No, the scam was not successful. It did however succeed in infuriating me. I don't like it when people feast on the unwary, even if the unwary need to be...wary.

Hmm, perhaps instead of a mail, a GM could post the official listings of past Flash Sales in the announcements on the forums. That would eliminate any forum trolls and scammers as well, as far as influence goes.

Mail was just trying to reach every player that may or may not look at the forums.

Regarding players affording sales/participating, imo, not really a factor. It's an in-game event and we usually have detailed mail about events anyway, regardless of affordability or participation. Granted, the event's randomness is every 2 hours or so, vs. normal events that have mail involve boxes with %chances and so on. Even though this event is different, it would still be nice.

I guess what I'm asking for is an official, from-OOO list of passed SD Flash Sale Content, in some form.

Obviously the buyer is at significant risk, with any given interaction. But that's not really the main point. Also, I'm sure if things that tell the population what's going on like the news channel, webfeeds, newspaper, etc. were to disappear, people wouldn't be too happy. That's why we have so many feeds in life - a person isn't "dumb" if they miss information, especially if there's only a few sources for it. They would be rather dense if there were tons of feeds. But we don't have tons of feeds for sk. Of the ones we have, very few are official.

This SD flash sale event is an interesting situation. The point is player awareness - for other events, we almost always get mail. This is nice, because a huge chunk of the player population doesn't know that the forums are an active part of the game. And that's not their fault, they are not "dumb" for that either. The forums are not the center of the SK universe. Yes, we have some users maintaining information about the event, as linked to in the original post, and even fewer have facebook, tumblr, etc. But again these are user based lists. For official awareness, something the real world media can't provide, a GM post of some kind would be cool. An opportunity for unbiased news/information should always be sought and fulfilled, imo.

This thread is about what method the GMs could use that wouldn't be too annoying, but be the most useful. Not about whether or not to let players know what's going on. Honestly I find the above post mildly disturbing. Walking through the world blind makes you prey for any rotten soul, no matter how "smart" you are. And if you're used to getting mail about events, that would make things even worse, unawareness wise. If there's no mail, there's no reason to assume anything is going on, for most minds. Sure, the stuff shows up when you get to the mission menu on the left, and players talk about current events in Haven, but some players are just so darn enthusiastic about running the levels, they don't check those things because they are normally things they don't care about. They are not "dumb" for that, they just don't utilize peripheral vision for the few seconds it takes to start a mission. Without official notification, things are very easily missed. This thread discusses how to best reach every player. Every individual. The entire population. Mail would have been the most sure way, but could easily be annoying, etc.

Sure, this event is different, as summarized before, but it would be very nice to have an official list. No, of course OOO does not have to intervene, that's ridiculous, saying they "have" to do anything (well they have to follow the law etc. that's just implicit). This would simply be a very nice gesture.