Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Again, as pointed out repeatedly in your previous topic, there is already a warning for this sort of thing.

Something like this that hard-prevents an action has more potential to cause problems than solve them, especially something like this that can be easily solved by simply checking your orders before posting them...

And as it was pointed out there that this warning is useless on many types of orders. And actually causing more troubles than helps.


At first - no one is 100% safe from misstypes, especially when you deal with many orders everyday. And at second - It was written above that this setting won't be active by default - so what are the troubles you're talking about? It'll be only activated by player intentionally.
So if you feel yoursef 100% accurate - you just don't need it. But if you feel a bit clumsy or tired - it might be really helpful.


It's not another warrant. Maybe it wasn't stated clearly - but this setting won't let you set(or change) order that is X% distinguished from the topmost on the market. For example: you'll type "15bil instead of "15mill" - and it'll notify "you've disabled ordres of 10% difference from topmost on the market" So if you really want to set 15bill - you should click wallet settings and disable this. No "click yes to proceed" noone reads. I'll add this in the first post to be more clear.

Maybe you remember how one unpaid bill changed the history of eve
Even if this mistake gave many fun to not affected(or even affected) players, but after that(and tons of tears) CCP added autopay functionallity in the game.
I'm not against mistakes, but this should be actually my mistakes, not misstypes.

Yes, I do. That's largely why the, "Grr, game should protect me from my own stupidity!" suggestions are so godawful. A lot of the most interesting game events to date have resulted from someone's carelessness. Why the **** should that be removed?

Just be more careful. This isn't a problem with the game, it's a problem with the player.

It's actually a 7-day weighted average of all sales of that item, and it's generally accurate enough more than 95% of the time, so very far from useless. Generally the only time it's not useful are for very small markets or niche items with little to nothing in the way of useful buy or sell orders already on the market, in which case your system would stumble as well.

Also, the reason that single value gets used instead of live market data is because it's an order of magnitude less server intensive to just retrieve that one precalculated value instead of grabbing the entire active market info for an item every time you need to check an input. Considering the number one source of load on the markets right now is retrieval of market orders like this I find it highly unlikely CCP would implement something like this in this way, they'd likely as not just use the average price, which we already have a warning for...



At which point you've got *another* popup for people to complain about, as well as people complaining that they'd use this if it didn't have the popup, plus again because it's a hard block you're *still* going to have it creating issues for people. That's why games almost never put in place hard blocks on actions taken.

Oh and the wallet is the last place I would ever think to look for something like this, at a minimum it should probably be somewhere in the market settings.

So yeah, once again, I'm not seeing anything here that isn't already covered by the existing warnings 99% or more of the time, except that this is a hard-no (which has its own issues) whereas the warning isn't.

The Eve markets are never going to be idiot proof, and something like this will create more problems than it will solve precisely because it's a hard-restriction on a UI function.

The answer is "not very" but that's going to be the case with any new item since there's a lack of history on its price, and the price is changing rather rapidly.

However, considering this is an extreme minority of cases and the current system doesn't actually prevent you from doing anything it still works fine, you simply need to stop and double-check when the warning pops up. The problems it causes are minimal compared to a system that actually locked your UI out of a specific action.



Let me see if I can explain this in a way that a non-programmer will understand.

So, to get this single precalculated value is a single operation. I just tell the computer "get that number". Simple, only one operation required.

To find the current highest buy price or current lowest sell price on the other hand I need to get *all* the buy or sell prices on the market. Lets call that number N. So, I need to get N values and then I need to sort them to actually find the highest or lowest one, which takes roughly N*Log(N) time to accomplish.

This means that to get that single pre-calculated value the server needs to make 1 operation. To find the current highest sell price or lowest buy price the server needs to perform roughly N*Log(N) operations, which is a couple orders of magnitude more, and it needs to do that every time someone takes an action that performs this operation.

Absolute best case here is the server just hands you the values and your local machine does the sorting, though that's still N values retrieved vs 1, so still exponentially more load on the server, just a slightly smaller exponent.

In fact, because of how data retrieval works even in the case of zero buy or sell orders for a given item in a region it's *still* more load on the server to return that zero values because the server has to actually check that there are zero values for that item, where as with the single precalculated value it just knows that there's a space for a value that it needs to go get and it can easily retrieve it based on the item being looked at.

That's why even if CCP were to implement something like this it wouldn't actually do what you seem to really want, work off of the absolute current state of the market, because that would be way too computationally expensive.



If you can't believe this would cause problems and can't believe people would complain about those problems I can only direct you to the entire rest of these forums as a point of reference. This is literally the reason UIs very very *very* rarely actively put a hard restriction on stupid actions that are valid, and only restrict invalid actions.

The only place I can think of where anything like this has been done in the Eve UI is the Safety, and that's *very* easily accessible and easy to toggle, and yet it still manages to cause issues.

Couple of points here.

While I don't like OP's idea I dislike it largely for reasons of implementation and practicality. I do agree that mistakes should be because of intentional action not fat-fingering a key.

This is precisely the reason the safety was introduced for in-space combat, though I will concede that in that case there was certainly an element of "lets not get the newbies killed by the police" at play as well.

Also OP's idea does not remove the ability to do stupid, it's basically a safety that the player has to manually set and enable. So if you want to set a buy order on a Carrier for 10b you still can.

If you're the one messing with the plex price kindly stop

It's not that the value doesn't change too often, it's that it's a single value vs the entire contents of the market.

Also you can't assume that the client will have up to date market data for the item in question. They could be using the API to check prices and adjust their orders, they could have waited several minutes between refreshing the market and adjusting, ect. Even if 50% of cases can use cached data you're still increasing load on the servers in general by an order of magnitude, and on top of that the load will be on the market servers instead of the static data server. The markets have a significantly higher load already, so an increase in load there is more likely to translate into a visible performance hit for the end users.

Also that's incorrect. If you click Sell on an order the value filled will be the price from that order, and the same applies to a Buy order. If you just hit "sell" on the item itself the price displayed will be the highest buy order with its range covering your station, same for a buy order, but if there are no orders in range then it just defaults back to the seven day moving average.

In any case the change in load here is still the same as I mentioned before. Where the moving average value can be used it's more convenient to do so.


Yes - this is exactly what i'm wanting to see! Somewhat like safety mechanics. You still could do all the mistakes you want - buy something overpriced, sell low, making wrong investments etc etc. It's just the protection from misstypes ONLY.

If someone don't need it - just don't use it.[/quote]

And like I keep telling you, what you want is unrealistic.

It's also no where near as necessary as safety mechanics since there are already warnings in place and there's no need for absolute split second decisions in market trading except in very very rare instances. There are already warnings in place, you've just chosen to disable them or ignore them.

I've written a full answer, then deleted - because it dawned on me how to prove that topmost values are already used in all market operations: what happens when you finnaly hit OK button in an order window? Server actually DOES a check if someone is buying/selling stuff at that price OR at higher/lower price(because you can only fill topmost order then next etc) at that particular moment. If no - it creates an order if you were selling stuff or modifying order, or returns an error if you were buying.
So all you need to do - is just place my optional check in between this check and action taken.


Hmm since when risk of mistype became part of the game(and since when it's the major risk)? How about risk of disconnect/desync/server crash/insult/meteor/volcanic eruption etc?

As for your example - no it won't help there. As it won't help with any type of scam, desinformation etc. Technically it's just ties your order to current market prices, so you don't go out of that by adding/substracting few numbers from price unintentionally.