Market Discussions

As a semi-experienced market trader, I've come into contact with what I believe are market bots on multiple occasions.

Market bots are a pain in the ass, and they get me annoyed at the game, and they are bringing down a wonderful part of the game. Sure there are strategies to trade against them, move them out of the market, or just move up, but I think the game would be better without them, or with less of them, or with them having less of an affect.

CCPs recent war on bots appears to have taken a chunk out of the Market bots for now, but what else can be done from a game play point of view to limit the advantage bots have over humans.

I have a couple of ideas, I'm sure you can point out the problems with my ideas and maybe even point out some better solutions.


My first idea is to limit the number of "trades" that a single account can make.


1) Flat out limit the number of Sell/Buy orders that can be placed/updated every day.
It would take 1 "trade point" to place OR UPDATE a market order.
It would NOT take a "trade point" to buy from sell orders or sell to buy orders.
You would be given X "trade points" per day based on a new skill.
At skill level 0 you get 10 trade points per day, at skill level 5 you get 60 trade points per day.
Trade points accumulate over time up to some limit (something like 500).

How this would affect the game . . .
* This would have no affect on the average EVE players market experience. They would always be at or near the trade point cap.
* Power market users would be forced to specialize in a couple markets or let more orders ride for longer periods of time.
* Bots would have much less of an advantage over human players.

I would not call myself primarily a "trader". I do have a market alt in all the hubs and update orders twice a day, but I rarely update a particular order more than 10x per day (I do often keep the jita alt online and update orders as I'm waiting for other things to happen).

There are lots of days when I make over 60 updates, but that's mainly because I am babysitting some orders in Jita (presumably against bots).

I think 420 updates/week is much much much more than I need, and would satisfy the needs of almost all EVE player.

I think that it would increase the profits of all the "real users". We can't update as often, but we will get more volume per update and be better able to compete across a large number of orders.

Please comment/roast as you see fit.

-FM

Obviously its a trade off. Any change to any part of the game is going to help some players and hurt other players. I think that this change would make the game much better for the casual trader (A small subset of EVE players) at the expense of the hardcore traders(a much smaller subset of EVE). I can understand why anyone that has their personal gameplay style nerfed would be unhappy.

On the plus side . . .
You wouldn't need to make as many updates per day because your orders won't be constantly bashed by bots. Your sales volume/update would go up, but you would no longer have a massive advantage over the "casual trader".

Do you have an ideas about how we could limit the power of market bots without infringing on market game play?
Maybe you can request more "trade points" from a dev?
Maybe it cost a "trade point" each time you post in Jita local?

-FM

I do not think any system that caps market order updates would be a good idea. EVE has the most complex economy of any video game for a reason. EVE has a free market of raw materials that players work to extract. That free market is governed by the laws of economics. If traders see a profit to updating their orders a lot, then a certain percentage of traders will do that. Other players benefit because the aggressive trading drives down the margins between the buyers and the sellers. If CCP decided to limit trade, they would be interfering with their goose that lays golden eggs: the dynamic, player-driven market of EVE.

In my opinion, the issue of market bots is best solved by CCP. If CCP decides that they do not want trade bots in EVE, then they have an obligation and incentive to spend resources to remove trade bots from the game. Kara Books has one idea that I agree with completely:



Traders have great incentive to report bots. If CCP is serious about banning bots, then I have no doubt that traders will begin selling or buying 1 unit to find out the name of a character they suspect to be a bot and reporting it to CCP. There is currently an ingame option to Report ISK Spammer. Correct me if I am wrong, but there is no simple way to report a suspected bot. In my opinion, the biggest thing that CCP could do to crack down on bots would be to introduce a quick option to Report Suspected Bot. Traders would immediately start reporting characters that update orders every 5 minutes, and CCP could investigate those flags through their own means to determine whether the character is a bot.

My 0.02 ISK:

both Fango Mango's and malaire's ideas are no-go for me - market regulation will kill important part of this complex game because player-driven economics is what makes EVE unique among other online games. Limiting order changes or raising modification fee would affect mainly human players - bot can still earn more isk using much faster decisions and better knowledge base than human brain can absorb/use, not mentioning that correctly written bot doesn't make mistakes and do not need to sleep/eat/...

Even when i respect Kara Books and her opinion, i strongly disagree also with her. Privileged, certified, fully-trusted or whatever named group of players should not substitute CCP's job.

From a database point of view there's certainly possibility to monitor and sort/display order-related data for each player. Even rapid-trading evil player should be easily distinguised from market bot. I believe that picking top 100 order-modifiers and watching them closely by CCP should solve this market-bot issue.


TL/DR: CCP, do your job properly.

Please be carefull with defining what is/not is fun... not only 0.01isking but whole Market PvP is suprisingly very funny for me and i believe i'm not alone. If you want to limit my style of playing do you also accept only 1k rounds fired per day or 10k units of ore mined per day?

i like the 001 game a lot more than people that raise it by 0.48 isk. if you're buying in bulk, why exactly do you want to give people more isk than you have to? it doesn't take any more time to increase your bid by 0.01 than it does 0.48, so why not keep profits for yourself?

In terms of bots though, CCP has the logs, all they'd need to do is set up the scripts to find the potential bots, then have the team look into them. They saw with the last bans, that 10 market bots were enough to really mess with the market, but is banning 10 bots worth the time to them? I'd guess not, or they'd do it.

This change would render the marketing skill useless. The effective use of the marketing skill is to use region buy orders, and then resell what you get without moving it. The consequence is that you have a large number of sell orders for very small quantities. Being able to place sell orders for only 50 items a day would largely end the niche such traders fill. You would quickly find a reduction in local availability of all items, as traders are forced to stop selling small quantities in large numbers of stations.

Now if you just wanted to limit modifications, it wouldn't be an issue, but don't limit the number of sell orders a player can create per day (paying normal fees, not the reduced modification fee).

To mirror Lauren, I easily do well over 1000 updates a day by a very large margin, and I too have been reported as a bot in my favorite market. Which was hilarious when the dude used the standard bot-dump tactic and I flipped all his stock.

Enthusiasm good, market regulation bad.

Thanks for all the good points made here by everyone. Please keep posting ideas and be polite!

Obviously the best solution would be for CCP to write a simple python script to identify bots and then deal with them manually.

Equally obviously, CCP is never going to bother doing this. They care about RMT bots and nothing else. I'm sure they'll catch the RMT market bots, but they have never shown any interest in dealing with non-RMT bots.

So is there some other solution to the market bot problem that "has a snowballs chance in hell of CCP implementing"?

As I've said before no solution is going to be perfect, but can we make an *improvement* to the game. Will you still need to make 1000 updates per day if you're not getting re-raised by bots? Will you make more ISK with less updates if the major hubs are not owned by bots? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I'm sure that one of the brilliant people here can come up with a solution that hurts bots and not human traders "too much".

My thoughts on other proposals.

* A group of GMs/dedicated citizens working to ban market bots. I don't think CCP will ever devote the resources for this. Also I'm not sure they should. It really is a minor issue considering all the other issues that devs/gm have to work on.

* Increase brokers fees to modify orders.
Once upon a time I thought this was the best solution. You can still make unlimited modifications to orders it just starts to cost more. The problem is that bots can just post very small orders that update as soon as they sell. This actually gives bots an advantage.

* Limit number of market placement/adjustments.
I threw out a number of 60/day, but that's just pulled from a hat. Maybe it should be 10/day or 1000/day. If you make the number to small, it hurts human traders too much, if you make it too big you don't affect the bots. No solution is going to be perfect, but I'd like something better than the situation in Jita today . . .





I disagree. I think the main advantage the bots have over humans is that can monitor and update many more orders than a human and can do that 23/7. If you remove the the ability to make an unlimited number of changes they are much worse at playing the eve market than a (smart) human.






How often do you need to update those regional buy and sell orders? My regional buy/sells get updated maybe once per week, often much less. Again maybe 60/trades per day is too low. What is a better number that would be comfortable for a human to make, but limit a bot working a major trade hub 23/7?



-FM

CCP could easily deploy client based monitoring to combat bots so a random snoop can determine if any programs are running alongside eve which are supect. No reason why anyone should refuse this unless they are botting. So why do they not implement this security, which is used heavily in the online poker world? Bots do not harm CCP profit so they have little care of it.

It's completely short sighted of CCP to sit and say Botters buy PLEX so it's ok. If they removed bots the real player subscription would increasce and allow the game to grow and evolve securing a brighter future for the company. Sadly CCP don't see past this months PLEX subscription which is evident with their constant publishing of user logins after every patch or content update.