Gaming marketplaces and trading sites can be tricky to evaluate. That's why we created the TrustPlay Trust Score – a comprehensive rating from 0 to 100 that helps you quickly understand how reliable and trustworthy a site is. Think of it as a health check that examines every important aspect of a gaming marketplace.
We don't just rely on basic star ratings or user reviews. Instead, we combine a wide range of data points to provide you with the complete picture. Our scores are derived from analyzing verified user experiences across multiple platforms, monitoring site performance, and tracking long-term reliability.
Our system carefully checks every review to ensure it's genuine, and we focus on objective metrics rather than subjective opinions.
We build our Trust Score on three main foundations:
This is the heart of our scoring system. We analyze verified user feedback from platforms including Trustpilot, Sitejabber, and our TrustPlay community to assess marketplace reliability, security, and service quality. We look at how ratings change over time and whether recent reviews show any concerning patterns. Every review goes through our verification process to ensure it's authentic.
Healthy traffic patterns indicate stability and community trust. We use third-party analytics to track monthly visitors, growth trends over time, and how users interact with each site. This helps us identify stable, established platforms that consistently serve their users well, while filtering out fly-by-night operations or declining marketplaces.
The number and frequency of reviews matters because it shows how many people actually use and trust a site. We evaluate the total number of reviews across platforms to gauge overall marketplace engagement and community activity. A steady stream of reviews indicates an active, trusted platform, while sparse or declining review activity can signal problems.
Here's what you can expect from sites at different score levels:
🟢 90-100: Exceptional
🟢 80-89: Very Good
🟡 70-79: Good
🟡 60-69: Fair
🔴 Below 60: Caution
Trust isn't just earned – it can also be lost. We take certain issues very seriously and apply immediate score penalties when they are discovered. For example, if a site is found to manipulate its Trustpilot reviews, we automatically deduct 30 points from its Trust Score. This kind of deduction reflects our zero-tolerance policy for deceptive practices.
We believe it's crucial to penalize dishonest behavior because it helps protect our community. A site might have great traffic numbers and seemingly positive reviews, but if they're willing to fake reviews on Trustpilot, how can you trust them with your money or items?
A Trust Score isn't set in stone. Our system automatically updates scores daily based on new data to reflect changes in:
While Trust Scores are a powerful way to evaluate gaming sites, they work best as part of your overall research. We recommend reading recent reviews, checking how scores have changed over time, and considering what specific features matter most to you.
Check out our site verification guide for another helpful tool in making your decision.
We take pride in being open about how we evaluate sites. While we keep our exact algorithm private to prevent manipulation, we're always clear about what factors we consider, how we weigh different elements, and how often we update scores.
We're here to help you understand how we evaluate gaming sites. If you have questions about our Trust Score system or need assistance interpreting a score, please don't hesitate to contact our team.
Our goal is to help you make confident, informed decisions about where to trade your gaming items.