Even during the best days of Fantage all you’d hear about from their users is how gReEdY Fantage is. Everyone loves to blame the big guy and no one likes to take accountability. Users loved to break the rules, play unfairly and then curse the site when they lost the features that allowed them to easily, greedily take advantage of it.

Now Fantage wasn’t perfect, it had it’s money-grabbing moments much like literally every other business of it’s kind, but I wanted to make a post making light of just how generous Fantage was to their entitled userbase, even as users took advantage and exploited their site.

I think the beloved Trade N Sell is the perfect example of this.

In theory it’s a great idea, but in practice a trading system is very risky; It’s impossible to make one infallible. Someone could always communicate a trade from an outside source and take advantage of it. It’s hard to regulate it, and the sites that have successfully implemented trading systems typically disown the usage of it so as to be void of responsibility of it’s misuse. (Something Fantage ended up doing later with MyMall)

I feel that Fantage bit off more than they could chew with this move which they quickly learned. Trading was too good to be true and it had to go.

Then MyMall comes along. Another compromising attempt to give users what they want. You could still buy and sell items, it was pay-to-play so people would ideally be more wary about risking losing their things, and when used as intended, users wouldn’t be scammed. What could go wrong?

Once again Fantage dares to put faith in their users and they proceed to find new ways to take advantage and profit off of their site. I think they could’ve been much more harsh from the start with MyMall. They should’ve been frank about the rules from the get go but even then they continued attempting to right the wrongs of users misusing their site. Fantage was never responsible for it and that they even offered to help users in the first place was way too generous on their part. They could have, perhaps even should have stopped caring way before they did.

Fantage gave us a lot, more than was deserved imo. If people had never scammed, profited from it, hacked, duped items, and y’know, had common sense in general we might’ve been able to keep many of the things we lost. This is very much a case of wrong-doers ruining things for the rest of us. “This is why we can’t have nice things” if you will.

The rules are there for a reason. Fantage is over here doing the most basic of business practices and getting called greedy for it. The only greed I see in this situation is the users who proceeded to break the rules for their personal gain. I touched on this in greater detail in an earlier post here. Were the users completely at fault? Certainly not, and this is not to say that Fantage made all the right moves either, but this needs to be addressed. We need less crying about greed and more spotlight on the ones who made it so things couldn’t stay like they were.

Think about it. Trade N Sell was all that users could ask for and more, and in a perfect world they’d have no reason to close it if their users were civil and followed the rules, but in reality that’s too much to ask for. Even after that fall out they gave us another chance which we recklessly proceeded to take advantage of. They tried to regulate it, they tried to keep it up and it only got worse. Giving entitled users control was the biggest mistake; a negative outcome was inevitable.

That’s not all there is to blame for the end Fantage, but it’s a contributing factor that many people won’t concede to. For all those reasons and more, I greatly appreciate what the Fantage team has done and their efforts to keep the site fair and safe despite all this. They’ve had to put up with a lot and I’m sure the community corruption was only half of it. Negativity aside, the site itself is cute, educational and a fun environment that I’m proud to have been a part of.

-ertyuiop