Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Actually the delay is 5 minutes, it's a minor quibble but details are important.

I also think that the ability for market orders to play the .1 isk game is important, it allows the market to respond organically and having things only be modifiable ever hour would be bad for the Eve economy for several reasons:

• It encourages the posting of small volumes of items repeatedly rather than posting everything and then modifying it.
• If the above isn't possible then trading in large volumes of anything becomes impossible -OR- people, and especially people using bots, would just turn to using multiple accounts posting stuff slightly out of sync with each other.
• It could be abused by pulling orders down and re-listing them and if that's not possible then it's a major inconvenience if you ever make a mistake with an order (and it will happen, either you posted your sell 1 zero too high or one of a dozen other things, never mind the immediately disastrous ones like posting a buy one digit too high.
• The market would either become very very slow to respond or would start shifting wildly since people can no longer dynamically adjust prices they would have to guess where the price is going, which leads to prices fluctuating wildly up and down or not moving at all as everyone posts for the current price figuring it'll stay steady.

Plus market bots aren't much of an actual issue, as is mentioned in the Market Discussions FAQ if you're sitting there modifying your orders all day then there's a good chance someone else is too.

What this seems like to me is a suggestion to benefit lazy market traders who feel they should be able to post an order and walk away for a few days and come back to a wad of ISK.

Nope, I'm not, but I know a fair number of traders who honestly do enjoy playing market games. Either they find it calming, or they enjoy the psychological warfare element of it, or they just enjoy making tons of ISK.

If you don't enjoy playing market games then you might be better off finding something you enjoy more or at least getting into a market with less price flux rather than making posts here trying to get your set of mechanics into the game. That's pretty much screaming into the void.

So, I assume you're referring to this bit from way back in February. If you actually read through it Kelduum never claimed that what he was doing was legal, he simply stated his understanding of the situation and his displeasure with CCP's handling of it. I was in Eve Uni at the time and had the chance to talk with Kelduum and some of the directors and can confirm that the story is actually reported fairly accurately there (if you're getting your info from a certain blogger who got kicked from the Uni then you should find other news sources).

The other problem with your argument is that someone got banned and therefore bots are prevalent... except that they banned this guy, which means they can detect and ban market bots, which kind of undermines the whole "bots are everywhere" bit.

Second, I've already shown how the OP's idea could be better exploited by a bot setup than by an actual player through the use of multiple accounts, repeat small order, ect.

I also stand by my conclusion that increasing the edit time to an hour would not have a beneficial effect on the Eve Economy. The 5 minute order timer allows people to adjust and respond to each other without causing wild speculation or making fluctuations in the market impossible.

Funny how you state that he's not a trader, while he actually corrected you on the 5-minute modification delay ((yes, I did read the post he actually isn't a trader)).

That being said, I rarely notice any problems with market-bots (I'm not stationed in Jita though). And some people actually are sitting around adjusting orders for hours on end. In fact, that's what we used to do in my alt's corporation (mining corp) when we had a wardec (which actually happened quite a lot since it was a rather new corp that was very fragile).

Thumbs up for thinking about improvements of the game though, but to be honest I think this is less of a problem than you think it is. Perhaps you can open a petition next time you think an order is being adjusted by a bot (give all the known information about the order like item, buy/sell, time left, amount etc. Triggering the order to find out the name behind the order is optional, but probably not required). This way CCP will take care of it in case it actually is a bot.

I don't sell things often but when I do

I play the 0.01 isk game till my items are sold.

I don't actively trade on Eve, but I have been an active trader in real financial markets, and I have written a great deal of software to enable automatic trading in real financial markets.

Automated trading demonstrably increases liquidity in markets, bringing the buy and sell prices closer together.

This is actually positive for all 'normal' market participants, i.e. people who just want to buy and sell the occasional thing, since it reduces the 'friction' between the buyer and seller - both gain.

It does mean of course that professional participants (market makers and speculators) must up their game because if their systems are inadequate they lose trade and margins to more agile and better equipped competitors.

The most liquid and fair markets in the world are actually the FX (foreign exchange) markets, which are completely unregulated (or have been up until very recently).

The scandals and scams actually occur in the very heavily regulated markets like stock and derivatives markets. It seems to be because the presence of regulation makes uneducated participants feel unreasonably safe.

In short, based on empirical evidence of real markets, I propose that allowing and encouraging an API for trading bots, and removing the rules is actually more likely to improve fairness and utility in Eve's markets than to damage it.

I doubt that since the modification time will be increased to 1 hour instead of 5 minutes. I for one re-check the market price about 2-3 times on average when I notice I made a mistake or when I noticed someone's order is above mine within the 5-minute modification timer which I won't have to do anymore in that case. In fact I would rarely have to re-check it since it would be automated anyway...

LOL if reporting bots were effective there wouldn't be any.

Market bots are not reportable anyway, CCP considers them a valid use of game mechanics.

Really? EVE University disgrees with you, so does CCP.

Changing the client in any way is against the EULA and so is botting... Have you ever even tried reporting them other than trying to find a button saying 'report market-bot'?