WHY PEOPLE ARE QUITTING CS- A Discussion

[Echo Revna]

Thank you to the people who provided me with where to find the BLM thread!

[appaloosa816]

what is ninja trading?

ninja trading refers to the practice of older/experienced users sending a trade to newer/less experienced users that are significantly or drastically unfair to the less experienced user, occasionally with slightly misleading messages (that aren't outright lies), relying on the user's inexperience to get a high-value pet in exchange for a low-value pet.

an older player outright lying to a newer player would be against the rules thankfully, so someone couldn't say something like "your pet isn't worth very much and I know you're a newbie so do you wanna swap with me? I have this from your wishlist and your pet is on mine, so it would be a good trade for you"

but unfortunately, can say something like:
"I know you're a newbie so I'll swap with this one from your wishlist if you want"

oh wow:( thank you for educating me! That is very unfortunate that its so common it has a term. Why not gift newer players rather than take advantage of them:/

[blues clues]

huge props to everyone contributing to this thread

everyone's been super nice + eager to give new ideas!! like lacuna said previously,, it would be fantastic to see this energy on other threads seeing how this one was going insanely fast earlier.

we're clearly capable of revitalizing the forums ourselves, and there's tons of forum games and topics to keep us busy while the cs staff work hard to update our site!

[Lacuna]

I really, really appreciated getting to see your message, Lacuna, that really meant a lot seeing your personal feelings laid out as such. There's one topic that I'd like to touch on/get more clarification for if possible:

Even if we wanted to, I can't even fathom what it would look like to constantly warn and reverse trades because people didn't follow the "approved" way to trade.[/list]

I completely understand how difficult this would be. but I'm wondering if I could ask; is this a reference to what people consider to be "ninja" trading? if so, I'd really like to implore staff to consider ways to address ninja'ing even if it seems difficult to moderate. of course, there will always be gray areas in different trading values, but it really does create so many problems when an older player who very clearly does know their pet values, is able to deceive a newer or more inexperienced player out of their rares as long as they don't type a direct lie in their trading message. I fully agree with you that as players we can uplift and encourage each other and contribute to the good vibes of the site, but it often feels like two steps back for every one step forward when this type of scenario happens on the daily.

I think the biggest problem is the users who do experience an actual "scammy" trade often don't reach out to us. They might not find out until years later they got a bad deal, and they were legitimately happy with that deal until someone told them that based on other user's opinions it was bad. Obviously, sometimes the trade was just objectively bad, like a common for rares, but others it's like, well, maybe a store pet they love the design of from 4 years ago is worth it to someone who doesn't want to trade much to find the "best" deal, can't buy C$, and just got a VR from Dec 18th they don't like the design of. I don't think there would be a way to manually find or them in the thousands of trades that happen every day when we also ALLOW gifts and unfair trades if people want to do that. There are a lot more trades and active users that don't post on the forum than people would expect, I think. Especially on Dec 18th we do our best to put a ton of info out on identifying pets and waiting to trade, but many people choose not to read the info and that is their choice. It all comes back to not wanting to and frankly it not being possible to set values for pets because even if we did, people would always have their own opinions.

[ARACHNOPHOBI4]

THREE MORE CHEERS FOR LACUNA!

[Ravens-Folklore]

I’ve been keeping up with this thread for a bit and I just want to put in a suggestion. Anyone can tell me if they like or hate the idea or if it would be too hard to implement.

Basically I have seen from a lot of people on a lot of threads that when their trades are canceled, they get rude messages and people being insanely mean.

I think it’s fine to reply for an accepted or suggested trade, but if you cancel maybe instead of the message box we should just have a drop down list with a few basic options that say things like-

🔘no thank you
🔘this is not fair to me, sorry
🔘I’m not interested in that, but thank you anyway

Just basic stuff that’s not opening the doors for people to be mean and unnecessarily rude and gross to other players.

reposting my suggestion since the thread is moving quickly and new people may want to see it <3

[Loelya]

I think the biggest problem is the users who do experience an actual "scammy" trade often don't reach out to us. They might not find out until years later they got a bad deal, and they were legitimately happy with that deal until someone told them that based on other user's opinions it was bad. Obviously, sometimes the trade was just objectively bad, like a common for rares, but others it's like, well, maybe a store pet they love the design of from 4 years ago is worth it to someone who doesn't want to trade much to find the "best" deal, can't buy C$, and just got a VR from Dec 18th they don't like the design of. I don't think there would be a way to manually find or them in the thousands of trades that happen every day when we also ALLOW gifts and unfair trades if people want to do that. There are a lot more trades and active users that don't post on the forum than people would expect, I think. Especially on Dec 18th we do our best to put a ton of info out on identifying pets and waiting to trade, but many people choose not to read the info and that is their choice. It all comes back to not wanting to and frankly it not being possible to set values for pets because even if we did, people would always have their own opinions.

ah, I see. that does make sense. thank you so much for your response again, it is very appreciated, and I do think knowing that it's more of a not-getting-reported issue than a just-can't-stop-it issue makes it a lot less of a bummer.

[appaloosa816]

THREE MORE CHEERS FOR LACUNA!

woot woot woot!

[Venøm]

Also to Lacuna if you're still reading - as someone with autism and ADHD and communication misunderstandings due to it, I entirely empathise and its horrible to be taken the wrong way. In future I'd even prefer to ask for you instead to help resolve issues I have (hoping i dont have any though :>).

Possibly an introduction of tone tags (things like /nm or /not mad) in CS might be useful to help preventing unintentional aggressive tones. This could come in the form like emojis where you can select from a list to add in messages. Someone also mentioned a while back these other options in trading that include "not what I'm looking for" or "not fair to me" instead of just "cancelled trade". Edited to see it was from ravens-folklore mentioned just above!

[Nexius]

I honestly believe, the biggest issue, and the one I’d like to focus on the most, is the lack of responses from the head admins (Tess, nick, etc)

This was something that was brought up in the thread I've linked a few times here. It's almost as if Tess has disappeared. Nick, I know, works behind the scenes and is the site's ONLY coder (poor guy). x.x

Agree. It's great that some of the mods are passionate about the site and interacting with us in this thread but the silence from Tess over the past year of complaints about inflation and the site's decline has been telling.