How Valve Can Do Trade Protection Properly
As we've seen, the trade protection update has been, and continues to be, abused by panic sellers to reclaim their skins moments before the trade protection ends. This causes issues not only for traders but also for people simply trying to buy skins.
As a buyer, you take on all the risk. The weight of market changes now falls on you for the next eight days: if the market crashes, you're stuck with the item; if the market rises, you should reap the rewards. However, trade protection allows the buyer to take all the risk while the seller can watch the market and pull their items back at any time if prices appreciate - or let the item go if they drop.
In trying to create a pro-consumer system, Valve accidentally created the most anti-consumer update yet. People who have had their purchases reversed are far less likely to try again. Valve is losing buyers' trust more and more every single day.
My Recommended Solutions:
1) Require the person filing a reversal to prove, to some reasonable degree, that they were scammed - whether that’s through DMs, location data showing API hijacking, emails indicating account compromise, or something to prove that the trades weren’t intentional.
2) If the first option is “too much work” for support staff, then make the ban three months - maybe even six. As someone who has taken a one-year ban from Valve, I can confidently say I’d do it again over losing all my skins. This would heavily affect people’s decision to revert.
In my opinion, either of these two solutions would improve the health of the market. Long term, I believe trade reversals will have a worse effect on the state of the market than gold tradeups.
Valve, please fix.