Your thoughts: EGS Middleman Service

[Infamous Flame]

Hey,

We're looking for your views on our premium middleman service. What do you think we should to, how should we proceed with it? Your thoughts are so important to us, as without them, we don't know where to go with it. So please do reply back here, and I'll respond personally as soon as I can. Some areas to get you started:

Cost: Current cost is flat $30 across all games (give or take obscure accounts/deactivated accounts etc.). Is this too high? Do you think we should change it from a flat fee and make it levelled depending on the value of the account?

Duration: Currently the service takes around 36 hours on average, depending on middleman availability, trading partner availability and other factors. Is this okay? How do you think we could speed it up?

Security: We try to make it as safe as possible, although we obviously can't guarantee anything. Do you have any thoughts about how we could make trades safer? What information do you think we should gather on people who use our service, and how could we use that to prevent scams?

Ideas that don't fall into these categories are definitely welcome too, so please do post back here and let us know what you want from the service!

[deviantval]

considering hosting the site isn't free i think the cost of the middleman service is acceptable, however the 36 hour wait is completely unacceptable for many people. personally once an agreement is reached i'm ready to do business so if a middleman isn't avaible right then i'm going to pass up on the offer, whereas if one were avaible within 10-15 minutes i'd definatly take advantge and pay for the services. i really just think they need to be ready when we need them and they aren't and thats a major drawback

[GunslingerV]

Cost: In regards to cost, I think it should be scaled according to cost (maybe 10%, with a minimum of $5). There are many people selling some accounts for maybe under $50, and buyers would not be willing to pay potentially double the price for insurance.

Duration: I agree with deviant, the "within 36 hrs" isn't acceptable; that's WAY too long. However 10-15min at whim would be very difficult to implement. I'd recommend the construction of a timetables with hours when multiple middlemen would be available. For example (weekdays from 9-12 AM, 5-8PM) etc; this way, buyers and sellers would know when to both be online to conduct the transaction.

Security: To prevent scamming/fraud, I think everyone should be required to enter a phone number registered under the same name as they used to register on the forums. They would have to use that phone number to call an automated answering system without blocking their caller ID for automated verification. I think that'll keep scammers away for sure. Or at least make the option available so people would know who's been verified or not.

[optimo twist]

please add a MM service for guild wars.

i see no feedback for any gw mm services in the past and all i can find is 1 old post saying that you plan to include guild wars in this service in the next week (dated april 24 2008), any updates on this, please?



http://www.egamingsupply.com/forum/n...expansion.html



mm service is really needed for guild wars, look at the buyer/seller beware section, MANY people are getting scammed here, ive bought 1 account here (was lucky enough to find an honest seller) but thought about buying maybe 4 or 5 others, all turned out to be scams and since ive been here on these forums ive seen a crazy number of users banned for scamming or multiple accounts.



heres another idea, for guild wars account sellers and traders, make it mandatory to post ur in game title/xp screen (they can edit out their ingame names if they are worried about anet trolling egs to ban them), that way buyers can compare the numbers to known scammer accounts, many of these titles involve MANY hours of grinding and many scammers wont want to put in a huge amount of hours grinding titles or xp, to get the account to where its not recognized any more, and even then this would be pretty obvious because all title or xp points will always be higher than before, making it real easy to tell.

as far as the cost, i am willing to pay $30 for this service, but i agree with the other guy, 3 days is too long.

[kedg]

I think the cost should be a % base, if you are sellling an account for $60 bucks and then pay $30 bucks for the service its point less. Maybe have a minmum charge and a %.

[Puffnstuff]

When browsing the buy/sell section, I keep seeing MM post and offer their services. I see it as spamming when they tend to do it to every post, atleast 50% of them. We all can see that your offering a MM service through its particular section as well as certain people's signatures.

As for the current price I would agree with GunslingerV. Pricing needs to scale a bit better for lower costing accounts/trades. If there would be a higher end flat cost for a higher estimated account value...then I would expect the time it takes when dealing with a MM to be very low. Since with most companies, the more you pay...the faster the product usually is completed.

For security...this may sound kind of "Gestapo" like but maybe for a premium account being traded/sold/bought (something of massive value) have both partys scan a copy of their ID (given to the MM) for verification with certain things omitted/blocked out like the actual issue #. Though it may only work on proving the buyer and if they are the original owner...dunno, just an idea there.


EDIT: just thought to add this...

About working with a % scale...the problem there is that if its too low, then the MM wont have the incentive to do the service since they may feel they are under appreciated by getting a lower fee for performing the service. There has to be some sort of compromise between MM and purchaser of the service when it comes to the value of the account vs the fee of the service.

[Infamous Flame]

Thanks for all the feedback so far, I'll respond ASAP when I get home today. Keep the thoughts coming!

[NewJose]

Cost: I think it should be a maximum of 30$, but a minimum for the cheaper accounts. If you're buying a 150$ or less account and spending the full 30 on MM, that's at most at least a fifth of what you're already paying, so I think that should be based on some kind of percentage. As for the higher end accounts, I don't think that should be based on a percentage as that could lead to sellers of higher end accounts avoiding MM services, thus leading to less customers and more scams.

Duration: As many have said before, the 36 hours is a bit ridiculous, but there really isn't much I can think of to remedy this problem other than to just hire a few more MMs, or to maybe offer volunteer work to proven trustworthy members that would be willing to help complete some MM transactions. Users like Jaime would be good candidates for this, imo.

Security: Honestly, I don't see much a problem in this. Scammers are typically intelligent enough to avoid MM, as it takes a bit, and the scammers are just too stupid/lazy to pull something as elaborate as that off. Although I've never been scammed while using MM service, so I could be entirely wrong here.

Random thoughts: I think you should add a program similar to Markeedragon's Trustwho program. A program that logs IPs and has the City/State of the user posted with each and every one of their posts. That way it would put a stop to scammers/potential scammers.

I think MM service is fine, other than the wait of course, but if that's what it takes to be sure my account won't be stolen, I'm fine with that.

[Infamous Flame]

Originally Posted by deviantval

considering hosting the site isn't free i think the cost of the middleman service is acceptable, however the 36 hour wait is completely unacceptable for many people. personally once an agreement is reached i'm ready to do business so if a middleman isn't avaible right then i'm going to pass up on the offer, whereas if one were avaible within 10-15 minutes i'd definatly take advantge and pay for the services. i really just think they need to be ready when we need them and they aren't and thats a major drawback

Thanks for letting us know this. I'm going to brainstorm some ideas on how we can reduce wait times, the problem has always been that we have a truly international audience here and we can't get everyone online at the same time to complete trades. Do you have any ideas on how we could ease this issue?

Thanks for helping us improve!

[uberleet]

As for Duration, I feel as though there should be a rotational service. One person cant be awake 24 hours, so why not have another MM member help out while the other is not available. I think it could help with productivity. and cut down on the 36 hour wait.