Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Working as intended, should not be fixed.
What irritates you simply that you're using the wrong metaphor in your head when you do the trade.

You are not in a shopping centre; you are trading on a commodity exchange market. Since all commodities are fungible, it doesn't matter which ones you get, so the brokers make sure that the buyers get what they want for the price they want, and that the sellers get the best deal they can given the minimum bid they're willing to accept… and the brokers rake in a profit the better that deal is.

Design-wise, it's like this because it promotes a far more efficient market that quickly converges on the true market value of any good sold. If you want to be able to pick and choose, the contract system offers that kind of trading too and is, to no-one's surprise, much less efficient at finding a good price match between buyer and seller.

It's my ISK. It might not matter to you who you buy the item from but it matters to me. If the game allows me to see the price of each seller, allows me to pick which seller I want to buy from, AND charges me the amount that the item is being sold for from that seller, then I should get the item from the seller of my choice. If this can work for items that are located on different stations, it should also work for items on the same station as well.

Not possible. You don't see seller names.

That aside, bureaucratic hoop-jumping = same player choice restrictions.

…and that's exactly what it does.

Your decision is to buy item X for n ISK. You get exactly that, if the broker can find a seller who agrees.
Alternatively, your decision is to sell item X for no less than m ISK. You get exactly that, if the broker can find a buyer who's willing to pay for it.

Then use contracts, which is set up to allow for exactly that kind of control, and which even lets you trade in non-fungibles.

If you use the market, you're choosing to use a commodities exchange model where the entire point is to generate the most amount of trades that satisfy both seller and buyer of a fungible good. Breaking the market just because you want the level of control you are already afforded through other trade forms doesn't make much sense.

The fact remains: the games offer both modes; turning one into the other just reduces player options and market efficiency. Both are bad things. The “problem” you're trying to solve has already been solved through other means, and solving it for this particular mechanic actually creates problems rather than fix them.

Tippia is right this is exactly how the stock market works . . . brokers auto default to the lowest sell and highest buy.

and yes the stock market is full of $.01 bids . . . in fact the majority of trades done are by bots on the stock market.

im not saying whether or not this is right but Tippia is correct, in eve you are not at a market or agora, youre trading in a commodities market like the NYSE

…and your decision to buy at the price you're asking for is your choice — that choice stands. Your decision to buy off the commodities exchange also stands. You get exactly what you've decided to buy for the price you've decided to pay. At every point, you decision stands. Your problem is still that you are thinking of the market as a K-Mart, not the NYSE.

…and guess what you're doing when you pick a sell-order from the list and choose “Buy this”? You're setting up a buy order with the duration “instant” for the item you want to buy. The “this” in “buy this” refers to the item, not the sell order, which is why you see the same “Buy this” command plastered everywhere, even when there isn't a single sell order on the screen. It's the exact same situation as if you manually set up the buy order; the logic applies to both equally because there's no difference between them.

…except that you don't know who that guy is so you haven't specifically chosen anyone. All you've done is picked a price that is not in line with what the market thinks is the correct one. If you want to bypass market forces and be particular about who you trade with, the contract system is there to provide for your needs. Or, hell, use station trading if you're that desperate to get a bad deal.

That doesn't break the market in any way. Quite the opposite: it enhances the market by ensuring that it is always converging on the true value of the item being traded. That's why this exact methodology is used in real-world markets of this kind: it's set up for efficiency (and for greasing the palms of brokers, if you're the cynical kind) and to give zero incentive to try to defect from the mass movement.

People come up with this suggestion every now and then, and for as long as I've been playing the game (and probably long before that), the CCP economist's answer has always been the same: “hahahah no, don't be silly — that would make the market inefficient and broken” (often with an accompanying “use contracts if that's what you want” tagged on).