mjmjr25 wrote:Are you telling me you inspect every game you purchase?
If it was a pricey cart game for a system that gets booted? Yes, I'd inspect it. I'd also consider the source. If it came from you, I'd trust that it was good and that you'd likely checked it out first.
What about estarland? You buy from them - how do you inspect those games? - i've got 2 issues with them right now and probably won't be buying from them in the future because of them, and one of them is likely not their fault (bootleg AES game, obvious to me, doubtful they had any clue - difficult return in process). So yeah, any rules that make it easier to buy here are good rules seeing as pretty much any online store is out now for me when it comes to SNES / NES / AES / MD / Atomis.
I inspect them by looking at things like the quality of the label, evidence of cart tampering, etc. I also haven't bought anything expensive from them, but I'd probably be quite meticulous in my inspection if I did.
It was your idea to have the top 25 bst'ers chime in and one after another they chime in that option 4 or 5 would be their preference - why is that carrying no weight with you?
It doesn't "carry no weight" - it was my suggestion to poll the top 25 if the poll results were inconclusive, which they aren't. The top 25 who have posted here might lean a little bit more towards option 4 or 5, but most haven't weighed in and there's a fair amount who don't want to see any rule changes.
You seem to take any rule change as a personal affront as you helped shape the original rules. This isn't an affront - it's a way to make our community a bit safer marketplace.
I did help shape them and am proud of that, as I am of the fact that we have a quantitative feedback system. I'm not suggesting that there's no room for improvement of rules, and I am of course open to discussion of revision when it seems merited.
That said, frankly the rules we have work really well and have for a long time - there are really very minimal problems here with con artists or bad dealings compared to most other boards I've seen. Likewise there are no instances that I can recall of someone buying/selling bootlegs without knowing what they were doing. It's a non-issue here, largely because the current rules and guidelines encourage openness. I don't think we need to start making specific kinds of rules about specific kinds of transactions or items (beyond the larger forum rule about "no bootlegs of or links to downloads of recent games" that we've had since forever). I also don't think we need to put a rule in place here primarily because of worry about what might theoretically happen to bootlegs or repros outside of this forum.