Ebay, cursed ebay.
For most of the five years I lived in Japan I was selling games on ebay. It was fun, back when you could get stuff cheap and sell it dear, but times changed. Still though I find stockpiles of games now and then and I sell them on ebay. Currently I’ve got about 85 games on auction, and I’ve got at least double that again to go up, in addition to a fairly sizable stack of hardware.
But ebay, oh how it’s changed.
I posted an auction for a soft called Tennokoe Bank, it’s a data backup card that allows a user to copy their save data from one machine to another. It’s possibly the first ‘memory card’ system ever used. But ebay, that champion of all things straight and narrow, threw up this warning before I’d even finished posting the auction:
It pisses me off to no end that ebay caters so willingly to the DRM crowd, to the intellectual rights holders who insist they have a right to tell me what I can and cannot do with the stuff I purchased lawfully. Here they are giving me shit in advance, promising to investigate my auction, and threatening to turn me in to law enforcement! Ebay’s always been like this.
Like the years ebay banned the sale of Japanese Dreamcast games ’cause Sega asked them to, quoting in their defense a law that, if you read it, specifically ALLOWED these imports to be sold.
Ebay has tortured the auction listing process so badly that what used to take seconds to rapid-fire list auctions now takes considerably longer. Instead of one screen showing all the auction details, it’s now spread over five or six. Their rules are draconian – you can only place one link to your site on your auction. Only one! It’s absurd.
I tried switching to Yahoo auctions back when they actually competed, but they were unable to charge my credit card for some reason, and all my attempts to resolve the situation met with a form letter that ignored my pleas and then demanded I pay up.
I tried voting with my feet, I was willing to take a hit by moving to Yahoo where the buyers were few, but Yahoo fucked that up for me. So I stuck with ebay, and I hate them for ruining every part of the auction experience.
--NFG
[ Oct 1 2006 ]
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