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[Frame] Honest hardworking scalpers when you tell them there's a reservation lottery (thelemmy.club)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://quokk.au/c/steamdeck/p/1173376/frame-honest-hardworking-scalpers-when-you-tell-them-there-s-a-reservation-lottery

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[–] 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Hey, but something similar to that would actually work best.

They have data to see that someone has bought Valve hardware and used it in the past. It would stop most scalping, obviously impossible to stop it completely, but that would feel more fair than a lottery that a scalper could win anyway.

Any accounts that bought a Valve Index and then never even used it would be immediately blacklisted and accounts that did use it would be eligible to purchase the Frame. People would be angry that certain accounts got benefits then instead of scalping, so you can literally never win when selling highly-anticipated, low volume products

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  • [–] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 child)

    That would certainly reduce the kind of scalpers who do that like it's their job, running bots and everything to buy as much stock as possible, which is indeed the worst kind of scalper to try to compete against. But some scalpers are more just... "opportunistic scalpers" or whatever. The genuine Valve customer who has no interest in VR, but understands that if they make one $1000 investment quickly enough, they can turn around and resell the item for $2000. There are enough of those customers that the lottery makes sense.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago

    Yes, that's why you cannot ever stop scalping. However I believe there's enough data for Valve to prioritise real customers, the first batches could be quietly sent that way.

    I also don't think scalping is that big of an issue here, the lottery system is mainly to stop the first come, first serve FOMO and panic, rather than scalper protection. It's just blown out of proportion because the products are in high demand and low stock, so people wanna point fingers somewhere. There's never that many listings for scalped products versus how many are actually sold.

    Valve's words about the lottery:

    The longer timeframe also allows us to do some extra validation on the signups to make sure they're real accounts, with only one per household.

    Hopefully they are taking more into account than we think.

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