Swapping FC Liability

Recently, a contact of mine got the RSN R2Pleasent in-game, and messaged about starting a swapping FC. Personally, I don't have time to run the thing, but I can oversee it and try to keep it well moderated. However, at the end of the day, I don't want to be liable if one of the hosts does something retarded.

So my question to Sythe.org Staff is, can I start a swapping FC which is officially endorsed by my company, but not take on liability for the trades? Obviously I would have some sort of disclaimer, perhaps something along the lines of me only providing a maximum of ~100M EOC in the case of a scam by our top ranks. Anything beyond that is traded at their own risk.

Let me know what you guys think and how I could properly set something like this up without having to take on full liability for the people running the FC.

~ R2

 

Love the idea, i'd pay for a rank in there

 

I believe that Sythe doesnt mind really what you do in Runescape. Sythe staffs will only care if a member of Sythe.org has been scammed by a rank.

I find it really hard to decide because it is not really your fault if another user scammed but at the same time, you "hired" them. I dont know. If I was scammed by a rank, I would expect to be repaid tho. (with proof)

 

If I remember correctly, the reason why buying a rank cost so much is in case the rank scammed. It doesn't work like someone buys a rank for 1b, scams 500M, and victim gets 100M.

There are precautions you can take to minimize potential losses if it ever occurred. Something like a rank's maximum bet being no where close to their buy in. 1b to buy a rank, 200M maximum bet. They'd have to scam 5 players (who valid proof) before you lose anything on a host. And if it costs to stay a rank every month, where the money is normally used to promote and do giveaways.

I was told in the early days of DD there was a deposit of around 7b. I dont remember if it was from a host or from a big gambler back then.

Now if someone has proof and you say you will pay back if they have proof and don't, then you should have a problem on Sythe. If a paying rank scammed, and you say you'd refund a max of 100m, and do that, I dont see why you'd be held liable. Unless of course one of your workers were a host there and scammed. If you say you wont refund anything even if a rank scams, and proceeds to do so, then instead of being held liable you will have your named ruined.

This is just my opinion, experience and what Ive heard.

 

Here's my feedback on the subject as well since we're going to be starting something similar. I can post an official suggestion thread too if needed.

Business & services coalitions that are made up of more than say, 10 people, need to have some sort of "group" (not necessarily a user group, possibly a donation perk of sorts?) made for them on Sythe if they meet certain requirements. One or more leading members of the group will be liable for the work related actions of those they accept in the group, and groups that cause too much trouble can be punished or suspended.

Apith covered security deposits as well. @ Dragon Dyce prior to the admin team leaving (which I'm going to be making a google doc and vid soon explaining why we left and what happened), we had "security deposits" for ranks. These were nonrefundable payments you made to the business owner to provide collateral against scams, similar to the way that the donation system works on Sythe.org in the sense that it would be extremely rare that anyone would scam for an amount substantially lower against their deposit. In all of my 2 and a half years @ Dragon Dyce where we had over 500 ranks over 3 and a half years, and since I became a rank in May 2012, we only had 4 notable work related scams with hired ranks

Two of these ranks were friends who scammed for ~700m and lost their combined 14b collateral. The users they scammed were refunded. The only other notable scams by ranks that we had over my experience @ Dragon Dyce was when Nick (who was hired for free) scammed a 2x blue partyhat pot (which was almost 4x his max allowance) from Fox TM immediately after gambling was made a bannable RS offence , which I refunded. There was one more scam where someone traded a new rank too much money (about 2.5x his allowance & etqual to his collateral) by accident, and that was refunded his rank max as well. These four people account for .08% of the hosts we've had at Dragon Dyce, and all four were special exceptions to the collateral based system as well, the other 99.04% performed their jobs under high scrutiny by the staff and did it mostly honestly. Even if you account for a generous ~2.5% margin of error for scams that we didn't catch, that's still 95%+ of people that do their jobs honestly.


The concept is really simple -- when I joined, I payed a 7b security deposit, and another 3b in rank upgrades ($5,000+ at the time even a bulk buyer rates). We've had Dragon Dyce staff members trusted by strangers with $30,000+, and almost every single ranked member was put in the opportunity to scam $2,000+ at some point in time.
Compare this to Sythe trading, where a crippling portion of the population scams. Imagine if every single user on Sythe had to pay $5,000 for the opportunity to trade on Sythe. There would be essentially no scams, compared to the current state of affairs, where a huge percentage of new users are ban evaders/return scammers, a depressing amount of new user's first trades ends in a scam (imposter, trust based, chargeback, other), compared to 99.999 etc% of trades were completed legitimately @ Dragon Dyce.

At most points, almost every rank was handling money at least higher than their security collateral on a daily basis due to some reason or another, with that track record for legitimacy, even when the clan owner (KO at the time) set a tone of dishonesty over the whole business? Even at some points, people had access to each others accounts, able to chargeback large amounts on Paypal, bail on $5,000+ loans with other people, able to recover valuable RS accounts, while holding 5x their collateral amount ALL AT THE SAME TIME. I know it seems unfathomable, but we really did have 99% of the 500 people who were predominately 16-20 males with no personal info at stake or legal liability make millions of dollars safely in 3 and a half years on an online video game.

I'm not saying that Sythe would be better if every single user had to forfeit $5k before joining, what I'm saying is that businesses grow to include multiple people, if Sythe wants to operate with those businesses, they have to make reasonable policy for those businesses to benefit customers, business owners, and the site. Making these "groups" isn't even a big change since there are already rules made for partnerships, and technical changes are being made slightly faster recently around here, & Govind is back.

Also, Will, you lucky bastard. How the fuck did they release the name "R2Pleasent", but not 90% of the dicing related names? They went through a considerable amount of effort to manually exclude a lot of dicer names.

 

Personally I am in favour of owners taking on full responsibility, at least up to the amount that you endorse your hosts are aloud to swap. This is one of the reasons why there are buy ins in the first place (to refund potential scams). If you endorse that your bronze star hosts can only take up to 200m swaps and they scam 300m then you should only be liable for the 200m however. As much as someone can always argue a disclaimer forfeits the victim's right to a refund, how can you possibly enforce this disclaimer 24/7? What about players who found their way to your fc through in game advertising and not the forum? Are you going to spam your disclaimer in your fc 24/7?

 

As it stands you'd probably be under the worker rule - meaning you'd be responsible, or should be IMO.

 

Why would it fall under the worker rule? He's using it more as a means of advertisement rather than managing the operation. They wouldn't technically be workers.

 

"can I start a swapping FC which is officially endorsed by my company,"

more than advertisement - you're putting your name on it and people are gambling in good faith of the name behind it

 

surely the account named 'R2Pleasent' would get banned pretty quickly, or at least the rsn removed

 

If you endorse something, you will always be held liable for whatever happens. (business/worker wise)

 

As Divica stated above, pretty sure the username would get banned after awhile.

In addition, you may think it's not your problem if someone scams and that you'll just say it wasn't your fault since you don't really endorse it. But that user is going to tell pretty much everyone he knows that R2Pleasant Swap chat scammed and that'll just associate with you. Your name is the swapping FC, you're the main liability I would say.

If you don't want it associated with you, but you wanna run it, I'd suggest making a different FC name.

Might as well have ranks make a payment to ensure safety.

 

Can you clarify the liability constraints for me/R2? I don't want me or anyone else to have to go through some ban or pardon due to some vague guidelines.

 

Hey,

I think that in your case, it would be best to start up the way Smokin Mils's dicing clan did back in '11.

When we first made the clan, we had a round of applications amongst the ranks of the merchanting clan. (You could hold one on Sythe.) People could at that point in time still join in quite freely if they were ranks. They would pay a refundable deposit. Their set max would be a pot of half their deposit. This made it possible for us to start up, as people did not have to permanently invest a lot of money in a fc that might not become succesful, yet it safeguarded the clients from scams, as the ranks had a max that was lower than their deposit.

The ranks of the fc (recruit, ..., general) would show the maximum of ranks.
For example, a smiley could have a 5m eoc max, recruit 50m max, corporal 100m, seargent 200m, lieutenant 500m, captain 1b and general 2b/unlimited (best reserved for upper staff).
(Or: 10 / 100 / 200 / 500 / 1b / 2b / unlimited)

The smiley rank would be there to do the small, relatively unprofitable swaps that the higher ups would not like to perform (100k eoc - 5/10m eoc).

Of course you could have the deposit be more than twice the maximum to be safe, as otherwise it might still be quite easy for ranks to scam a total amount over their deposit. This was not much an issue within SM, as ranks themselves already held a degree of trust. I would suggest x5 to be sufficient.

It was required for all ranks to be able to provide proof of everything related to the trade for at least a week if asked, in case of a scam report (screenies/vid). In the end running a vid at 1fps or better of the entire process was required. At this rate, you still had a good proof of the trade yet it did not eat up one's hard drive even if you ran it for hours a day while hosting.

When a rank scammed, the amount up to one's max was refunded by admins. Not more, because if you would refund over one's max, a host could collude with someone to get vidded for "scamming" 10b, while it was actually their own gold. This would result in a succesful scam report in which case admins would've needed to pay out 10b.

All ranks also had to record their wagers (in this case swaps) on a google spreadsheet. 30% of their earning were paid to the admins as commission. If you were caught omissing wagers (swaps), one would receive a substantial fee, and if caught multiple times, a kick and loss of deposit. These commissions were first collected once a week. When we turned to buy-ins with a non-refundable deposit, this became once a month. All current deposit hosts would still remain deposit hosts and would not need to buy in, however they could no longer increase their rank by depositting a larger amount to admins. If they wanted that, they needed to buy in. When you will switch to buy ins, I'd recommend a 50% off for all current hosts.
Once you buy in for a certain rank, you could upgrade to a higher rank by paying the difference between said ranks in buyin cost.


As to someone saying that you'd need to spam the FC all the time with maxes: I'd recommend running an autotalking bot in the FC that spams the following every 30 seconds:
Welcome to R2Pleasent ~ Our current rates are [x:1] and [y:1]. Always make sure you're trading a rank!
Maximum rank limits: Smiley 5m, Recruit 50m, ..., General Unlimited

I'd recommend having the Smiley (friend) rank used for the bot as well. Names like R2P Info## etc. I'd suggest registering the 100 names before launch.

 

I'm curious, what was your rank/position at SM and when? This is a pretty good brief explanation

 

Endorsing an ingame clan with one of the biggest names in real world trade would get all the hosts pretty much banned. Home fc has enough problems with constantly getting banned, let alone calling the fc the name of a huge gold selling website. I'd think about that before checking if you'd be liable for scams or not.

 

*Just editted a few miniscule more details in since your quote*

I was the third rank to join SM when the forums became public in march 2010, and one of the first hosts as well. I used to host as a silver star at first, but when my main got banned for 12b (All I had) due to a fucked up name transfer, I paid my monthly fees from my deposit. A few days later the deposits were all frozen, and buy-ins were introduced, which ment I was stuck at a 225m max (2 banana's) unless I wanted to pay the multi-billion buyin price

I rose up to Co-Rank manager (of the most active group) / Trainee Manager (of the most awesome trainees) / Mentor / Host / Highly Trusted. After I got banned for my 12b, I quit the merching side of the clan and went on to purely host/RWT. I recently returned after a near 2 year hiatus, not in any official rank capacity though. SM's dicing section is currently ran by Adrijana + 2-3 dicing managers in total, and merching had no fun in it for me ever since my main was banned.

Good point. Tiggy18, who was admin of the in-game clan of Smokin Mils, got banned for RWTing by jagex because he owned the clan, even though he did not rwt at all.

 

It's a neat rule in theory, but in reality this rule leaves anyone running a business at such a huge risk. This is the rule that prevents me from opening a lot of new businesses. Here's why:

Let's say someone gains affiliation with my business. Now I am liable for 100% of what they do until I end this affiliation. This person could set up a fake scam with a friend (collusion) and it would look 100% real. They could make a fake scam where this new affiliation "steals" $10,000 USD+ worth of stuff. Under the Sythe rules, I would be fucked.

The rule needs to be rethought in a big way. There needs to be something in place to protect people trying to run legitimate businesses. We should not be liable for everything that happens through our partners / affiliations.

Also, let me bring up "Dragon Dyce" to Sythe.org's attention. Many HIGHLY ranked people on Sythe.org were affiliated with Dragon Dyce, and advertised it all over the place on Sythe. Were they responsible when the owner of Dragon Dyce scammed like $20,000 USD worth of stuff? Absolutely not! So why is this rule only being applied to select people??

 

In dragon dyce's case the owner scammed people who were already ranks. But I very much agree.

 

I don't think that other Dragon Dyce members should be responsible for what the owner did, but the reality is that based on the way the Sythe rules are written, they are completely liable.

These rules need a re-write by those who are highly active in the market.