Introduction

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It has been more than a month since steamtrades opened up (I know... I was there… No wait, this isn’t that movie :P) and though a small community at first composed mainly of interested wanderers from steamgifts and such, the site gained quick exposure and an exponential growth in users and threads when the steam forums went down and also when a sticky to our site was placed on steam trading forums.

At first, there were no rules as they were not necessary- we were a small community composed of people from steamgifts and we more or less knew or trusted each other. There were no scammers afoot (certainly not in this number) and most traders respected the other in terms of both trade etiquette and otherwise.

That quickly changed however, when the user base grew and it quickly became apparent that something had to be done and one of the mods from steamgifts, lokonopa, was forced to intervene in the forum and establish some rules on the forums. Bump policies were put into effect and many of the rules from the main community site, steamgifts, carries on here as those rules were voted for and reached by the majority vote as well as by the community's, mods' and admin's own moral and ethical guidelines. A reporting thread was "stickied" to help users that were inconvenienced by the actions of another to report the said action, report violations of rules and scam reports. I have been very heart broken by the sheer number of posts that get added there every day, and many of them can actually be avoided if everyone reads, understands and applies the rules of the site. The emphasis here is the applies part, as it is up to us to prevent ourselves from being scammed. So without further ado, I present to you my humble opinion on how you should trade.

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Trading

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We will look at this in two different perspectives; the trader making the thread and the trader making the offer. The trader making the thread is like the trader setting up shop. You put what you have to trade on display and wait for the interested persons to come by your thread and try to come to some form of agreement on the trade terms. The trader making the offer is the one that goes from thread to thread making offers for the games they are interested to get, i.e. like the customer. The most successful traders make threads and also actively seek out games they want in other's threads by making offers for them. So now let us look at the trader creating threads to inform others of what they have:

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Creating threads

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One of the most important things about trading is letting others know what you have. Thread titles are limited to 100 characters, so it becomes a case of optimizing the information in your title to attract the maximum number of interested users. Titles should in the form of
[H] <insert what you have here> [W] <insert what you want here>
Of course, sometimes you have so many games to trade that it will not fit in the title; in this case you have to decide what it is that will attract the most number of users. There are a number of ways of doing this but I shall name a few here:

• Based on past trading history (you know it trades well); this is not always obvious or available to all
• Based on what people want most. There are two ways to get this information:
  1. Consult the Top Sellers Section on steam storefront
  2. Visit the wishlist section of steamgifts to see what our community users (and hence the ones on steamtrades) want the most.
• Events or activities that have a high number of followers (winter/summer achievements, etc)
  This holds true for listing what you want as well; a common and good way to keep the [W] section as short as possible and attract the maximum number of interested users is to either state the single game that you wish to trade for the most or just say "Wishlist" if you are only interested in getting one of the games you want or "Offers" if you are open to any game offer that will be made.

Once the title is ready, enter any and ALL descriptions about the items you wish to trade, including any regional tags on the games, activation restrictions as a result of regional restrictions, where the game is in your inventory or a key, and so on. Please note that trading keys that are considered exploited are NOT allowed, regardless of whether the ones you have are exploited or not. This is stated in the rules section clearly.

Once you are done entering the details, click "Create Your Discussion" green button below the "Body" where you entered the description and WAIT. The site is slow to respond sometimes, but your requests are taken in and if you click the button multiple times, you will be creating multiple duplicate threads. If you realize this has happened, please delete any and all duplicate threads made by you, as they clutter up the forums needlessly, make it more difficult for people to search for the stuff they want and (more importantly to you perhaps) make it difficult for you to follow offers made to your threads as you will need to follow each of these threads separately when offers are made and might miss out on important offers.

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The Wait

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Once your thread is made, it is a matter of waiting. Please remember that the current site rules allow for a maximum of one bump per hour after the latest activity (i.e. post made by you or from another person making an offer) on your thread. Do not bump your thread beyond these provisions. Do not worry, if you have something that people want, someone is bound to make an offer sooner or later. As I said, it is a matter of waiting- the length of your wait depends on the games you have, how much people want those games and the games you ask for in return for the games you have.

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The Offer

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So you got an offer? Congratulations! This means that someone is interested in what you have to offer. Evaluate your offers based on:
1. How much you want the game being offered, regardless of price, discounts and/or value considerations.
2. How much you want the game being offered, but keeping an eye on any price, discounts and/or value considerations.
3. Based on price, discounts and/or value considerations. You may use Steam Prices to see how much a game costs compared to other regions and how much more expensive (or cheaper) a game is to determine your trade terms.
4. Trying to make a profit (this only works if the game you are offering is in very high demand; you will usually wait for quite a while if you use this method if what you have is not in high demand).
5. Your own personal method for evaluating efforts.
If you are happy with the offer, reply with your steamid or a link to your steam profile, so that you may conduct the trade. If you are not happy with the offer, then state why you are rejecting the offer; too often I see people say "no thanks" but actually they do want what is being offered, just don't think it is a fair trade. If you do not want to hear another reply from the person, then "no thanks" is fine, but if you think you can work something out, say so.

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The Trade

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Ok so you think the offer is acceptable (or better) and you got the person's steam id. What next? Well, the first step is to contact the person. The most common way to do this is to add the person as a friend. However, I do NOT prefer this unless if the trader is highly trusted (for reasons I shall explain later below). You can actually pm and trade with people without adding them as friends. This can be done easily if you are both in the same group chat room (steamtrades group chat , for example) and then you can select the person you wish to send a private message to from the users that are in the chat room, and then chat and trade as usual. Regardless of the method you use to chat and reach an agreement, once an agreement is reached we go on to the most exciting part - the actual trade ^^

Do's and Don'ts of trades

• DO make what you are going to trade clear and ask for clarification on what the person is going to give in return.
• DO make sure what the person has given you is what they said they would give (some gifts do not have pictures for example)
• DO make sure the gift you are receiving is free of regional activation restrictions (some games bought by users from the CIS and Russia need to be activated in these regions, so you need to conduct activity that is against steam subscriber agreements to activate the product. Even worse, some games can only be played in these regions too, so watch out for regional restricted games. In general, steam adds a tag to notify the user of where the game was bought, such as DE for Germany, NA for North America, etc and you should watch out for some regions as the games may be censored and/or require activation in those countries.
• DO make sure what you are asking for is what you want; no one likes an indecisive trader who changes their mind halfway through a trade.
• Do NOT trade for keys that are considered exploited (this is in the rules but people keep doing it and then go crying to the reporting thread)- do not offer games for these keys and do not offer these keys
• Do NOT trade your games away for keys if the key trader doesn't have rep and/or is a newly registered user of the community (see below on how to do this)
• Do NOT trade outside of the trade feature- the trade feature was implemented for a reason- to help facilitate safe and easy trade for steam users. I have seen quite a few people on the reporting forums complaining about being scammed after sending a gift in first and the user not sending anything back; or the scammer claiming to have sent the gift when it is still in his/her own library and then accusing the other side of having scammed them and that they would report them (i.e. blackmail). WHY ON EARTH ARE YOU SENDING GIFTS IN THE FIRST PLACE?!?! If the person cannot trade, it means that: a) they are a new user on steam (see below on how to determine if a trader can be trusted or not), or b) they have been reported for scamming and banned from trading. Either way, you should not be trading though the gifting feature- that should only when you are gifting a gift to your friend. If you do this, then know that you are open to risk of being scammed.
• DO keep a copy of the entire chat log and keep it somewhere safe for future access (use a site such as pastebin if you do not want to store it on your computer but don't lose the link as you will need it as evidence if the person you are trading with turns out to be a scammer). - DO take screenshots of keys failing to activate if you have traded for a key (again do not trade for exploited keys).
• NEVER trade for accounts for steam, origin or any other online game or game client

Once your trade is conducted, thank each other and say your goodbyes courteously and then each of you can go on your merry ways (or if you both wish you may even stay as friends if you think the person is really a decent fellow that you would like to have a chat with once in a while or would like to stay as your friends, or whatever).

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Posting in threads

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Say you saw someone trading a game you would like. What should you do?

• Well, the first thing is see what the trader is looking for. Don’t post if the trader is looking for a particular game and states that they are not interested in anything else, and you do not have what they are looking for.
• Try to see if the person’s wishlist is available and if it is then try to see if you can offer a game from there. If not, make your offer if the person seems willing to accept other game offers.
• When you post, always state what you are offering and what you want (if trader is trading more than one item) or if you want to see what the trader will offer you for your games, just ask something like “anything(s) for these?” or “interested in any of these?”
• If you would like the person to contact you, leave a means of reaching you… Not everyone likes people adding them in steam randomly. Don’t post your offer and then leave the internets for a week then complain he never responded to your offer.
• When you post, be to the point. Don’t write an essay. Be clear and concise.
• Be reasonable in your offers. Don’t offer Fortix for Rage, for example… :P
• Wait for the owner of the thread to respond. If they respond but miss out your thread, then ask whether or not they saw your offer- they may have missed it, though usually people either try to keep it for later or just can’t be bothered to say “no, thank you” :(

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Checking out user profiles:

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As you may know if you tried to click on a user’s name on steamtrades, steamtrades profiles are not yet active. However, steamgifts and steamtrades use the same usernames. This means that, by replacing the “trades” part of the address to “gifts” you can get a lot of information on the user; most importantly the date the user was registered to steamgifts. You can also view the steam community profile from this page. Use these two sources of information to determine how trustable the person is based on:

• When they joined steamgifts (3 months ago is my preferred minimum).
• When they set up a steam profile (newer profiles, say made in 2011, is not a heartwarming sign).
• How many games they have on steam and what is the value of those games (do not count exploited keys in your valuation of the games and also remember to take regional differences into account). You may use
  ddgamer price calculator or
  steamcalculator
• Do they have a trade or VAC ban on status? Trade bans are a definite warning and means stay the hell away as this user has scammed users before or traded in things he/she shouldn’t have. VAC bans are an indication that the person you are dealing with is not entirely honorable and may cheat you (as he has already cheated in the game).

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How to trade safe

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O.K. so now that we have discussed how to trade, let us now talk about how to trade safe. The first thing you should do is visit this thread by megarobot. It has a list of all scammers that have attempted to scam users of this site and he uses a process where scammers are added based on proof (so it is a pretty good and accurate list). Choose to block these characters on the blacklist for your own security or do not do so at your own risk. Read the section on "How to Report a Scammer" for information on how the proof data is/should be collected just in case you come across one as well. So now that you are geared up to report a scammer, let us talk about how to avoid one entirely.

• Use the profile information as a guide. The above section gives details, hence I shall not go over it again.
• Always try to use the built-in trade interface on steam to conduct your trades. If the person cannot trade using this because their gift is not tradable, they must go first. When they do, make sure you accept the gift and the item is safely in your inventory or library before trading it off. Some people recall their gifts after sending and then claim you accepted the gift and accuse you of scamming (see the official reporting thread for some examples) in an attempt to get you to hand over the games. Note that this applies to all forms of non-tradable games including keys.
• If both of your games are not tradable, decide who goes first based on: 1. profile information as described above; 2. trade reputation (check their steam profile to see how many successful trades they seem to have; although this may be manipulated by some to boost their profiles artificially and make them seem legit).
• NEVER trade for keys considered exploited. This includes MW3 now too, btw as well as Dead Island, Dirt 3 and eets.
• If you have a shoddy internet connection, say so from the start and also conduct any bargaining before hand.
• Do not send your game or key (i.e. in the case of non-tradable items) to the other side before the terms of the deal have been clearly stated and the other side has expressed their acceptance of such terms.

This is a work in progress so bear with me and if you have any suggestions, lemme know.

EDIT 1: Now that steamtrades user profiles work and can take you directly to the steam community page, you do not have to remove the "trade" part of steamtrades and change it to "gifts" in the users user profile on steamtrades :)