Recently, I’ve been seeing quite a lot of threads on the BasilMarket forums regarding being feedback scammed or having to deal with poor traders. And while I frequently post about ways to prevent getting negative feedback through no fault of your own, it’s kind of tiring to say the same things over and over again. Thus, I’ve created a list of things you could do.

Keep in mind that these don’t ALWAYS work because there are ALWAYS exceptions. But they should greatly decrease your chances of running into bad experiences with trading.

BEFORE YOU PRESS THE BUTTON, DO YOUR RESEARCH
It is your fault if you accept the bid or bid on an auction made by someone with poor feedback. It’s your fault for not thoroughly looking through the feedback of the person you hope to trade with in the future. I’m personally very meticulous about things like these so I rarely had any problems. You should look through the feedback of your trader-to-be. If you see a neutral or negative, click on the person who gave that feedback to figure out why. There are chances that your-trader-to be may be totally innocent and just had a bad experience with a poor trader and you can usually tell through vulgar language, description of trading experience and grammar within the feedback comment. It is also normal to see neutral when a trade ddin’t succeed due to time restraints. If those are the cases, your trader-to-be is a good trader but has had a few rough encounters.

LOOK FOR SIGNS OF POSSIBLE FEEDBACK SCAM
This isn’t usually detectable but it’s a good idea to take a brief look anyway. Look for consecutive feedback by the same person, and that person has no other feedback than the main account. There are some feedback scammers stupid enough to use their IGN as the scammer account (so you’ll see their IGN is “JohnDoe” and in the feedback, you see multiple postives from a Basil account named “JohnDoe&quot and I’ve personally encountered this once. Since those are so obvious, do Mr.Basil a favour and report the stupid scammer.

ONCE THE AUCTION ENDS, TAKE THE INNITIATIVE
If possible, take the innitiative to contact that person first. Don’t be a sitting duck This may be just trading in a game. But if you think about it, you don’t like beggars in real life and you don’t like them in the game either. In the same way, be a smart business owner in the game and be a smart business owner (or whatever profession you choose to be) in real life. A smart business owner doesn’t just sit and wait for customers when business is going bad. He might go and advertise or bring in telemarketers, whatever. It’s TAKING THE INNITIATIVE. And what I mean is not just to send that default message. Take a look at their profile and absorb the information. Ask in your Basil message if there are any gaps missing in the profile (e.g. time zone not stated clearly) and give any extra information that you did not leave on your own profile.

WHEN YOU GOT A HUNCH THAT THINGS WILL GO WRONG, TAKE SCREENSHOTS
It doesn’t matter if it’s a screenshot within the game, your “My Auctions” page or your Basil messages. Screenshots provide proof that something went wrong. It could be even as simple as a feedback not being registered on the your trader’s profile but you know fully well that you submitted feedback. A screenshot would show proof that you fulfilled your part and you could send it to someone who’s in charge to fix the problem. If your hunch was wrong, you could always delete the pictures later. It’s better to be safe than sorry.

EXPLAIN YOURSELF WHEN LEAVING NEUTRAL OR NEGATIVE FEEDBACK
This coincides with the first point I listed. People like me are going to look thoroughly through feedback and make a judgment based on it. If you don’t properly explain what happened, we might mistakenly assume that you did something wrong when you were actually innocent. I know how short your feedback comments are so make it simple and straightforward. If you think it’s necessary and you took screenshots, you might even want to say “Bad trader. PM me for proof” in your feedback comment.

NEGATIVE AND NEUTRAL FEEDBACK WON’T KILL YOU
I am more likely to distrust someone who has never had any negative or neutral and super high positive than someone who’s got a rather high positive with a few negative and neutrals here and there. Again, this has to do with being cautious of possible feedback scamming. The feedback acts as a meter of how trustworthy you are and those of use who are smart traders will be able to see through those few times you’ve been blamed for something you didn’t do. Don’t make it a goal to have a clean record with no negatives or neutrals because it is pointless. A clean record can only occur if everyone is honest about the whole trading process and I don’t see that happening anytime soon.