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Margin Trading and Minimum Volume rework
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Syri Taneka
NOVA-CAINE
#1 - 2012-02-26 15:41:44 UTC
Just recently I noticed a buy/sell (Margin Trading) scam in progress and decided to have an underhanded go at it. Quickly amassing the proper number of items in an outside market at a normal price, I flew them over to drop on the buy order. And it failed. Why did it fail? Because the amount of ISK in escrow was lower than the value of the minimum buy order. What this means? The buy order was intentionally rigged to fail. Knowingly and intentionally placed despite the fact it could never be filled.

This issue has been discussed to death, but there's a pretty quick and logical solution to it, one that inconveniences legitimate users only a little, and absolutely ruins the unwatched buy order scam (repeat, this does NOTHING to the cancelled buy order variant of this scam). When placing a buy order, the Margin Trading skill allows players to place less than the total amount of ISK in escrow (100%, 75%, 56.25%, 42.19%, 31.64%, 23.73%). What I propose is that this number be compared to the ISK value of the minimum volume for the buy order (if any) and the higher value used for the amount in escrow.

Under this process, legitimate users of the Margin Trading skill can still place buy orders with minimum volumes - one way or another, enough ISK to cover the minimum purchase amount will be placed in escrow.

For scammers, this means that placing an order of, say, 500 units with a minimum volume of 500 units will require 100% of ISK to be placed in escrow regardless of Margin Trading skill level, eliminating the possibility that the order cannot be fulfilled by legitimate in-game means. (As noted, this does not stop buy order cancellation scams, only those that rely on the order automatically breaking when it can't be afforded from the placer's end.)
tankus2
HeartVenom Inc.
#2 - 2012-02-26 15:50:30 UTC
so you are saying that, depending on the level of Margin Trading, that if someone wants to sell to an order that has 500 units with a minimum volume of 500 units, that you can purchase/sell 425 units regardless of the minimum buy thanks to lv 1 Margin Trading?

Where the science gets done
mxzf
Shovel Bros
#3 - 2012-02-26 15:52:45 UTC
Simple solution: take the ISK out of the buyer's wallet to pay for the order, even if it puts him in debt. As in real life, if you attempt to pay more than you have, you go in debt 'till you can pay it off.
mxzf
Shovel Bros
#4 - 2012-02-26 15:56:22 UTC
tankus2 wrote:
so you are saying that, depending on the level of Margin Trading, that if someone wants to sell to an order that has 500 units with a minimum volume of 500 units, that you can purchase/sell 425 units regardless of the minimum buy thanks to lv 1 Margin Trading?


No, his point is that the minimum buy amount cannot exceed the amount that the person has paid so far.

So if you have a buy order for 100 missiles at 50 ISK each (random numbers) but only put in half of the ISK to cover the order, than your "minimum amount" can not exceed 50 missiles.

TBH, I think it's a fairly decent solution to the broken uses of Margin Trading ... but I still like the idea of driving the scammers negative Twisted
Aqriue
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#5 - 2012-02-26 16:32:53 UTC
So a loser, who fails at common sense, falls for the scam, knowing it was probably to good to be true, went ahead and bought stuff off the market, flew it to the destination, and it failed.

So in summary:

Whine, Butthurt, failure to use brain, and CCP needs to fix the problem you can avoid.

Working as intended, your appointment to be backhanded to the reality of EVE was successful. Have a nice day Big smile

I just can't see why no one else relizes 1) Scammer puts buy order, loses out on taxes 2) No one fills order 3) Scam fails up to 90 days later. Yup, the one counter and it never works. I wonder why Roll. Hey, if it happens to you it happend for a good reason and you personally can avoid it, then either you are successful or you are not. Fix margin trade scam, might as well fix contract scams and in station trading to make EVE less harsh (though I personally wouldn't mind scamming getting shitcan, then I won't have to speed read Jita local anymore )
Tidurious
Blatant Alt Corp
#6 - 2012-02-26 22:29:03 UTC
mxzf wrote:
Simple solution: take the ISK out of the buyer's wallet to pay for the order, even if it puts him in debt. As in real life, if you attempt to pay more than you have, you go in debt 'till you can pay it off.


Problem with this - I create an alt, train Margin Trading V, and go to a quiet system. I place an order for, say, Tritanium in said quiet system at 1000 units at 100m each, after giving the alt just enough to place the buy order from my main.

Main flies in and "sells", collecting a hefty sum of ISK.

Alt with negative balance is biomassed later, or just hangs around forever. Either way, ISK is created out of nowhere, since the "debt" will never be repaid on the alt. The main gets a few billion ISK for very little effort.

mxzf
Shovel Bros
#7 - 2012-02-26 22:59:50 UTC
Tidurious wrote:
mxzf wrote:
Simple solution: take the ISK out of the buyer's wallet to pay for the order, even if it puts him in debt. As in real life, if you attempt to pay more than you have, you go in debt 'till you can pay it off.


Problem with this - I create an alt, train Margin Trading V, and go to a quiet system. I place an order for, say, Tritanium in said quiet system at 1000 units at 100m each, after giving the alt just enough to place the buy order from my main.

Main flies in and "sells", collecting a hefty sum of ISK.

Alt with negative balance is biomassed later, or just hangs around forever. Either way, ISK is created out of nowhere, since the "debt" will never be repaid on the alt. The main gets a few billion ISK for very little effort.



Yeah, true, that is an issue with that. Ok, then what the OP said would work too, you can't require people to sell more to you at a time than you have ISK to cover.

And, @Aqriue, the main issue I have with the MT scam is that it's completely unforeseeable if you don't already know about it and doesn't make any sense in the first place. I'm not against scamming, but I am against scamming without any way to know through common sense that it's possible to get scammed.
Stonecrusher Mortlock
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#8 - 2012-02-26 23:17:26 UTC
i known about this scam for a while, and even did it a few times to see what all the commotion is about.


and it feels LESS like scamming and more like abusing a bug ccp is to lazy to fix.




I mean its not hard to fix do it like the OP said or just go OOPS this buy did not have enough isk and leave you with your items.
Syri Taneka
NOVA-CAINE
#9 - 2012-02-29 17:35:32 UTC
Aqriue wrote:
So a loser, who fails at common sense, falls for the scam, knowing it was probably to good to be true, went ahead and bought stuff off the market, flew it to the destination, and it failed.

So in summary:

Whine, Butthurt, failure to use brain, and CCP needs to fix the problem you can avoid.

Working as intended, your appointment to be backhanded to the reality of EVE was successful. Have a nice day Big smile

I just can't see why no one else relizes 1) Scammer puts buy order, loses out on taxes 2) No one fills order 3) Scam fails up to 90 days later. Yup, the one counter and it never works. I wonder why Roll. Hey, if it happens to you it happend for a good reason and you personally can avoid it, then either you are successful or you are not. Fix margin trade scam, might as well fix contract scams and in station trading to make EVE less harsh (though I personally wouldn't mind scamming getting shitcan, then I won't have to speed read Jita local anymore )


Do you read anything? I did *not* buy his overpriced goods for resale. I horded from an alternate market at normal prices. I was attempting to defeat the scam, but didn't know about the Margin Trading part of it - I thought it was entirely timing based. I expected a macro alt to cancel the buy order when the sell orders were emptied out; since I didn't purchase from the sell orders, I thought I'd be fine.

Having realized this is in fact abuse of game mechanics, I'm now trying to get those mechanics revised so they can't be abused this way anymore.
Tidurious
Blatant Alt Corp
#10 - 2012-02-29 19:28:41 UTC
Syri Taneka wrote:
Aqriue wrote:
So a loser, who fails at common sense, falls for the scam, knowing it was probably to good to be true, went ahead and bought stuff off the market, flew it to the destination, and it failed.

So in summary:

Whine, Butthurt, failure to use brain, and CCP needs to fix the problem you can avoid.

Working as intended, your appointment to be backhanded to the reality of EVE was successful. Have a nice day Big smile

I just can't see why no one else relizes 1) Scammer puts buy order, loses out on taxes 2) No one fills order 3) Scam fails up to 90 days later. Yup, the one counter and it never works. I wonder why Roll. Hey, if it happens to you it happend for a good reason and you personally can avoid it, then either you are successful or you are not. Fix margin trade scam, might as well fix contract scams and in station trading to make EVE less harsh (though I personally wouldn't mind scamming getting shitcan, then I won't have to speed read Jita local anymore )


Do you read anything? I did *not* buy his overpriced goods for resale. I horded from an alternate market at normal prices. I was attempting to defeat the scam, but didn't know about the Margin Trading part of it - I thought it was entirely timing based. I expected a macro alt to cancel the buy order when the sell orders were emptied out; since I didn't purchase from the sell orders, I thought I'd be fine.

Having realized this is in fact abuse of game mechanics, I'm now trying to get those mechanics revised so they can't be abused this way anymore.


CCP has stated time and time again that the Margin Trading scam is a legitimate use of existing game mechanics. Now you know, so don't go for it again. Problem solved.
Antigena
Opportunity Cost
#11 - 2012-03-04 11:41:43 UTC
Tidurious wrote:

CCP has stated time and time again that the Margin Trading scam is a legitimate use of existing game mechanics. Now you know, so don't go for it again. Problem solved.


More like "use of BROKEN existing game mechanics" ...

How could it be legitimate? There is no way for any reasonable person to know that they are taking a risk and are about to get screwed. If they foolishly took a risk then maybe they deserve to get screwed. But no, they spend all kinds of time investing in legitimate game play, for which they should legitimately receive the posted reward, only to find out that through no forseeable or avoidable fault of their own, they're getting screwed in the end, and it can even translate into real world time and monetary losses because of the sanctioned gold-selling system known as PLEX that lets you buy in-game money with real world money.

People here are confusing the difference between "intuition" and "intelligence".

"Intelligence" is something that anyone can have and it won't help you one bit against this problem.

"intuition" is something that only experienced / veteran players have, and it should be something that makes the game experience "better" for the player - It should NOT be something that is "required" for a player to avoid the game being ruined for them.
Antigena
Opportunity Cost
#12 - 2012-03-05 00:27:10 UTC
Maybe Issues & workarounds be a better place for this discussion...
Tradelita
Ducats in Buckets
#13 - 2012-03-05 18:02:50 UTC
Why not simply keep the mechanics as they are, but publicly flag the order in the market window to indicate that the buyer doesn't have enough isk in their wallet to satisfy the minimum volume requirement? This wouldn't affect legitimate traders using margin trading, as there's no logic to setting up a buy order with a minimum volume you can't afford, unless you're scamming.

I'm not saying people shouldn't get scammed, but we should have a way to check whether an order will fail.
Syri Taneka
NOVA-CAINE
#14 - 2012-03-07 22:00:10 UTC
Tradelita wrote:
Why not simply keep the mechanics as they are, but publicly flag the order in the market window to indicate that the buyer doesn't have enough isk in their wallet to satisfy the minimum volume requirement? This wouldn't affect legitimate traders using margin trading, as there's no logic to setting up a buy order with a minimum volume you can't afford, unless you're scamming.

I'm not saying people shouldn't get scammed, but we should have a way to check whether an order will fail.


Oddly, I like this, as it still requires people not be ignorant, impulsive sods...
Gizznitt Malikite
Agony Unleashed
Agony Empire
#15 - 2012-03-07 23:10:22 UTC
Syri Taneka wrote:
Just recently I noticed a buy/sell (Margin Trading) scam in progress and decided to have an underhanded go at it. Quickly amassing the proper number of items in an outside market at a normal price, I flew them over to drop on the buy order. And it failed. Why did it fail? Because the amount of ISK in escrow was lower than the value of the minimum buy order. What this means? The buy order was intentionally rigged to fail. Knowingly and intentionally placed despite the fact it could never be filled.

This issue has been discussed to death, but there's a pretty quick and logical solution to it, one that inconveniences legitimate users only a little, and absolutely ruins the unwatched buy order scam (repeat, this does NOTHING to the cancelled buy order variant of this scam). When placing a buy order, the Margin Trading skill allows players to place less than the total amount of ISK in escrow (100%, 75%, 56.25%, 42.19%, 31.64%, 23.73%). What I propose is that this number be compared to the ISK value of the minimum volume for the buy order (if any) and the higher value used for the amount in escrow.

Under this process, legitimate users of the Margin Trading skill can still place buy orders with minimum volumes - one way or another, enough ISK to cover the minimum purchase amount will be placed in escrow.

For scammers, this means that placing an order of, say, 500 units with a minimum volume of 500 units will require 100% of ISK to be placed in escrow regardless of Margin Trading skill level, eliminating the possibility that the order cannot be fulfilled by legitimate in-game means. (As noted, this does not stop buy order cancellation scams, only those that rely on the order automatically breaking when it can't be afforded from the placer's end.)


Do you know how the money is escrow is used? Your solution doese NOTHING to stop margin scamming.

The money in escrow is used first, and then money is taken out of your wallet. So, with your changes, this how the margin trade scam works:

I place an order for 1000 items, with a minimum buy order of 500 items. I then sell myself 500 items before I put those 500 items on the market. By doing so, I empty all the money I had in escrow into my alt's account, and I suddenly have a perfect margin scam setup. In short, you don't solve anything with this change.

The most effective and easiest way to stop the margin trading scam is to remove the minimum buy amount. At the same point in time, I'm not convinced the margin trading scam needs to be "fixed."