The marketplace wasn't even meant to exist and I hate how OpenTibia has become all about making money. This wasn't a rushed decision, what could have been a rushed decision was adding the marketplace in the first place. I have considered this change for months and now that Znote brought up that there is scamming going on in the marketplace I finally decided that it's time to limit creating threads there to premium users (it was planned to happen at a later time anyway).
We're not stopping you from making money from OpenTibia, but we are limiting the advertising of it to premium users as they have paid to support OtLand. If there is evidence of them scamming we can ban their account, and it won't just be enough to register another account to start another scamming attempt.
This change was more about decreasing the use of the marketplace than trying to stop scammers though. While it obviously doesn't stop scammers from contacting buyers/sellers, it stops them from reaching out to everyone who is viewing the marketplace. It is up to the seller/buyer to decide if he or she wants to make business with anyone who is interested or not.
I'm disappointed to see how most of you are upset about this change and aren't trying to see the good things with it. It was definitely not made for OtLand to make more money, if I was running OtLand as a business I would have added ads to the forum a very long time ago and stopped working on The Forgotten Server, OtLand IP Changer and any other project I develop as free and open-source.
To answer some questions that were brought up:
No, existing threads by non-premium users will not be deleted. Although we won't help you to keep your very old thread alive by i.e. cleaning it up so you can start selling a OT map when you originally were selling a Tibia character in the thread.
No, your thread won't be deleted when your premium expires.
I'm closing this thread now so that people can easily see my response without having to go back a few pages when everyone keeps repeating what has already been said about how they dislike this change. I've heard you and I'm not changing my mind, the change is final and if you don't understand then that's just too bad but you can still go sell your stuff at eBay if you're here to sell stuff and while you won't give anything back to OtLand.
