Marketplace Reform

For number 4 that means the burden is on the seller to either sell as Preview/Review OR to check the item is different.

 

What happens in the instance when the seller has items that are marked as Beta but has no hardware to test the material on? In that case can they not be sold with a disclaimer such as 'Seller unable to test material, sold as seen'?

It would mean a few sellers here would no longer be able to participate in marketplace, which is harsh given that the vast majority (and I mean the VAST majority) of AG users tend to understand the risks involved.

Clearly people simply passing off material as something it is not should be weeded out, yet those who have previously demonstrated or have long standing feedback scores, active members of the community should be allowed some slack?

Sometimes the seller may be in no position to confirm whether the material differs from retail. It took months to determine the debug commands of a title I shall not refer to here, but whilst the debug commands remained unfound the material was referred to as a 'Preview' for media. On finding the debug commands it was obviously reclassified as 'Debug'.

 

Then its up to the seller to sell it as preview/review along with a picture and price. Its up to the seller to a set a price that he thinks is fair. If a buyer were to agree then i cant see the problem.

 

(1) and (2) are good suggestions, but (3) and (4) are not necessary. It's buyer beware, always has been, always will be. The experience of dealing with a certain user recently shouldn't f**k it up or complicate it for the many dozens of us who have been using the marketplace without issue for years.

Ask them to take it offline and let's all move on...

dave.

 

Generally speaking, as long as we remind people that its caveat emptor, we're good. By this point, we all know the pitfalls of buying from others online.

Your options are to only buy from people you know...or take the risk. As adults we are capable of making these decisions.

So, while mandatory pictures and such might be nice, I think it is better to leave things to the individuals as much as possible.

 

As it should be.

 

Well now hopefully these changes will make it better for buyers and people can see what they are buying.

 

i second that

 

Sounds like a good solid set of rule changes.

 

I think they are solid rules. I dont do betas or reviews (only retail stuff unless its something very special)

But the problem I see with the reviews/previews is that alot of systems poeple can just burn a 1 to 1 copy of a retail game or a actual preview and burn it to CD/DVD and then market it as such when its really not. Then claim there are no diffrences.

 

This is all from one isolated incident, but I have a few things that combine from the other thread to say:

I don't mind taking pictures of everything in the thread, I admit I am lazy, but I'm not the one that made the rules about things having a picture with XXX amount in price as the minimum, and I certainly don't like it when that is questioned when it's in the marketplace rules.

Also, I can't test/tell the differences on these games, I think by now everyone knows that, and I've had ONE person come back to me about this who obviously was expecting something completely different.

I think what many people are forgetting is that there also is a language barrier getting in the way with some people, but I definitely do not think it is fair for the burder to be on the seller to figure out if there are differences in these when we have no way to test/figure it out.

This marketplace states it is the best place to buy/sell development hardware/software on the net, and I've been on here a lot longer than even my "join date" states, and the whole point is to get this stuff to people who want the items at fairly decent prices. I didn't get this stuff for free, but I am offering a lot of them cheap so someone on here can enjoy such games.

All in all if it has to be a picture for everything, with name and site, great, that stops arguments about pictures, but Preview/Review/Beta, it's all on the same media, but a lot of times, especially with me, unless it is written, I just can't tell.

 

i would say, that if the seller is not able to test for differences, at least he should run a file by file size/date comparizon with the retail version... there are automated programs doing that.

 

Or just sell the item as Review/Previews if they arent sure of what exacly it is. This will keep the problems to a minimum and if the item contains more then just review code will keep buyers happy.

 

I'm sure that takes awhile, and with $10-15 games and not having finals to most of them, that makes no sense.


I agree with Paulo's assessment, Review/Preview if you don't know what it is, solves lots of issues.

 

Sounds like a fair set of rules that will hopefully improve trading on this forum.

 

I agree with everything.

It might, but it protects the buyer AND the seller of certain items.

Buyer beware still stands as there is still a risk in buying online. These potential rules are meant to make a certain sale of items more clearly as the potential of scamming someone is very high. I can claim it's beta and sell it for lots of money when in fact it really is a retail version or a retail with some files removed to make it look like it was a beta copy. It can happen.

 

I like that idea, but it may not always be possible. If a buyer doesn't understand the risks of buying online then they shouldn't be purchasing anything in the first place.

 

I agree with the first three, they are solid. However:

What if the disc is marked 'beta' by the devs? I know from experience that for example Sega Genesis games had betas (official betas, tested by QA) become finals. As in, a version was a beta and then, when they found no bugs, it was marked as final and went gold. I'm sure there would be more situations like that.

Maybe there should be some kind of stickied topic explaining to people the risks involved and the distinction between prototypes. Betas are almost always very very similar to finals as most companies use the term 'beta' to describe a version of the game that is major-feature-locked and is only to fix bugs. Sometimes things get added last minute, and certainly some companies have different terms to describe stuff, but most commonly betas are almost-finals.

 

The idea is that even if the disc says "beta" or "alpha", it is not sold as a beta unless differences have been verified. I think this change would not only be fair, but just.