[LVS] Council Pre-Meeting Agenda (6/4/2019)

[ABParadigm]

We're having a meeting in two weeks time, to be hosted by the penguin formerly known as Sway!

Topics? Apologies? List them below!

Link to the previous meeting notes located here: https://zedwork.co.uk/wiki/Zedling_Coun ... 2019-23-09

[Dax23333]

I do have a topic for this meeting. Market Underpayment, which unfortunatly is still happening.

I hardly venture into the market. I only sell 4 things, which are ice, shulker boxes with music discs in them and then tridents and nautilus shells with ABP and Spec. Of these 4 items I sell only the ice has not had underpayment happen to them. This is frankly ridiculous and I have noticed no improvement since I last brought it up 9 months ago (Meeting https://zedwork.co.uk/wiki/Zedling_Coun ... 2018-06-30). It is still happening and still people are getting shorted time after time.

The notes from last time say the following:

Dax was the bravest member of the council this meeting, as he put up another thrilling market topic for us to all see. This particular topic called up recent underpayment. There has been strings of players getting shorted in various ways; be it underpayment or outright theft. It was generally stated that if you see something, say something, no matter of how severe the underpayment is or if you do not care to be compensated. Zedwick has enough trouble trying to play detective with just one report, why not help him by submitting one of your own? This helps to know because it is easier to tell if the underpayments can be traced to one serial-thief individual or a multitude of people that accidentally mis-counted. Please note, per Zedwick's statement, if you are found underpaying in the market a ban will be issued, no matter if you are a new player or an LVS veteran.

Note that last bit. While some bans have been issued for repeat offenders the vast majority of these are people for the first time misreading (or in one case, having a recource pack cut the last word of a line that said "2 Diamond Blocks" completly changing the meaning of it which according to mojang works as intended. I could rant about that for weeks but I'll save that for another time) the signs or price tags and paying wrongly, and promptly corrected thier error when it was pointed out. People like this don't deserve (or indeed get) the same punishment as those who would blast multiple peoples builds into tiny bits and pour lava over the crater.

Still this is an issue that needs to be addressed in some fashion.

What is causing the issue? The vast majority of incorrect payments I have seen have been where diamonds have been payed in place of diamond blocks, a 9 times reduction in price. Or indeed, other recources given where the block version was requested. It will likely help this issue if we stopped charging for things in blocks, instead using on numbers of diamonds. So instead of 2 diamond blocks you'd put 18 diamonds which is equivilent. This falls down when asking for over 64 diamonds as it becomes awkward paying with more than 1 stack of things. But anyway, we shouldn't need to do any of that as the buyer should actually read (and finish reading, not just stop before the word blocks) the price.

Currently there is pretty much zero deterrent from underpaying the first time as you'll get away with it if as soon as Zedwick brings it up you say it was a mistake and go pay properly.

So what could be done about it? If anyone has any ideas, please please please post them in this forum rather than bringing them up in the meeting I would like it to last less than 40 years.

Some thoughts:
-Implement the ability to ban people from the market, so a Zedlings privilages of market access can be revoked to use as a punishment for first time offenders without banning them outright.
-Any automatic system to detect underpayment would need to be vastly complicated to correctly read the numerous ways sellers display thier prices and would likely be an impossibility.
-Have somebody go around the market every 1 or 2 weeks to check all the chests for underpayment, which would make it easier for Zedwick to indentify the crime by narrowing down the timeframe. I beleive this was discussed last time but amounted to doing it in a wolly neighborhood way, which may or may not have helped and is not in the notes anyway.

[ABParadigm]

I feel the market suspension was considered during the last meeting but some folks rejected it because it would "not be fair" in some instances (such as the above "mistake" cases), or something along those lines. With all due respect to the council and the guardians, look where it has gotten us. I have counted at least a dozen underpayments of elytra alone in the time I have been selling it, which started roughly a year and a half ago. Bearing in mind I sell upwards of three dozen different items, imagine how many things were underpaid if just the elytra had a dozen underpayments. I did not report all of the underpayment instances to Zedwick as I didn't think it mattered until the last meeting. I still hear people wondering if they should report it. That is wrong. Everyone should feel like they should report it. There needs to be some sort of middle ground. The market is not currently working as it was intended. If there is no incentive to simply read the signs or slips of paper before purchase then it's going to keep happening. I have kept myself very calm every time I'm underpaid but by now I am probably a stack of diamond blocks worth in the red from the total underpayments i have received, because I didn't ask for payment in return to simplify the matter (bar maybe one or two instances where the underpayment was so severe, the single instance would have been ridiculously high if left unchecked). If it were anyone else they would believe it's unacceptable and wrong, and demand immediate payment following the occurrence.

This is NOT how the market is intended to be run.

It is not acceptable to be lenient when lenience is not working.

This must be rectified, at this meeting, or players will stop using the market. Simply putting a band-aid fix over this is not acceptable. This is a server-wide issue, and one that is detrimental to the market.

[SneakySkeleton]

I've been selling at the market for a long time, and whilst there have been times when the underpayment problem was worse, I recognise that it is still a problem. I'm not happy about it, and I think it's time for harsher action. The problem is, I don't feel there's lots of options.

I've been underpaid at the market a lot (over many years) to the point I've placed 4 different signs pertaining to underpayment in some way or form in my shop alone, and yet it still happens. To me, it looks like carelessness, although I know mistakes are genuinely made.

It makes me think that the option of a temporary market-only ban may be an effective measure, as a first step. A market ban may sound harsh as a first step measure, but there are so many ways that underpayment can be prevented from the root cause: ask other players online if a price is unclear; read the sign twice; read the pricing boards in the market if you are unsure what "dB" means. (We're not paying in a measurement of sound intensity)

There are measures a seller can take too. They can include price labels inside their chests (as well as a sign), label their trades in diamonds as opposed to diamond blocks, among other things out there.

I really don't want to have to get to the point where we have to name our diamonds/emeralds/iron/gold with our names in an anvil, or even worse, have hopper locks on every trade. (Hopper locks is how the market was originally run back when I joined)

I just wanted to write a summary of my thoughts in the case I'm not able to make it to the meeting.

[Forseth]

Can't say I have this problem a lot, but it does happen. I guess the problem with banning everyone who underpays is the detection process. Once it's discovered that someone stolen/payed to little, Zedwick needs to find who did it and when it happen, in order to be certain of who to ban. It's not automatic like the grief ban and thus require more work. So unless we find some way to make it more efficient, relying on the ban to remove underpayment seems inefficient. To make it better, we could add some measures to increase probability of detection or reducing the probability of underpayment

For detection, a simple "log in/log out" thing should work. A pressure plate over a command block at the entrance of the personal shop. Every time someone enters or leaves it registers them. Maybe it will simplify the process?

Another alternative is to stop using the market as a market. Remove all items from sale and replace them with a tag or sign saying what's for sale, for how much and who to contact. Potential buyers would need to contact the player who is selling and make the deal using the chat. No underpayment can be made if the deal is made in person and nothing can be stolen since the items aren't unguarded.
- Side effect of that would be that sales would go down and so would market productivity, as the seller needs to be online in order to make a deal.

[AlyCatMeow]

I personally haven't experienced any underpayments myself in my own shops, but I have seen it (and brought it to their attention) in the shops of others. One person in particular I can think of who I saw being underpaid was Raysun in the trade office, which I, a poor peasant, frequent often to purchase his surplus of diamonds... I have noticed him expressing other instances of underpayment in public chat.
I have also seen underpayment to Elias Ripley in the end shops.
I'm unsure if this is at all helpful or not, but thought I would share what I have seen.

[ABParadigm]

I guess the problem with banning everyone who underpays is the detection process. Once it's discovered that someone stolen/payed to little, Zedwick needs to find who did it and when it happen, in order to be certain of who to ban. It's not automatic like the grief ban and thus require more work. So unless we find some way to make it more efficient, relying on the ban to remove underpayment seems inefficient. To make it better, we could add some measures to increase probability of detection or reducing the probability of underpayment

Inefficiency isn't a problem. It's that we don't have a reason to not underpay, since you can just say it's a mistake and get away without a hitch. Having a temporary market ban as a consequence would be a reason to not underpay. Even if one person gets a market ban every year, it still serves as a message that doing so is a breach of server rules, and makes others less likely to do it, or make others more likely to simply read, which is something they should already be doing. This temporary market ban could possibly be a Zriend thing if you're worried about efficiency, since they oversee the market. That being said, you would still need Zedwick to determine who underpaid in the first place.

Another alternative is to stop using the market as a market. Remove all items from sale and replace them with a tag or sign saying what's for sale, for how much and who to contact. Potential buyers would need to contact the player who is selling and make the deal using the chat. No underpayment can be made if the deal is made in person and nothing can be stolen since the items aren't unguarded.
- Side effect of that would be that sales would go down and so would market productivity, as the seller needs to be online in order to make a deal.

I think removing the market as a whole is the worst possible thing we could do, frankly. The market is a necessity for some players, simply removing that would make many players stop playing. Catching players online is hard enough with time zones, I can't imagine the entire market being run in that way.

[ABParadigm]

Unrelated to the market business, I'd like to announce Aly's murdery birthday party event! More information located here, which will be updated slightly as we get closer to the event.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3097&p=11972#p11972

[SneakySkeleton]

I really don't want to have to get to the point where we have to name our diamonds/emeralds/iron/gold with our names in an anvil, or even worse, have hopper locks on every trade. (Hopper locks is how the market was originally run back when I joined)

Another alternative is to stop using the market as a market. Remove all items from sale and replace them with a tag or sign saying what's for sale, for how much and who to contact. Potential buyers would need to contact the player who is selling and make the deal using the chat. No underpayment can be made if the deal is made in person and nothing can be stolen since the items aren't unguarded.
- Side effect of that would be that sales would go down and so would market productivity, as the seller needs to be online in order to make a deal.

This is effectively what I briefly mentioned, but now that it's come up again, I wish to elaborate.

Unfortunately the majority of the remaining old market shops from when I joined have either been locked up, so it's not easy to see clear examples. Or in my case, my old shop is the home of the market magma cube, Molly. However, the way it was ran back in the day was these personal shops (it was only personal shops) all had signs stating the trade on offer. A player would visit the market, but would not be able to buy what they wanted when they wanted. They had to wait for the shop owner (someone with a key to a hopper lock), or a Zriend (who could simply break through the floor) to make a trade, which coming from experience (I was a seller in the market at the time) really reduces the number of trades made and general market usage compared to now. The only thing in the market it might improve is the usage the bank's vaults (which are blocked off) would get. Not really worth it.

I'm against going back to this system.

Whilst I believe the market usage would fall in general, it would put so much of the work done to the market over the years to 'improve it' to waste. If the market didn't fall in usage and we did revert back to this system, Zriends would be back and forth, to and fro, there and back, and would get massively reduced Minecraft time. I'm not sure Zriends are active enough to handle this system, as that was a problem in the past too. As ABParadigm mentioned, time zones could be an issue, and I found that they were back then. A trader could go inactive, which is easier to handle under the current "honour/trust system". And finally, you never get to see if a trade is out of stock - you could be waiting for a while, just to find out the trader has nothing to trade.

This server is built on trust and a kind community. I think going against that should warrant a punishment of some kind, as mentioned in my first post.

[Zedwick]

Reading the discussion here has been illuminating for me. For market issues, we Guardians are likely to only know of problems when they are reported. We've seen spikes in reporting, which to us seemed to indicated spikes in underpayments. However, now I believe it may just be spikes in reporting, where one person reporting an issue encourages others to also report their recent issues. So the problem has been left unresolved as Lady and I did not think there were any problem at all, at-least not in the scale talked about here.

To try to encourage reporting, and provide a clear process for doing so, we have decided to create a topic here on the forums specifically for reporting market issues. We have decided public reporting in this case is perfectly fine as no personal locations are revealed in coordinates, and no specific players will be mentioned in the reports.

You can find the new topic for reporting market underpayments here: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3099

Please continue to discuss this issue here, I look forward to reading your feedback on this topic.