Sydno

If it's free, you are the product. Would you rather be the product or accept to pay to get something in exchange? The software you are mentioning operating costs are widely covered by big investors that may later on ask for ROI (and possibly try to milk users a way or another). Mark my words, such a software will most likely puts ads or make you pay or sell your personal data whenever investors ask for cash back (no, nitro doesn't fully cover operating costs and no, it doesn't grant you that much of perks compared to xat powers). You cannot compare that to xat where there is no investor at all (ie no base money to work with to pay a dev team, etc). If I were you, I would rather be suspicious of all these nice free features from big new companies (who could have guessed youtube would get so many ads a few years ago? Or that Facebook would sell your personal data?) than of xat, that is actually quite transparent on how it makes money (powers, subscriptions) and that does make you pay for something if it has additional operating costs. Yes, it is less sexy, but it is far more realistic. ie you should lower your expectations, nothing is free, especially on the 21st century. TL;DR you cannot compare two completely opposed business models.

Congratulations Lemona!

This probably comes from different users but I do not understand how at the same time one could criticize xat for: - relying on users' help rather than on employees (making the website partly community-run) ; - not listening to the community. I would also like to mention that the forum community is actually not representative of all xat communities (simply because of the language barrier or general lack of interest into the forum or the official chats). A lot of new chat changes were suggested by the community and implemented. A decent amount of new powers were suggested by the community. When a change is brought up, it NEVER is set in stone forever and Admin are always willing to revisit decisions. I don't know many xat competitors that could say the same, and this is without mentioning the abyssal differences in fundings between other competitors and xat. Sky verified pawn is a new change and it was said multiple times it would be revisited if the pawn doesn't meet the expectations. xat Admin have indeed read most of the community (fair in some cases) criticisms but now is time to wait and see whether that works. One cannot reasonably expect a whole website to bend under their concerns even before a change is implemented, especially on a free-to-use service. I don't think it's a fair criticism to say xat doesn't listen just because a new pawn goes through a handful negative opinions. PS: Yes, there are other fair concerns in other forum threads related to a few powers issues but this thread is on the verified pawn (at worse, this changes nothing for you if it goes through).

I really appreciate Bau's words regarding this criticism, although I understand where the criticism comes from. Anyone can always find a viewing angle where a decision or an idea is unfair but we shouldn't hold back ourselves because of past experiences. Because past volunteers (or smiley makers, developers, resellers, etc) did not have a chat feature, then none of these should ever have one? This does sound very restrictive and unfair for the website development. As for other xat contributors, you could hear me argue hours on how wiki translators are crucial for xat, or on how I believe chat managers are not always given the appreciation they should receive compared to contributors. You could also argue that owners of very popular chats are more impactful than the manager of a small chat. The thing is we are all important in different ways, and when it comes to this type of feature, a line must be drawn. Whatever line is drawn, you will always find room for criticism on why this group has it but not that other group, etc. Although I agree we should also find other ways to prevent scams, and although I agree we shouldn't rely on this type of incentive to help out, I must admit the line was well thought out. Please note this rather is a "verified" pawn, first anf foremost, meant to verify influencers that happen to be using xat and, on an Admin-discretionary basis, some volunteers (as in anyone who volunteer time to help, not as in ticket volunteer) and resellers. The wording is important to convey the right message. As far as I'm concerned, no volunteer (ticket, devs, smiley makers, etc.) has been secretly pushing for being verified as an influencer just to get a special pawn.

For consistency reasons, it was suggested to create a separate feature for influencers rather than lowering the 'celebrity' pawn to a 'verified system'. This new feature is intended to be a verification system. Since TechRax and through the years, there was a dozen applications of users who definitely weren't celebrities but who could be considered influencers in their own area. Not all of them would get the influencer pawn but a handful one could have been granted it. We didn't need a pawn for some people aiming at volunteer for the fame or any other ingenuine reason. This aspect has decreased through the years, hopefully. I think the reasoning behind ticket volunteers, developers, smiley makers and xat *listed* resellers is to decrease impersonification and scamming. I am not sure how effective it will be. I personally have never been looking for it but I understand why this was brought up.

Hello everyone, Today, Fair Trade Team has reviewed all of fair trade prices. Due to the important quantity and diversity of powers xat has, it appears some of the powers were not updated in a long time and it was time for us to review them all individually. To update powers with consistent prices, we came up with a few, yet important, principles: - Given xat current number of daily trades, we believe the volatility of prices has increased ; - Given last auctions, we believe unlimited powers prices are floored at around 50% of their store price. At the end, EveryPower price remains around at 488k - 527k but some changes may have strongly affected a few powers. Because of volatility changes, lower bracket has decreased on average and upper bracket has increased on average. If you notice any major inconsistency, please tell us. Overall, we are satisfied with the new changes and believe they better reflect the reality of trading. If you have any new suggestion regarding fair trade prices, please use the following google form: https://forms.gle/CVxptYv25jT9mf5g9 In any case, we will continue to watch epic powers closely and to monitor seasonal powers on a more regular basis, as well as powers that are collected by traders. Thank you for reading, and thanks to all the traders for making this important part of xat alive on a daily basis.

Reselling is not encouraged by xat although xat does have a list of recommended resellers for users to avoid being scammed. Keep in mind you always do it at your own risks. I don't think a special pawn or indication is needed on chats for resellers. If they want to prove their faith, they can show the wiki article to their customers. Whether they can sell or buy on official chats is up to chat managers only. Regarding the volunteer indication on chat, I am personally against. It gives us too much attention than needed and will most likely not reduce the scams at all, for the following reasons: - If you dont know the wiki, you most likely have never seen a volunteer on chat and would probably not notice whether there is a "volunteer" indicator, so you would still believe the scammer. - Most of current scams are not users impersonating volunteers but mainly users impersonating xat staff or "official bots", in short something that wouldn't get the indicator if there was one. - Even if you are aware of everything, the indicator, the wiki list or whatsoever, scammers will always find a reason why they are not using the listed accounts (go undercover for privacy reasons). Chat indicators is just fancy stuff, including the black pawn. Last but not least, the crucial point is not who you talk to but where you talk. Sensitive issues should ALWAYS be handled on the ticket system, period. Regardless of who replies the ticket.

First of all, I would like to thank everyone who participated, we have had a LOT of entries of good quality and it was hard to decide! It was sooo hard to decide that exceptionally, the prize pool was increased again and we have added a 6th place! Here are the final results: 1st - @RobFerrari- 10,000 xats 2nd - @Ethan - 6,000 xats 3rd - @Toxic - 3,500 xats 4nd - @Nathy - 2,250 xats 5th - @Aliss - 1,250 xats 6th - @Guinho - 750 xats

Entries are locked. We will do our best to select the winners within a few days!

Entries will be locked in approximately 30h! Be sure to enter before the deadline.

Thanks to Dimple, 4th and 5th place were added. You still have 16 days to enter!

Don't worry, this is where I come! I'm working in banking risks as a statistician, specialized in credit risks. First off, thank you for your idea. For a long time I was thinking of something similar but I never went ahead. I am therefore glad to help you improving your idea with more banking insights. Before anything, I would like to remind that implementing this idea on xat would be very hard technically and may never be high enough in a priority list for it to be added, but I do 100% support this idea. In the example you gave, I think the user needs to borrow 100,000 xats and not 50,000 xats. The reason is that if he agrees to block his gold power, he will not be able to sell it and miss another 50,000 xats to have enough for ruby. In other words, I suggest users cannot borrow more than what they currently have (loan to value aka LTV indicator). If you have 250,000 xats, you can only borrow up to 250,000 xats (for a total of 500,000 xats) with a 100% LTV. Therefore, if you only have gold and want ruby, you will not be able to borrow enough xats to buy ruby. I would also go beyond this and include interests in the LTV. Keeping the 20% interests and 50,000 xats example: if you borrow 50,000 xats and have an additional 10,000 xats to pay for interests, you must have up to 60,000 xats in your account. The reason for this is that if you do not include interests, users will accept to be removed the capital and find a way to never pay the interests. In xat terms, this can be implemented by adding a 60,000 xats reserve on the user account: their account value cannot go below 60,000 xats (capital + interests). The reserve will decrease each time a payment is issued (minus 7,500 xats per week in your example). Note that users who have powers cannot delete their account. If they have a reserve and thefore powers on their accounts, they will not be able to run away from paying by deleting their account. Regarding the interest rate, banks usually put higher IR for longer maturities. IR are usually expressed yearly (at least in my country). I suggest we put a unique interest rate and a maturity up to 3 months. The interest rate can be expressed monthly. For example, for a 1 month credit, it can be 5% of interest. For a 2 months credit, it will therefore be 10,25% and 15,76% for a 3 months credit (1.05 x 1.05 x 1.05). Once the total of amount due to date is computed, you can compute the weekly balance by dividing the total amount by the number of weeks. The idea is to use these credits for users to test powers at a lower cost without having to resell everything they have. To complement this idea, we could add possible moratoria: users don't pay anything for the first month but then either start to pay or cancel the credit and only pay the interests.