As you guys know, we have been using TcgPlayer prices to show the value of cards, decks and trades.

Our plans going forward were to add our own Deckbox Prices as soon as the Market feature got enough traction to provide meaningful values, but to keep the TcgPlayer ones as an option for users that considered them more useful or relevant. This is sadly no longer possible.

We have received very insistent requests (i.e. legal threats) from TcgPlayer asking us to remove all price information we get from their website. While using publicly displayed prices does not (as far as I can tell) actually represent copyright infringement [1], we want to build useful websites for our users, not argue and fight with other companies, so we hereby fully comply.

So what now?

Since the market feature has just launched and cannot provide meaningful price data yet, we will move to use prices imported from amazon.com for valuing cards & trades. We hope to switch to our own prices in a few weeks time.

If you see prices that are completely off or missing please let us know in this topic: http://deckbox.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=85547

Until then, we will provide a warning message on trade & set pages so all users are aware of the change. There is also link on each card page to the tcgplayer page, for easy access for users that wish to quickly assess the prices there.

We are sorry for the inconveniences caused, and we will do our best to find a good, permanent solution for varied and relevant price data as fast as we can.

[1] http://web.mit.edu/smadnick/www/wp/2010-05.pdf

Later edit: Posting a reply I made later in this thread, for clarification of our intent:

We are really sorry for this situation, and if it had been avoidable, we would have avoided it, but sadly we cannot.

I have tried to discuss and reason with Tcgplayer, offered my thanks for the collaboration until now, explained our position on the market and general strategy / plans for the future. All we received in return were legal threats.

We do understand the need for reliable pricing, and we will find a way to provide them. We want them to be more reliable than the tcgplayer ones and fix all the issues that we had with them, the ones our users kept reporting.

We were not able to do that before, but we are able to do that in the future. The future is bright

Last edited by sebi (2014-04-02 08:50:12)