[RTC] Bundling

Last modified 24. December 2018, 01:13 | Page exists since 28. April 2013, 16:07

The Rare Trading Center rules state:

You may offer only rare dragons (…).

This includes bundle offers.

What does that mean? That means that once you have one common in your bundle, you cannot post that bundle up in the Rare Trading Center.

That seems harsh; why not allow bundles?

One of the first things the current incarnation of the Rare Trading Center pushed for was to allow bundles, since it was frustrating having to “hide away” rares in A dragon trading thread V2! just because a common hatchling was tossed into the mix, or something else that would be considered benign muddying of waters. It affected the RTC moderators just as much as any other user of our thread, and we really wanted to allow some leeway.

The rule we decided on was that at least 50% of a bundle had to qualify as rare.

In brief… it didn’t work out, mainly because of the bandwagon effect.

In greater detail: People saw other people offering commons in the Rare Trading Center and simply assumed that any sort of bundle was all right, or posting commons as hatchlings was all right, or any number of misunderstandings. The amount of people who benefited from the rule change, on the other hand, seemed negligible going by our careful tallies.

We factored in that some misbundles would have been posted even without our bundle-allowing rule. We factored in that people were benefiting from being able to offer rare-common checker pairs. But we also factored in that it was greatly increasing the moderator work-load – it’s much easier to skim posts and react to non-rares indiscriminately than it is to carefully read a post with non-rares as to whether it matches the criteria.

With no significant benefit to be seen and the downside of clutter and workload, we axed the experiment again – much to our collective chagrin.

Bundles will not be coming back (unless someone has a better idea for a rule that meshes better with intuition, and/or adequately counters the bandwagon effect – we’re quite eager to hear suggestions, as we’re equally bummed about this situation!).

Okay, so how do we post in the Rare Trading Center to let people know we have a trade with rares?

There is a way you can ‘offer bundles’ without violating the RTC’s rules; it’s documented here in hope of decreasing some frustration on the matter, since this topic is probably the most frequent point of contention in our PM correspondence (rare as contention is):

Not okay: Can also throw in common x, rare y and common z or any permutation of rares and commons. (Pure rares are fine.)

Not okay: Willing to part with anything on my scroll, unless there are only rares on your scroll when the Rare Trading Center moderators take a look at your post (that does mean we generally don’t recommend this, since it’s not time-invariant).

Not okay: Willing to breed anything / IOU anything – with the note that this is illegal chiefly because of the Trading section rules. The RTC moderators may not necessarily do anything about this (it’s up to the individual moderator whether they want to act on it); but if the section mods catch you, they’ll remove it, so we feel it’s good to know not to post that sort of thing.

Okay: Willing to add much more. It’s implied and assumed that this is a rare offer. We assume that if it isn’t, you’re going to disappoint the person taking the effort to PM you, anyway, and then it’s your loss. ;)

Okay and recommended: Please PM me for now; I can supply teleports for the rares, but they are currently tied up in another trade. with a link to your A dragon trading thread V2! ‘crosspost’. You could also link to the trade link itself, but if you link to the crosspost, people can click on the link, see you entire trade request, and decide whether to act on it. This is especially useful if you’re asking for something for the whole bundle you wouldn’t dream of asking for only the rares in that bundle, or vice versa. All threads stay clean and maximum transparency and order is achieved. \o/ Resistence is futile, you will be assimilated

We’re very fond of the last method for our own trades because of the fine-grained control it gives to everyone involved, including the trader. It’s possible we may allow other variants in future, providing something else strikes us as not prone to the aforementioned bandwagon effect that we struggle quite hard against – and, as always, we love to hear suggestions!

Neike Taika-Tessaro

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