Player Features and Ideas Discussion

In my time playing EVE I've seen a lot of changes to the game. Feature and UI changes. Ship and Module balance changes. Changes to how Corps and Alliances function. Additions, removals, alterations, sometimes as often as on a monthly basis. But the one thing that I can't remember ever being changed is how the market functions. I don't remember a time when balancing Market PVP was even brought up for discussion. After 10 years I really think that should change.

CCP calls it Market PVP, but as far as I can tell it's really just Market Pinata. In PVP you should know who your opponent is, and you should be able to have some sort of meaningful response to their actions. You should also be able to tell the difference between a friend and a foe. Currently there's no way to do this on the Market of EVE. You buy and sell without knowing who you're buying from or selling to until after the transaction is complete. You post goods to market and adjust prices without knowing who you're undercutting, or who undercut you. This means that you may unknowingly purchase goods from someone you're at war with inadvertently funding your own destruction. It means that you can't tell if that guy that just undercut your sell order by .01 isk is the newb you just recruited to your corp just tryin to make some bank or some market bot with 50 other sell orders on market for the same item. In a gloriously backwards implementation you can post a Buy order with a minimum purchase amount, but you can't do the same for a Sell order. And most annoyingly, when you click on 'Buy This' you're not actually buying 'This' you're buying the lowest price item that meets the location, price, and quantity variables of your purchase order and that means you are incapable of purchasing items from a specific seller if there's someone else selling that item at the same location but at a lower price. This should all change.

The Market should show the identities of the people that posted the buy and sell orders. You should be able to see if you're buying from someone with Red standing before you make the purchase. You should also be able to tell the difference between a Market newb and a Tycoon trying to manipulate the market with 10 Sell orders up for the same item that he has a couple Buy orders up for. We should also be able to actually buy what we click on regardless of if there are cheaper goods at the same location. It really burns me up when I see a sell order on market for a low quantity and a bunch of people undercutting it by .01 isk with many times the amount. I don't care if they're bots or not...those kinds of market games annoy the crap outta me and I really wish I could just buy the stuff from the person that's being undercut even if it's gonna cost me a few extra cents and that's just not possible in the current market. I can't even send that person a mail telling them to take it off market and contract me the stuff because I don't know who posted it.

Now, this leads to a few extra ideas:

First, that the possibility for Market Anonymity should remain in the game, otherwise some people just wouldn't be capable of using the market at all given their reputations among the player base. Anonymity should be a luxury though, something that costs a bit more than a normal buy order, so make it have a higher Brokerage fee to post an order Anonymously.

Second, since we're talking about allowing people to see the identities of the buyers and sellers why not allow players to give discounts to friends and markups to enemies. I wouldn't mind so much selling to people on my Red list if I could charge them a 50% markup and I wouldn't feel so bad when I see a friend's name in my buyers history if I could give them a 20% discount on the purchase automatically. So we should have options to apply discounts based on standing, just 4 boxes on the buy/sell order window would do 1 for Dark Blue, 1 for Blue, 1 for Orange, and 1 for Red and we could just put a % number in the box that would be automatically applied to a buyer/seller with those standings. Four sliders would work too if typing numbers isn't your thing. You wouldn't need to use them if you didn't want to, in which case everyone would be charged the normal price. The actual price adjustment wouldn't be seen till the buyer/seller opened the window to finalize the transaction, at which point they could get a popup that says something like 'Your standings with the client have adjusted the offered price' and you'd then see the adjusted values in the window and perhaps have to do some math to tell if the price went up or down. But before then you'd be able to see your own personal standings with the person that posted the items by clicking on their names in the window, or even have the Overview settings apply the appropriate backgrounds or icons to their listings as if they were being seen in the overview or a chat channel. So you could steer clear of funding your enemies while preferring to commerce with friends.

Cont.

I'll have to read through the entirety later, I admit I did stop at some point. +1 from what I've read. Anonymous trading is a bunch of BS.

People will respond, "they can just make a new alt to trade with...".
That alt won't have 5 months of trading skills your trading character does.

1. This is absolutely essential. Learn brevity.
2. Just as I wouldn't want increasing length cycles of weapon fire in combat PvP I wouldn't want it on my market PvP either, so no on increasing the order cool down beyond 5 mins.
3. Minimum buys on bulk sales sounds interesting.
4. CCP is looking into the buy order scam.
5. I played the market in wow and you can see the seller's name. It does add complexity to market PvP but for anyone not able to play 10+ hours a day you will find people like me will crush you with this information. I had spreadsheets of my competitors game playing times and market strategies. This coupled with a lot of free time let me tank an entire market economy for three months. In the end only myself and two other players remained. Those two others had no life just like me. They were not using bots because I found a strategy for beating bots as well.
6. The ability to buy from any seller could be added but I promise based on experience with this mechanic in wow it will be little used.
7. Underselling to friends sounds interesting but it too will be little used and can be accomplished already anyways using a variety of methods.

Did you seriously just draw parallels between the economy of WoW and the economy of EVE?

These 2 ideas are needed to work together, without being able to buy from who you want to, it is useless to be able to see who they are.
As for weather it will be used, I would be happy paying more if it is going to a blue instead of the cheaper order going to a red/neutral.


The ability to buy from specific orders would also benefit the discounts idea, if you can see a Blue order that is a little bit more, you might be more likely to buy from it, especially if you know the seller is one that often puts a discount on their goods.

Since the OP is asking for changes to EVE's economy that already exist in WOW yes. When you are considering a project it is a good idea to seek counsel from people that have experience with concepts as similar to your idea as possible. I will emphasis the word similar since obviously the condition doesn't exist in EVE so zero people in the world have the exact background to counsel on the OP's suggestions. My background is probably about as close as you are likely to find.

I didn't claim it wouldn't be used only that it would be little used in practice. In WOW you can see who purchased something from you and having been the guild leader of a guild of hundreds it was infrequent for guild mates to buy from me even though my items were usually cheap since frequent undercutting was my market weapon of choice.

If you restrict your idea of the market only to the Hubs like Jita and Amarr then yes, it will make it possible for people with a lot of free time to dominate the market during their timezone. But the market is awake when you're not, unless you don't sleep, and it's much bigger than just 'The Hubs'.

Beyond that I think you're underestimating the difference between the economy of EVE and the economy of a game like WoW. In WOW you don't really have 'enemies' that you can do financial battle with. You have competition on the market sure, but if your guildmates buy from someone you don't like that can't give them a tangible financial edge to destroy you in combat and you don't have space they can invade using those funds.

Don't underestimate the amount of people that have no life and are willing to abuse these changes either. You may end up finding more competition than you can handle :)

So much this :)