Market Discussions

True. I sell items on Amazon and have/have been '.01-isked' my orders/undercut on my orders. As in, seriously, one cent. So, it definitely does have 'RL' precedent.

The auction analogy isn't quite correct, trading is more like retail selling, not auctions, (as far as small incremental upbids), same rules don't apply.

Anyway, I'm not really for a limit on trade changes/day. Not that I'd hit it regularly, but I don't like the idea of being limited in a sandbox game in that type of way.

I think we differ in defining Jita..

I see it more as a comodities trading hub, where some might see it as a retail hub.. I would like the retail out into the rest of the universe and only keep the stock / commodities exchange in Jita. Hence why I believe there is a need for a market liberating action.

We did expand the talks ingame, and some good points came up, that I had not considered.

The limit swap from outstanding orders to changes per day is really just going to kick the bucket down the road.

So I would say something along either a solution using price impact on changes like in RL market, or a Voucher based option would be preferable.

So brokers fees should be increased in impact, according to location and activities like office prices, and percentage fees decrease. This would make stacks bigger and reduce the number of changes(bids). Compare to RL (broker)

The voucher would basically be a consumable where the brokers worked like Agents, and you would get RP to buy vouchers for orders and contracts. This would then become a product that would be tradable much like starbase charters. This system would really serve everyone best, since there would still be a limiting factor, and skills would decide how many agants you could have printing vouchers. Thus it would use already well known mechanics from the research agents.

I am against OP's suggestion. I am afraid to present any arguments, as OP is likely to respond with a wall of text and browbeat me down!

As a trader who manages up to 3000 market orders, I like the following suggestion:



This will sort out the the market better than any of OP's fantastic suggestions. Further suggestions on this line:
Retail: 100 k per modify order
Wholesale: 500k per change
Tycoon: 1m per change

Having said that, I am perfectly happy with the market. I have no nostalgia and do not remember OP's wonderful days of the market, as I started playing only 4 years ago.

Followed this for a while.

I do kinda like the OP's grand vision - the scenario he describes has many attractions (and a couple of potential worries as mentioned earlier).

Personally however I feel that the OP has failed to show that the grand vision is achievable through the removal of the market cap and the change of order update mechanics. The main evidence proposed for the link appears to be that in the olden days there were no market order caps and "insert tales of green fields and joyously skipping traders here".

I see two thorns in proposing this link - firstly the nostalgia effect. Like the placebo effect, *everyone* is susceptible to this even when completely aware of the effect - when seen through our rose tinted monacles everything looked so much better in the "good old days". Secondly that correlation does not equal cause and effect. Many many things have changed in Eve over the years and suggesting that instigation of market order caps has caused hub domination, dormant stockpiles and unnatural regional pricing and margins is a dangerously unfounded (whilst not necessarily untrue) cause and effect statement. I'm aware that one of the counters to this is that of the many other things that have changed is the vast increase of goods types, further straining market order caps; one immediate counter to this counter is that there has also been a vast increase of players, bringing with them an increase in potential market orders.


Those points aside, when looking at the suggestion of a market order cap we have yet to really ascertain whether the current cap of 305 per char is actually limiting the economy at present. In order to do this we first need to ascertain how many chars have tycoon V and how many of those are routinely hitting their order cap. Only CCP can really know this, as players we're only really left with personal anecdotes and gut feeling. My personal anecdote being I have 65 order slots and very rarely do I come close to using all those. My personal gut feeling is that the number of people regularly hitting the tycoon V cap is actually fairly small - and further, as dangerously communistic as this may sound, these people are likely amongst the very richest in Eve and probably don't need any further advantages.

As has been noted, the market order cap can be bypassed with alt chars, and as has been rightly countered, clumsy game mechanics requiring of multiple alts are no way to run an MMO. However what we need to know is whether those players who are hitting the 305 order cap right now are limited by those game mechanics - are they thinking "sure I could roll an alt but I really can't be bothered, it's too much hassle, I'll stick with 305?". Because if the current pool of players hitting the order cap is reasonably small, and if the majority of those players are currently content (if rightly grumbling about game limitations and workarounds) to roll alt chars then regardless of whether a change is right or wrong - it will actually have no effect on the game as it stands.

People do invention in their droves. Invention is undoubtedly one of the most clumsy UI designs and processes out there and has been for years. Yet people still do it. As such, whilst I'm not advocating the continuation of poor and clumsy game design, it can be shown that people are remarkably resilient to it and will continue to put up with it if there is a benefit. Extrapolating inventers to traders feeds my gut feeling that traders hitting the order cap currently will grumble about it but will work around the mechanics by rolling alts - so a removal of market order caps will undoubtedly make the lives of a handful of the richest players in the Eve universe easier but have no actual effect on the number of orders put out in the economy because those minded to run thousands of orders are currently running thousands of orders through alts.



Finally, quick point to say I love these sort of discussions and this one has bought up many interesting points on all sides. This is exactly what makes MD interesting and is a welcome break from the usual stream of "sky limit < waffles", "yay candles", "lol candles", "scam (a)", "bond (b)".

At the risk of this turning into what I believe is delightfully termed a "circle jerk" I find little to disagree with in the last post, or at least little that hasn't been covered already and we can never really move beyond differing interpretations of the same (limited) data.

In the search for some nugget to latch upon to continue the discussion (because I'm an argumentative barsteward):



I'll certainly concede that we can't necessarily infer players actions in an unlimited scenario from their current actions in an alt-and-hassle limited game. The second half of this paragraph though I feel I can take issue with, if only by extrapolating personal motivations and actions to the player base as a whole (undeniably a weak position but one I take with some justifcation on account of the fact that I'm human and I play Eve - two qualities I share with every other Eve player).

I have the mountains of crap you describe scattered in hangars across the universe. I'm also not currently limited by orders. I have Retail V, giving 65 order slots and I rarely reach that limit. The prereqs for Wholesale skill are already met but I can't even justify picking that up. The main reason I went to Retail V rather than stopping at Retail IV was because I wanted the shiny "Business Mogul Elite" certificate! The reason I haven't put my mountains of crap into the market rather than allowing it to fester on hangar floors is not because I'm limited by orders but because I'm fundamentally lazy. I've only recently sold at a small loss about 800m worth of PI goods I picked up months and months ago and have (irrationally) been hanging on to in the hope of a market rise; finally common sense realisation of opportunity costs has led me to overcome my irrational nature on this particular good.

If I am in any way representative of Eve players, we're lazy, irrational, and easily distracted by shinies. But not necessarily limited by order slots.