This isn't the death sentence, this is Magic cards, the rule of "Banning 1 innocent person to ensure 10 guilty people get banned also" is perfectly acceptable in my opinion.

__________________
H/W List

quote:

---

In my opinion, it doesn't matter that your trade with that ripper "went smoothly."

---