I know your intent is to play the game correctly and not to cheat. The problem is that there will always be others who _do_ try to get around the rules with the intent of cheating, which results in the rules needing to be tighter than they really should be. So far in this thread (and others) there have been a few possible solutions to this problem, none of which I am especially excited about:

1) It has been suggested that a sysadmin approves every trade that happens. This won't work, for several reasons: first, right now I am the only sysadmin, so my attention would switch from making the game better to approving trades. If you all are happy with the current state of the game, then maybe that's something I should consider. But I'm not happy with it, so this option is not on the table. Another problem is that there is a lot of subjectivity that goes into whether a trade is fair or not, and it even depends on the climate of the league itself. Unless I am in every league, I'm not going to take the time to be aware of the climate of each league, and so am probably going to blindly approve every trade anyway.

2) Only bring trades to my attention if they are suspicious. This is how it currently works, and it has to be fairly severe for me to take action. Most of the time this results in disciplinary action against the user in question as opposed to reverting the trade. I'm very hesitant to reverse a trade because it can have lots of unintended consequences, especially if there has been other trades or cuts or games played. With this knowledge, a user could potentially time his ill-gotten trades in such a way that they are not able to be rolled back safely, then come in as a new user and take over his team after his previous avatar has been kicked out. Even if he doesn't come back, the competitive balance in the league could be a mess for several seasons until it sorts itself out. So to mitigate this the rules are in place to prevent imbalanced trades as much as possible, and stronger rules to prevent trades from the same IP address, because no matter what kind of balance rules are in place it will always be possible to load up one team at the expense of another.

3) Allow the community to police the trades in each league, most likely by a vote. Probably only trades that are currently being rejected (probably tightening the balance threshold as well). A certain percentage of active owners voting "yes" will push the trade through, a certain percentage of "no" votes will void the trade, if the votes are not received by the deadline then the trade goes through. There has been significant opposition to this whenever it has been suggested, so while I personally am in favor of this option due to the opposition I am not sure I'll go forward with it.

That is irrelevant. If its against the rules its cheating.

Understandable, hopefully one solution will soon come. Thank you.

Well he's asking for it to be not against the rules so that he can make fair trades with his friends. You can disagree with his request and even be suspicious of his motives, but if he's calling all of this attention to his trade history, I really doubt he's cheating or trying to game the system. I don't think his request is unreasonable.

I don't see any difference between:
(1) two individuals that happen to have the same IP address for whatever reason trading with each other
and
(2) two "friends" who have different IP addresses trading with each other

To me, the real danger is ONE individual creating multiple accounts and then trading with themselves.

I don't see a way to allow for the first scenario without also opening the door for this more dangerous one, unless there were some oversight of "questionable" trades, which it doesn't appear is going to happen.

WarEagle, I think that's the sentiment people had, but we had an owner go rogue and abuse the system. Now, people want to tighten it up a bit.

Ha. Pun intended?