Hi everyone, I want to make a trade system for my game and I’m not too sure on how I can keep it as safe from scammers as possible. Would you all have any ideas on how to prevent scams?
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Tbh, I think it’s impossible to detect if a trade is a scam because the trade can either be a very generous trade or a scam.(When i say generous i mean a very nice person giving all of their items away for nothing.)
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^^^. All you can do is add a couple of dialogues stating how to avoid common scams (eg. “give me X and i’ll give you Y later”). You could also add a timer for around 5 seconds after each user has confirmed the trade to let both users review it.
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I really like the concept Adopt Me uses, (correct me if I’m wrong here, by no means am I an avid Adopt Me player), but I believe before you’re able to trade big items with a substantial amount of rarity, you have to go through a “quiz like system”, I think they call it something along the lines of a trading license. Basically it’s a slideshow or quiz type system which showcases examples and how scams can occur. You could try to incorporate something like that.
Assuming the coding is flawless and you have all your checks in there to ensure bad actors such as exploiters can’t duplicate or steal others items with your system, the weakest link that people will target is inevitably people. No matter what you do, scams will happen. You could try making a system where each person has to trade at least one item in the trade to prevent someone getting nothing. You could also maybe check if the trade is balanced by assigning each rarity of item a value and auto declining the trade if it seems too imbalanced (personally I wouldn’t do that, just throwing out ideas)
Overall, I don’t think it’s reasonable to completley abolish scamming, however hopefully my ideas help out a little bit.
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Well, at the start of the game you should do a “tutorial” about how not to get scammed.
And giving each item a “value” like gun x 500 and gun y 100, you can check if play 1’s total trade value is 4 times bigger (Or something like that) and if it is, show them a “don’t get scammed” GUI. And checking if one player’s trade side is empty may work, but that will eliminate donations
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Jailbreak has a very good trading system where there are set values for each item and it wouldn’t allow to do a trade that’s unfair but has a 50-75% leeway
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I would script every property of the trading items visible on the trade system, so players can check it if it’s scam or not. I would also make a list next to the items about their rarity, chance or goodness.
With a simple MouseEnter you can show the players some values in a gui about the item you trade or the person you trade with.
Here’s a few things that I thought of, which would reduce scams and at the same time, make them easier to track down and moderate.
- Prevent trades where one side has no items/value
- Both players unaccept automatically when a new item is added or removed
- If both players accept, they have 5-10 seconds before it actually goes through
- Setting to turn trade requests between (Everyone, Off, Only friends)
- All item information can be easily obtained through the trading menu
- Prevent trades where the same items are on both sides
- Prevent new users from trading
- Button in trading menu for info on trading (How to catch a scam, what’s a good trade, etc)
- Report player button
- Item has unique user history to track down scams
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One of the things you should also really worry about is someone getting their account stolen but they reacquire their account, not many developers prepare for this but if you had a separate validation within the game to prevent account Stealers from bombing items off of someone’s account they stole it would also help