Suggestion for EA - Inter-player rummage sale

keithzilla208 wrote:

MaxxSpider wrote:
Terrible idea

Care to elaborate?

People will abuse it with feeder towns.
There will end up being millions of abandoned towns on their servers.

MaxxSpider wrote:

keithzilla208 wrote:

MaxxSpider wrote:
Terrible idea

Care to elaborate?

People will abuse it with feeder towns.
There will end up being millions of abandoned towns on their servers.

I can see where this might be an issue- people using these towns to come into the auction with the intent of jacking up prices on items to make their real town earn higher prices for their unwanted content.

But then again the abandoned towns can be offset by deleting towns that have no activity or are barring participation if your town is below a certain level.

EA would have a major headache with people moving content between towns. There would be a strong possibility of problems with server connections causing content to be lost making EA have to fix problems in two towns. Then there is the chance of fraud and even theft such as people exploiting the "wrong town glitch" to sell content from one town to another and then that 2nd town to the glitch exploiter's own town.

Good idea in theory, but as others have said the implementation could cause major issues. The main issue I see is that the stuff I'd be willing to get rid of, I don't think anyone would want. Unless there's a long line of players who are clamoring for Valentine's Fences and Easter Towel/Umbrella sets that I haven't heard about yet...

The reason for the requested feature has come up several times since I have been playing (about 6 months now) under several other suggested ways of handling it. One was trading one item from player A for one item from player B. Another was a simple classifieds listing where player A listed one item for sale at a fixed price and player B goes in and buys it. More complicated but seemed reasonable. The other was a sell back to EA method where the player got almost all of the items value in donuts, for example, that the price of the item is from the sell back. This last one probably being the best one of the ones I have seen. Because it does not involve other players or towns but does allow players to get rid of junk they don't want and get compensation for it in a way that is like selling or trading the item to another player. Though I did like the idea of an item for item trading system between players.

The downside to any system that allows players to trade or buy and sell from each other is that there are always way for people to abuse the system or scam others with the system or cause damage in other ways. And the consequences to the game can't really be fully evaluated unless the system is in place. And if the consequences are too great the damage would already have been done and the clean up most likely ends up being more than anyone expected and sometime irreversible. I know this sounds like a worse case scenario kind of thing but I have witnessed this damage happen in other games because of trading systems. In some of the games the damage the trading system caused were never able to be cleaned up, some going on as much as 7 or 8 years after the damage was done.

I just wish we could trade crafting items. I have a boatload of gummy bears because I keep getting batches shooting down UFOs, but I have so few broken fence pieces that I'll never be able to craft the Queen.