Rn the shop rating system is really abusable, as if you look at a shop with 5 stars all across the board, it’s obvious that nobody actually does a perfect job on every single trade. On the otherhand, there’s also people who give a less than 5 star rating without ever having traded with the shop owner for the sole purpose of being an asshole. (Which I’ve had on more than one occasion and if you look at my shop rn it has this problem)
My proposal is to fix the rating system. Add some rules to it, such as you must add a screenshot of your trade with a player and the “Trade Accepted with Xevenant” thing that comes after the trade is accepted with a rating.
It should also be mandatory to provide a reasoning for anything sub 5 stars as with the above rule it is still abusable.
take from this what you will obviously add/take away at discretion just fix the system, i really like the idea of it but it was just thrown in there as a neat feature but needs fixing
Something else about the shop rating system I’d like to point out is a lack of any stats for the shop itself. You can find stats on the person, their fairness, trustworthiness, and the other I forgot but you can’t rate their organization/presentation. You could be the best trader but if your shop looks like shit and is out of date then it is kinda hard to look through it to find what you want. These are minor overall but with how many people praise/critize shops based on their looks/layout I am surprised this isn’t a thing. There could be some reason for it, idk, but that’s my input on how I think the rating system can be improved.
I always figured that layout/presentation falls under the umbrella of the “Convenience” stat since having a better layout makes it more convenient for others to find what they need, but then again, it’s just as likely the “Convenience” stat may have been purely intended to how efficient the trading process is for that trader.
i get why you would want to add this but at the same time people can often estimate your trustworthiness and fairness by looking at your trade history. Its how i come up with the ratings i give to other shops. For convenience you could argue that youre only rating how convenient the shop is to browse, in which case you could easily rate a shop’s convenience without trading with the owner (what i usually do), or you could rate how convenient it is to trade with that person (respond time, timezones etc). So what do we define as convenient? One of those, both or neither?
tl;dr kinda hard to fix it. Better to just require people to explain their ratings like you said here
if i constantly hear that youre a trustworthy and fair trader and i have seen evidence of those things from other people why could i not rate you for said trustworthiness and fairness?
i get your argument tho, its a fair point to make. But at the same time this ^ sounds, at least to me, pretty fair too
They should probably make it to where if there’s a rating from a user who hasn’t traded with the shop owner, then the shop owner could exclusively report it with the report button (not by the “Something Else” button, a new exclusive one for shops), and then later on the post gets taken down by a mod. It doesn’t even have to be the shop owner alone, it could just be for when you’re in the #marketplace:shops category and anyone sees a false rating. I’m pretty sure there’s no rule pertaining this, so there should definitely be one in the future as this is unfair to many shops on the forums.
